Recording and playback for audio comments in presentations
LibreOffice is a freely available office suite that is developed and promoted by the community on an open source basis. Various schools and universities worldwide, as well as individuals and companies, use LibreOffice.
The ability to record audio comments in presentations has become a growing need to enable eLearning. In contrast to video recordings, audio recordings are stored per slide and can be adjusted to match the individual pace. This is particularly suitable in school, academic as well as corporate environments to make learning content and product presentations more interactive.
The crowd-funding project «Voice up your LibreOffice» aims to make this feature enhancement possible.
A community project where everyone benefits from the ongoing expansions
LibreOffice is not owned by a company - it is a community project. Major changes require a collective effort to pay for its development. In return, everyone benefits from this effort and can use the app freely and without restrictions. Of course, the code will be contributed upstream in its entirety to LibreOffice, where it can be adopted by the community.
Help to finance the development work!
How does the development amount come about? The cost was calculated by experienced LibreOffice developers. This function extension enables the recording as well as playback of audio comments in the desktop version of LibreOffice. The audio files are saved in the most important file formats (odp and pptx) so that an exchange with PowerPoint (TM) is easily possible.
The project, which will cost around EUR 62’611.–, was divided into various milestones to enable partial successes and to implement the overall project step-by-step.
Goal 1: Record function (EUR 16’967.–)
In the first step we make sure that LibreOffice gets a function for audio recordings and that the audio comments can be embedded in the document.
Goal 2: Windows and Linux Support (EUR 22’522.–)
In the second step we make sure that the recording function works on Linux as well as on Windows.
Goal 3: Play comments during slideshow (EUR 28’078.–)
In the third step, we implement the playback part so that the saved audio comments are played back when the presentation is played.
Goal 4: ODP/PPTX import/export (EUR 44’744.–)
In the fourth step, the import and export functions for the two most common office formats (LibreOffice and Microsoft Office) will be implemented.
Goal 5: User Interface (EUR 55’855.–)
In the fifth step, the user interface will be implemented, through which the various functions (start/stop recording, pause playback, etc.) will be made accessible.
Goal 6: OSX Support (EUR 62’611.–)
In the last step we’ll also make sure that the recording function works on OSX.