I am now in pause between the two jobs. So almost every day I am walking through the nearby forest park with my child. She is sleeping and I have about three hours to do something interesting or useful. Snowflakes falling down do not allow me to read on paper or my pocket pc, but I can listen podcasts or webcasts.
The additional reason to do such things is to learn spoken english. For example when MS contacted me via phone on the SQL injection hole i've found (BTW i have tried to reproduce it on Ax4 and it is still here) I was not able to understand almost anything from what they have spoken.
So I need to train...
The first candidate to listen is the list of webcasts on channel 9 tagged with "Dynamics" because it is an interesting topic to me.
It is very useful, but have some disadwantages:
- the files are very big - I need soundtrack only
- my mp3 player can not play wmv smoothly (and it plays them only after renaming them to .wma) - I am forced to use a Pocket PC
- I feel, I can get a slight Danish accent (it is nice, but I think not when mixed with Russian ;) )
So I am switched to other podcast named .NET rocks - an internet radio about Microsort .NET and related technologies. It is interesting for me, sounds quite professional and, I think, made with a clean American English.
Can you recommend me interesing podcasts in English?
Do you know something for extracting soundtrack from a wmv file?
PS. The latest ".NET rocks" show is with a Steve McConnell, the author of the "Code complete" book, recomended recently by MFP
2 comments:
I use the free tool "Video mp3 Extractor 1.6" (http://www.geovid.com/Video_mp3_Extractor/) to extract audio from wmv files.
I tested it with the "Smart customizations" webcast. It is about 30 minutes long. The wmv file is 18.3 MB. When setting the bitrate of the audio to 32 kbps the MP3 file is 7.0 MB
Than you, Mikael. I've found the other one (BTW yours seems better), but there is a mall problem: they are not really extractors, but recoders.
It means that these programs do not just get existing audiotrack as is, but repack them (extract form compressed form and then compress again). It couses them to be slow, require entering compressing parameters and, i think, make some extra noise in the soundtrack.
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