WikiAudio.org
Q&A with WikiAudio.org founder and Ex’pression Sound Arts Lab Instructor, William Turner.
What is the purpose and vision of WikiAudio?
The goal is to be a consistently growing database of easily accessible information about audio that anyone can contribute to. More importantly, WikiAudio is a how-to database that not only tells you how, but also why something works the way it does.
As it stands, most of the information regarding audio on the internet is scattered. To find anything becomes a research project in and of itself. I’m not talking about complicated things either. Something as simple as how to reset a sound module can be a pain if you bought it used and there’s no manual. Nobody wants to spend 2 hours weeding through forums and YouTube videos to figure that out!
What’s the current state of the site?
In the last year I’ve developed the project using the Mediawiki software with a lot of extensions to implement things like video, forums, and social profile styled user pages. I added the basics of a pretty large microphone database, posted over 200 tutorials, and added a ton of basic information about audio.
I developed a simple question and answer mechanism that I recently changed to a “Request and Granted Request” scheme. People can use this to submit requests (and questions) and have them answered “on the fly” by other users.
What is the future of the project?
It’s a wiki, so that depends on what people make of it. Personally, like last year, I’m going to focus mostly on basics; really “surface” level material. By the end of 2010, I intend to have at least 300 tutorials for many of the major DAW platforms (i.e., Pro Tools, Logic, Sonar, Ableton Live, etc.), a batch of recording and mixing tutorials for at least 30-40 instruments (with audio examples), as well as, seed the content for audio programming and code-level audio related areas of the site. This might change since I’m constantly adapting the site to accommodate all the new things that come into my awareness of what’s possible.
Starting in 2011, I am going to shift my personal focus to more elaborate and tedious areas of production and sound design and (attempt) to have a strong focus on audio programming and development such as audio related C++ tutorials and more MaxMSP. I would like to see the project become multilingual as well.
Wikiaudio is a user created encyclopedia project and database for all things audio and sound related. You can visit online at www.wikiaudio.org
