Cool Tool #3: Chirbit

Chirbit is a social media site for sharing sound recordings. It falls into the same category as other sites such as Bandcamp and Soundcloud. I'm not a musician or podcaster, so I don't see myself as someone who would use an audio file-sharing site for any reason. But in the name of science, I will investigate.

Creating an account on this platform is free. Chirbit website here.

After I typed in a username and password and hit "Submit," it appeared that nothing had happened. I thought I had made a mistake, but the website had sent me a verification e-mail and my account was indeed created. Just a warning in case this happens to you and you get confused.

This is a screenshot of the dashboard when I opened my fresh account. There are icons for recording audio and uploading an audio clip. The middle icon Video 2 Chirbit can extract the audio from your Youtube videos to be uploaded here.

When you click on the left recording icon, this window will appear. I was pleasantly surprised by how user-friendly this was. All I had to do to create an audio post was hit the red button when I wanted to start recording my voice, hit it again when I was finished talking, and then hit Submit.

This is what my homepage looks like with my six-second test uploaded:

The platform has many of the same features of other social media sites:

• It has a feed for new posts.
• You can like people's uploads.
• You can follow channels (I don't know what to call them--"content creators"?) 
• You can like and comment on uploads. 
• You can put tags on your uploads so they'll appear in a search.
• On this site, you can explore clips by category (next picture)

Not a fan of this cheesy, dated design. Also, note the "Not Safe For Work" Category

As a future teacher who would potentially use this platform, I have a couple questions:

• What's with the NSFW category? I'm not for censorship, but is this an appropriate platform to use? Can we explain to parents how to put filters on the searches?
• What is the best way to use this with our students? Is it alright if we, the teachers, are the only ones with the account? Can students who don't have a Chirbit account still view our posts? 

I personally don't understand the benefit of using this site when there are video sites out there like YouTube. And the fact that for most of the clips I've clicked on, there are virtually no comments or likes on anything. ANYTHING. I feel a bit sad poking around this website. Every profile I click on has zero followers. This site seems to be a place where people go to wail into the digital void. I wouldn't recommend going on this site if you're a band looking to be discovered. 

However, maybe that's unfair and a tad nasty of me. This is a platform for sharing, not necessarily getting a ton a views and followers. This is a very easy way to share audio recordings with friends, your students, and other people who DO know you exist. If they can figure out how to filter out the NSFW clips, it could be great for sharing study guides, lectures, oral book reports, and other student projects. 

These are my knee-jerk observations of the site as a fresh user who doesn't have any background in audio recording. If you're interested in finding out more, here's a review of Chirbit by a librarian with firsthand experience using it. I'm sure the site could be used successfully in a number of scenarios but I would encourage you to do a lot more research first.