Thanks to all for the helpful comments on the thread.
As part of my own pali learning process, I've been listening to the mp3
pali chants of the abhayagiri monks, simultaneously reading the
english+pali text, and clumsily reciting the pali along with the monks.
This total immersion I believe facilities the learning process
(simultaneously listening, reading, saying pali). One drawback as
Lennart pointed out is if I ever become proficient at speaking pali and
attempt to converse with another, they might wonder why I have a sing
song accent.

Making mp3's and putting it in the web is ridiculously easy. In less
than 20 minutes last night, I downloaded audacity (open source free mp3
recording software for pc), used a 5$ cheap microphone (same one I use
for skype or googletalk), recorded myself reciting verse 1 of the
dhammapada on the laptop, created a googlesite, uploaded the mp3, then
using a smartphone pointed the web address to the googlesite I just
created, downloaded the mp3 I just created and listened to it on my
smartphone over the internet.

For my own personal use, besides pali recitations, I'd also like the
major suttas to have multilingual verisons such as english, mandarin,
etc. Think of it this way. There's about 1.5Billion chinese in the
world, there's tens of millions of smartphones that download mp3's off
the web in the USA, if not already there will soon be hundreds of
millions of mandarin chinese smartphone users. You think a wiki of mp3
mandarin pali suttas would be useful? Basically, if you're not sure
what I'm talking about, just visualize a multi-lingual version of this
excellent site: http://www.suttareadings.net/index.html


I created a googlegroups just now, audio_tipitaka@....
The googlesite mp3 file respository:
https://sites.google.com/site/audiotipitaka/file-cabinet

I set up permissions so any member of audio_tipitaka@...
has "collaborator" status, to upload, delete, move mp3 files in the
file-cabinet.

Each gmail account is entitled to a free googlesite with 10Gig max
capacity. Max file size is 12Meg, which should be plenty for dhammatalk
mp3's.

Using Majjhima Nikaya as an example, if I were to recite and record
mp3's (in english) one sutta per week, in 3 years I'd have a complete
audio version of [MN].
If there were 152 volunteers, we could make an audio english version of
[MN] in one day.

For pali recitations, I'm thinking 5 or 10 minute excerpts from suttas
would be excellent. Every iphone I believe has an mp3 recorder, so if
you have access to 5-10 minutes of time with a sri lankan or other
fluent pali speaker, we could put together quite an excellent wiki of
pali audio mp3's.

To help on this project, you can subscribe to the googlegroups at this
address:

http://groups.google.com/group/audio_tipitaka/boxsubscribe
google will send a confirmation to your email that you need to respond to (It should be pretty instantaneous). If you don't get the email from google right away, check your spam folder.
Type something short in the confirmation to let me know that you're not a spammer and I'll approve the application.


-Frank