OneNote's capability of being able to sync handwritten notes with audio is great, but at formal presentations I'd like to be able to accept the audio feed over a WiFi broadcast directly from the speaker's mike. The quality of the recording should be much better. Maybe simulcasting audio over WiFi is something for PDC and other tech-oriented conferences to start doing.
Does OneNote have to be changed to make this work? How would I tell OneNote to pick up the audio feed from a network address? Could I fake out the audio driver? I guess the audio feeds would just be URLs and could be a webcast or "local" mike broadcast? Could local broadcasts be self-discovered so they could magically appear in a toolbar and then I could pick one? Of course, how would I know which is the feed I want? Wouldn't it be discouragingly funny to record an event only to later find that you'd picked the wrong feed? Ouch.
Creating a WiFi broadcast shouldn't be hard. A Tablet PC hooked up to a good mike should work as a audio stream "server" shouldn't it? I don't know this kind of stuff. I bet someone out there does.
Actually, I guess a hybrid system that can automatically switch between the internal mike and a WiFi mike would be the best--so that if someone speaks in the audience you might have a chance to pick them up when the speaker is silent. This is the classic speaker phone kind of problem, I guess.
Actually, another twist on this might be interesting: Leveraging the mikes in multiple computers. Here's the problem: Even in a mid-size conference room, my little Tablet PC mike does a mediocre job of picking up people speaking on the other side of the room. But more often than not now there are multiple computers spread throughout the room, so how about have the mikes work as a coordinated P2P WiFi mike array? Each computer would be capable of broadcasting its audio feed to the other computers subscribed in the meeting so that the strongest signal could be recorded. This would be wild. There'd probably be a delay proportional to the number of computers, but there might be a way to get around this. Neato.
Posted by Loren at July 28, 2003 02:30 PMImagine casette recorders with WiFi built in so people could record these audio streams. The batteries might last all of 10 minutes. lol.
Posted by: Loren on July 28, 2003 02:36 PM