Photo by robinfeder on Flickr - used under a Creative Commons licence

Remarkable photos that, amongst other things, illustrate the importance of getting the dust off before you play the recording.

The document is called How Do I Digitise Difficult Objects? and it shows some simple ways to photograph or scan one-off atypical objects including glass plate negatives, small reflective objects and scans from magazines or books.

Axial lighting set up used to photograph coins or medals

Photo edited using Picnik by Sandy Redding on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons licence

Picnik is a web-based application that allows users to crop, resize and add effects to their images - all through their existing web browser without the need for additional software.

Picnik has also been available to users of Yahoo-owned photo sharing site Flickr for a couple of years - it will be interesting to see how Google and Yahoo get on with this new partnership. The official Google Blog announcement does not mention Yahoo, but states “we’d like to continue supporting all existing Picnik partners”.

Picnik is one of many options for editing photos - see our Image Editing Software for more information.

Online photo editing is likely to become more and more popular - there’s already an online version of Photoshop. Have you used Picnik, Photoshop.com or any other online image editors? Would you be tempted to in the future?

The conference aims to celebrate and showcase the work of our regional learning and skills providers in meeting the business and community engagement agenda

AAC improves on the file compression technology behind MP3 and marries it with the flexible MPEG-4 standard to deliver audio in a package designed to offer users the widest range of delivery and playback tools.

Our new advice document AAC Audio and the MP4 Media Format explains the benefits of using AAC in teaching and learning, and how AAC relates to video and other enhanced learning resources. We also look at compatibility and the software which you or your users need to work with AAC audio, and some of the features it can offer.

The MPEG-4 standard, of which AAC is a part, is a large and potentially confusing collection of standards and formats, so we try also to cherry-pick some of the most salient features to enable those working with AAC audio in MP4 or M4A format to understand the place of AAC in the wider MPEG-4 family.

So why should we care? Those of us who are horizon scanning will be particularly interested in one of its powerful new features: the ability to play video without a plugin. Past and present, we rely on various plugins to watch video on the web, which can cause headaches if the final user’s computer does not have the correct plugin.

HTML5 will help us provide video unrestricted by plugin. Below we link to a demo page that has an example of a HTML5 video player in action. At present this will only work in the latest versions of browsers for Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome. My favourite feature is the ability to jump anywhere in the video and have it start immediately.

Visit the SublimeVideo player demo site for full details on this exciting development.

In a draconian move, Google has recently removed several music blogs from its Blogger and Blogspot services. Citing complaints about the legality of music posted by bloggers as the reason behind their actions, some well known and sometimes longstanding music blogs have been summarily deleted. The owners of the blogs concerned had apparently already been politely but firmly informed that they were in violation of Google’s terms of use, and receiving no adequate explanation, Google has pulled the plug.

The bloggers themselves are widely outraged, claiming that much of the audio they post is sanctioned or even supplied by the record companies concerned. However, mostly legal is not completely legal. Complaints of uncleared use of audio in these blogs, in violation of the USA’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998, have highlighted some grey areas and assumptions in the use of copyrighted audio, which some bloggers have allegedly failed to address or clarify when asked to do so.

Some of this material may of course have been used perfectly legally, but the failure to follow Google’s procedure has led to shutdown.

Currently this all centres around American copyright law, but it also starkly demonstrates the importance of gaining permission to use copyrighted material, lest you spoil your ship for a ha’pworth of tar. As always, if you’re not sure, don’t use it!

If you want some guidance on audiovisual copyright for your own resources you may want to take a look at our advice documents Copyright: an Overview and Audiovisual Copyright Frequently Asked Questions.

This short guide to Uncompressed Audio File Formats summarises the essential features of common uncompressed digital audio formats, focussing particularly on the WAV family.

Suitable for archiving and working with high quality audio, uncompressed files are the best quality medium for digital audio, and figure prominently in the audio workflow at many stages. Here we examine their comparative strengths and how they have evolved to fill different needs, and take a look at the latest developments, including Multichannel Broadcast Wave Format and iXML metadata.

Watch this space - further advice on the AAC audio and the MP4 media format will be published shortly!