Excitement about HearThis for Android

HearThis
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I’m responding to this in a new thread because it didn’t seem to belong in one about the new beta of HearThis.

Hi Rowan,

I’m really excited that someone is starting to use HearThis Android and finding it useful enough to request improvements. We’ve been waiting to hear that people were actually using it and what improvements are really wanted before putting a lot more work into it.

I decided not to copy all the recordings to each device for fear that they would run out of storage space. That doesn’t mean we can’t improve the program to mark things that someone else has recorded, though. The limitation would be that we could only mark recordings that had been synced to the central collection on the desktop. So it would still be possible that someone else has done work…maybe even a lot of work, if they’ve been out in the village unconnected for a few weeks…that wouldn’t be marked. It might even give a false sense of security…unless everyone is syncing very often it will still be important to keep track of who is supposed to record what. With that reservation, does it still sound worth doing?

(By the way, one advantage of keeping the copying one-way is that if one android’s recording overwrites someone else’s, the original recording should still be on the original device. The sync process keeps the most recent recording (that matches the current text), but you could manually copy a better one to the desktop if you want to.)

Thanks for catching that the chapters view doesn’t scroll. That should definitely be fixed.

Recording a long line in parts could certainly be done. It’s a little tricky because we’re much shorter of space to put controls on a phone than on a computer. I’ll give it some thought.

If you have 15 recorders and are using HT 2.0, I wonder whether you are using Glyssen to assign speakers to parts? That’s another thing that could make sense to integrate into HT Android…assign a particular part to a device.

All this depends on finding time, of course…HT Android has been mostly a spare-time project for me; no one is officially assigned to work on it currently. But you can agitate for it to get some resources!

JohnT

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Great to see HT Android now on Google Play. I saw some mention of the android version somewhere some months ago, looked on Google Play and just found something with the same name but very different. Now my only problem is that my virtual machine (in which Windows runs) sees the network as wired rather than wireless, so I don’t know how I can connect the two unless I can hack the Network adaptor to appear to be a wireless one.

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David,

it’s possible we could give HT Android an option to connect over a USB cable. Would that help? Can your Windows virtual machine ‘see’ the android as a disk drive? (You may have to tell the android device to use USB to transfer files or transfer files with MTP or something similar.)

Another possibility is that all the devices could sync with a fileserver somewhere, rather like Paratext. Do all devices have at least occasional access to the internet? Would that option be useful?

JohnT

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That would help immensely. I plug USB devices in and the Virtual Machine sees them.

The Virtual Machine also sees network connections, but they are all wired.

Shared folders appear as network drives too and so that would be another avenue that could work for file exchange.

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FYI: The newly release HearThis Android does not include any new transfer/connection options, so it probably does not solve this problem. Apparently, there have been some challenges (in Bloom) with syncing over a USB cable, so we’re not sure that’s a good way forward. We did discuss Bluetooth as an option. From the VM are you able to communicate with Bluetooth devices?
This discussion should probably be carried out here.