Edit: The Town’s audio is up now. Theirs has vastly less less crowd noise, but mine is louder, and might be more understandable for the quieter speakers. Take your pick.
You can find it at this link. On my system, the only browser that can deal with the Granicus system used by the Town is Chrome. If you don’t like the Granicus player, you can download the file (slowly) and play it on your own system.
To avoid confusion, I’ll post the “index” that matches the Town’s audio file here, on this page. The only major difference I see is that I left the tape running during the break and replaced that with silence. The Town just cut that out. The times in this file are approximate right for the Town’s recording. If you use my recording (Google Drive link below), use the index stored with my recording.
2019-02-27 Planning Commission work session index for TOV audio
Original post follows.
You can download my audio recording of last night’s Planning Commission work session, along with an Excel file that is the index to my recording, from this Google Drive location. My audio was poor enough that I made two versions — normal amplification and over-amplified. If you can’t make out the speech on the normal version, try the over-amplified version.
If you are reading this, you know I started recording various Town of Vienna public meetings a few weeks ago. And — coincidence or not — the Town subsequently started a new policy of releasing its own audio recordings of (some of) those same meetings. (I think that meetings of minor agencies within the Town, such as the Transportation Safety Commission, may not be recorded or posted by the Town, because there is no place on the Town’s Granicus website where such recordings could be posted.).
As it turns out, the Town had been recording some of these meetings all along, for use by Town staff (e.g., for writing up the minutes of the meeting, I would guess). They just never made those recordings public before.
Today, I was waiting for the Town to post its audio, rather than post my own (above), for two reasons. First, the Town’s audio is much higher-quality than mine. I have to post-process mine to remove noise, amplify, and then (audio) compress it, to make speech as understandable as possible. So I would rather use the Town’s audio when available. But, second, the Town and I start at different times, so I have to recompute the time offsets in my index, if I want it to match the Town’s recording instead of mine.
Be that as it may, as of now, the Town has a placeholder up, not the actual recording. My guess is, given how clear the Town’s recordings are, they may do quite a bit of post-processing to remove noise, amplify the mumblers and the people who won’t use the microphone, edit out the spikes when people drop or bang on the microphone, and so on. (Whereas on mine, you hear all of that.) For a four hour meeting, that takes some time.
I will produced a second index, to match the Town’s file, when that is released.
