Live Audio: Mayoral Candidate Forum

June 14, 2014 Ann Arbor Democratic Party forum features: Sabra Briere, Sally Petersen, Stephen Kunselman and Christopher Taylor.

By Dave Askins

June 14, 2014 at 6 am

The Ann Arbor Democratic Party is hosting a mayoral candidate forum this morning, June 14, 2014 from 9:30 a.m. to 12 p.m. at the Ann Arbor Community Center at 625 North Main Street.

One [click] allows you to skip the intro and start listening live. Remember to “click to play.” Updated: The live broadcast is over. The player will now allow you to listen through the 2 hr 18 min file. The candidate forum starts about 40 minutes into the file. The first 40 minutes is Ann Arbor City Democratic party mingling and announcements.

Campaign yard signs for candidates in the Ann Arbor Democratic mayoral primary.

Expected to attend are all four candidates in the Democratic primary, which will be held on Aug. 5. The four are all sitting city councilmembers representing one of the city’s five wards: Sabra Briere (Ward 1), Sally Petersen (Ward 2), Stephen Kunselman (Ward 3) and Christopher Taylor (Ward 3).

The Chronicle is using the occasion of the forum to test out Mixlr as way of broadcasting live audio over the Internet. The Mixlr audio player is embedded below.

Social mingling among the Dems is expected to last until around 10 a.m. And at that point the forum will start. We’ll use the half hour before that to test things out.

A comment thread is open. Feel free to use the commenting section to alert us to any technical difficulties: This is a test broadcast and it’s always possible that it will be an unmitigated disaster. We hope not. But we expect that there will be a certain amount of static and possible buffering that make this effort fall short of “broadcast quality” audio.

After the live broadcast, we expect to make the recorded file from the event available for playback at a listener’s convenience.

The text box below the audio player is a way to provide live notes to listeners – for example, the current question that candidates are answering, who is currently talking, or other listener aids. It’s programmed to force the scroll continuously to the bottom of the text notes file – so that no manual scrolling or refreshing should be required. If you need to see everything at the top of the file, here’s a link to the actual file that’s embedded in the window.

Updated: The live broadcast is over. The 2 hr and 18 min broadcast can be replayed below. The forum starts about 40 minutes into the file that’s played in the embedded player below. But here’s an a file with some initial editing to pare things down of just the candidate forum portion of the recording [.mp3 of June 14, 2014 mayoral democratic candidate forum].

Updated Again: .mp3 files of forum segments are provided here: