About
this Website
Most of elizabethparcells.com was created between July
and December 2005 by Elizabeth
and me (her brother). Content has been added since then. The messages on the sympol page and the videos were not considered until after Elizabeth died.
Content for the site comes from audio recordings, videos, scores, photos, Elizabeth's vocal wisdom, and performance recollections and tributes from friends and fans. From those sources
are made digital audio (mp3) and video (wmv) files, html files (htm), picture files (jpg and gif), and Adobe document (pdf) files which are organized and connected with navigation pages that include text, graphics,
and hyperlinks. Various software applications are used to create these files, discussed below.
Audio and video files contain music performances or comments about singing. Many music files have embedded photos, and lyrics. All the music files have artist and composer tags which can be viewed, depending on the visitor's media player and settings.
Play lists are provided to play groups of audio files. PLay lists are simple text files with an "m3u" file name extension, that can be created in Notepad, with a URL for each audio file in the group.
Music scores, in pdf format, are intended for following along with performances and often include Elizabeth's mark ups and notes. A "play mp3" button is embedded on the first page of the score so it is convenient to start the audio after opening the score. Score animations were created to make it easier to follow with the score and encourage that practice.
Open reel tapes were played on a Revox tape deck and ripped to an Audigy notebook sound card in 16 bit wav format using the Audigy software recorder that came with the card. Audio editing is done with Goldwave and consisted of removing a slight amount of tape hiss when necessary, maximizing volume, and dividing into tracks. The last steps are to convert the wave files to 320 bit mp3’s (about 2MB/min) and add information tags. When tape hiss seems a particular problem fade-in at the beginning of the track, and fade-out at the end are added to disguise it. Removing more than a slight amount of hiss pushes the singing into the background which was avoided when ever possible.
VCR tape recordings were ripped to a Mini DV digital video camera then transferred to hard disk with http://www.scenalyzer.com/ and edited with Windows Movie Maker or, more recently, with Roxio Video Wave editor.
The interviews and comments were recorded direct to hard drive through the Audigy sound card then transcribed by typing and with Dragon NaturallySpeaking Standard Edition voice recognition software. A freeware utility called Express Scribe was used for controlling playback during transcription.
A few recordings without programs turned up after Elizabeth died. Help identifying songs and arias was provided by regulars on several internet message boards, in particular the Coloratura board run by John Carroll in Yahoo.com.
Microsoft FrontPage was used to create the navigation pages. The visual theme is one of the standard Microsoft FrontPage templates chosen by Elizabeth. Frontpage was replaced by an old version of Dreamweaver. The site navigation pages are edited in plain html. For large uploads of multiple files to the web site we used a freeware program called Core FTP. Recently the preferred FTP client is Filezilla.
Most of the work was done on an aging Toshiba notebook computer with a 1.7Ghz processor upgraded to 1GB of RAM and an 80GB HD connected to a broadband internet service. Since then the site and media files are edited on a Dell Latitude D820 with a dual core processor combined with a large external HD. The newer computer is noticably faster compressing audio and video files.
Elizabeth's website is currently hosted on bluehost.com which promises 200GB of storage and 2,000GB of monthly bandwidth for about $100 per year. The website needs only a small fraction of these resouces.
A significant percentage of visitors find the site via search engines, which seem to favor sites with lot's of content.
Descriptive file names, vocal wisdom
terminology, and music details improve the ranking of pages by search engines. The media file search engines like singingfish open the mp3 files
and read the matadata (song title, composer, etc.) embedded there.
Elizabeth's intentions were to preserve her legacy, encourage young singers, and promote a health message.
Software used to prepare content for the Elizabeth's web site.
Audigy Notebook sound card player/recorder
Goldwave
Dragon Naturally Speaking Standard Edition
Express Scribe
Core FTP
Windows Media Player displaying a playlist (.m3u file)
Scenelyzerlive
Windows Movie Maker
Roxio VideoWave 9
