Continuing liveatc.net Listening Practice

2012-01-13 | X-Plane 10 Tutorials

A few days ago, I introduced liveatc.net. Listening in real-time indeed has a great sense of presence, but the speech rate is too fast. After trying for a few days, I felt it was still very hard to understand. Is there a better method?

I continued to search and found that liveatc.net has a very useful archive function. Past ATC recordings can be downloaded. This is very useful. For example, the archive page for Kennedy Airport, http://www.liveatc.net/archive.php?m=kjfk_twr After selecting the date and time, you can enter the MP3 playback and download page. Very convenient, right?

But there is still a problem: the ATC conversations are not continuous. There are always tens of seconds or even several minutes of silence between each conversation. Listening to it feels very inefficient. So, I considered if there was a way to remove the silent blanks from MP3 files. I searched online and finally found a good software —— Audacity. This software is very powerful and seems capable of doing many things, but I am already satisfied just using the “Truncate Silence” feature.

How to use it: First, download Audacity 1.3.14. After decompressing, drag Audacity.app to the Application directory to use it. Then open the ATC audio file you just downloaded, for example, KJFK-Twr-Jan-08-2012-1630Z.mp3. Select the Effect menu, click the Truncate Silence… command, and it will automatically delete all silence, compressing the original audio into a smaller file.

If you want to save the file as another MP3 file, you can open the File menu and select the Export command. A dialog box will pop up asking you to select the filename, extension, directory, etc. Note that if you want to save it as an MP3 file, you need to install the Lame MP3 Encoder Library beforehand. However, this is also simple. Open http://lame1.buanzo.com.ar/, download Lame_Library_v3.98.2_for_Audacity_on_OSX.dmg, and install it.

Below is a sample I made. You can try it out and see how your listening skills are. <a href=KJFK-Twr-Jan-08-2012-1630Z.mp3