# Sound letters


My best friends are scattered all around the world, which can be very
frustrating at times. Luckily, more and more opportunities are appearing
for staying in touch, Skype (and the Gizmo project) being perhaps the
most important - free high quality phone calls over the internet. Works
out of the box. (With Gizmo you can even leave short messages,
surprisingly fun). I have still to try webcams, and don’t know how that
works. Also, I have been experimenting with sound letters.

I think that even with the existence of Skype, etc, sound letters still
have a function - sometimes I need to just “tell a story” or “complete a
line of thought”, without needing to have someone say “mhm” or “yeah”
all the time. Especially because talking to others, it is very easy to
get derailed. This is of course the nature of a conversation, and often
it is desirable. But sometimes, it can be annoying never to be able to
make a certain point. So I have been experimenting with different ways
of doing it.

The best is still using Audacity to record the sound, save it as an mp3
(usually takes almost as long as the sound file is, on my slow iBook),
and email it through GMail (max 10 MB pr file). This works quite well. I
tried out an online system today, called podomatic, where you can
actually record straight over the web (through Flash). Unfortunately, it
was very choppy (as in leaving out whole 30-second segments) which made
my 10 minute coherent talk into incoherent rambling. (Okay, the first
version was perhaps not that coherent, but the second one was
immeasurably worse, almost absurd.)

The one annoying thing about internet phonecalls is sitting in front of
your computer looking at the screen talking (especially since I am using
the built-in iBook mike). Buying a headset would improve this. I wonder
what is next.

And of course, it does worry me slightly where this is going. Certainly,
having already a lot of friends around the world, email, IM and voip are
very helpful. But I would love to have a larger percentage of my good
friends in Toronto (or whichever city I happen to live), instead of
spread out. Does the existence of these tools help us keep long-distance
friendships alive, and thus spend less time on our local friends? Are we
eventually going to go all global? Or perhaps it’s only me being weird.

Stian