Welcome to the soft launch

Welcome and thanks for stopping by.  Speakertap.es is a massive undertaking, we’re trying to dramatically improve on the concept of an anonymous archive of speaker recordings by addressing three major areas.

Design

We want to provide a sleek, modern, and mobile-ready site that makes access as easy as possible.  Speakertap.es uses responsive design, meaning the whole thing changes dynamically depending on what kind of device you’re using.  Each file has a full page with details and a player that works on desktops, phones, tablets, and probably even internet connected refrigerators.  There’s also easy sharing to the major social networks.  Nothing on speakertap.es implies membership in a 12-step fellowship, so for the tradition thumpers out there: you’re safe.

Standardization

There are already several speaker archives out there, but the files are a mess.  An mp3 file has meta data embedded with the audio, its how programs like iTunes know author, album and song titles.  We’ve settled on a standard we think works best across most music application.  The speaker is the author, where he/she spoke is the album, and additional information is put into other fields where appropriate.  Through this process we review each and every file that gets uploaded.

Search

This whole effort would be pointless if you couldn’t find something useful to listen to.  We’ve made the whole archive searchable, but there’s no way to include the content of each recording as part of the search.  To help get around this we start by putting every recording into categories that make sense in a general way: which fellowship they refer to, specific conferences, etc.  Then we tag the files with more specific information, such as “big book”, “step study”, or “relationships”.  This is the biggest challenge because of the time needed to listen to each recording.  We hope you can help with that, and we’ll have some example tags up as soon as possible.

This is a work in progress, and always will be.  More will be revealed.  We have a huge backlog of recordings to process and we haven’t yet figured out the best way to accept direct submissions, but if you’ve got something you want us to host then head to the “Contact Us” page and let us know about it.  There are no fees for hosting your recordings, as long as they fit the criteria of the site.