Audio Files

About 1980 while home on vacation in Idaho, I interviewed my Dad, Uncle Lester, and then Uncle John. I "digitally remastered" these recordings to improve their quality using a program called GoldWave. Because of the poor quality of the original recordings, even after considerable work was done on them, they are still difficult to understand in many places. But keep listening. You will get it.

When I made the recordings I wanted to preserve some of the family history they knew. So, on these recordings, you will hear me quizzing them about their ancestors. They gave me a good start into documenting the Gould family genealogy.

Simply click on the name to hear the recording: Clarence Gould, Lester Gould, or John Gould. If you would like to copy a file into your computer, use a right-mouse click and select the "Save Target As" option. I hope you will be awed to hear these long stilled voices from the past.

I have discovered that not all computers respond the same way when you click on an audio file name above. The way a computer responds depends upon how it is setup. On some computers, the audio file will begin to play a few seconds after clicking on it. On other computers, the file will not begin to play until the entire file has been copied into the computer. The Lester Gould file may take more than 30 minutes through a 56 k-baud dialup connection.

A setup that works especially well is to use Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 as the web browser and Microsoft Media Player version 9. A few seconds after you click on the file name, the audio will begin to play in Media Player and it will continue to load the file into its buffer at the same time. It gives you an indication as to how the file load is going. When the file load has completed you can go off-line and the file will continue to play. If you want to save the file on your computer, you can click on "file" and then "save as". This gives you the best of both worlds since you can listen to the file as it is coming in and save the file after it has all been copied to your computer. Media Player 9 can be installed on your computer using Windows Update. Need to know what version of Media Player that you have? Launch Media Player and click on Help, and then "About Media Player" and it will tell you what the version is.

Hint for AOL users: Don't listen to the file directly from the AOL browser. Instead, after you have connected to AOL, launch Internet Explorer and connect to www.rgould.org using IE. This works much better than the AOL web browser, especially when Media Player 9 is the default media player.

If you have loaded Quick Time or other such program onto your computer, they may interfere with the operation of Media Player 9 by making themselves the default media player. i.e. they won't let Media Player load from Internet Explorer. This can be fixed by finding the option in the internet setup in your computer that controls such things.

Click to hear a poem about finding gold in Alaska. This 4 minute recording is a good test of your system to see how it will respond to listening to audio files coming from the internet. My favorite phrase from this poem is "but it isn't the gold that I'm wanting, so much as just finding the gold".