Alan Gutierrez

The Audio Town Hall project, which has been in the works for some time, has been launced over the weekend. We’re facilitating conference calls between neighborhoods and the group urban planners from which the neighborhoods must choose, in order to move forward with the “process” of rebuliding our fair City of New Orleans. For my non New Orleans neighborhoods planning readers, there’s a lot of back story.

For those of you who’ve been following along, you can hear Carrollton residents Jenel Hazlett and Kim Carver speaking with a David Dixon from Goody Clancy, and also Carrollton and John Hoal of H3.

Gentilly resident Nikki Najiola speaks with David Dixon of Goody Clancy, and Marty Rowland and Karen Parsons join her to speak with John Hoal of H3.

Oddly timed, Nancy White, who I follow for insight into social networking software, has written up a long article on telephone faciliation, which might be worth a study for those of use who are developing the Audio Town Hall.

Look forward to more intereviews with planners in the comming week, and an interview with the creators of the Kid Camera Project, which breaks the planning mold into which Think New Orleans has been stuffed.

This dry run wasn’t as dry as the last dry run. It succeded after a fashion. The audio is audable and all present were recorded. It worked out okay.

The Audio Town Hall was recorded with a combination of the Free Conference service first suggested by Mark Folse of Web Bank Guide and Skype on OS X with a nice plugin, called Call Recorder. The result was a free phone conference. Rebecca Houtman, Sarah Elise Lewis and myself attending.

Prior to calling, I had to disable the built-in mic in my MacBook. It is tinny and no good for the call. I wanted to use Skype to dial out to the conference and record. To do this, I chose line-in as the input for Skype. This setting is found in the Audio tab in the Preferences dialog.

Without a line-in device plugged in, that muted Skype.

There was no way to disable recording otherwise. Choosing Mute from Skype’s Call menu did not disable the built-in microphone. It muted my voice for the other callers, but not for recording. The built-in mic still captured my voice, which Call Recorder recorded, even though Skype did not send my voice out on the call.

Muting the speaker on the MacBook was done from System Preferences. This was to prevent feedback.

At the end of the call, I was able to terminate the entire conference by being the first to hang up. A feature I wanted to test, should I ever use the premium service. People could run up a bill on my account by staying on the line.

The final step was to convert to MP3, which I did by using Convert to MP3 in iTunes.

You can scroll forward to 4:18 where the conversation becomes something of a Rebecca Houtman interview.