teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk

WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...

Microsoft, ever since Windows 95 (in fact it may even have been part of 3.1!), have included a small program called Sound Recorder. If you have a microphone attached to your computer it allows you to record yourself. You’ll find it under Start/Programs/Accessories/Entertainment. The trouble is it’s very basic and only allows you to record up to 60 seconds of audio. We need a better program…

Step up Audacity, the free and open-source audio editor and recorder. This amazingly powerful but easy-to-use program is what we’re going to use to record the audio which we’ll use for our podcast. We’ll also use it to edit the separate audio files together to create the finished version.

1. Get Audacity from audacity.sourceforge.net. If you’re using Windows you have two options on the front page - the beta or the stable version. The beta version has a few more features but is more likely to crash. The stable version has been tested fairly extensively and is less likely to crash. (I tend to use beta versions and have never had Audacity crash on me)

2. To begin with we’re just going to be concerned with the record and playback functions of Audacity. I’m presuming that your microphone and speakers are set up correctly - to adjust their levels simply go to Start/Settings/Control Panel and click on ‘Sounds and Audio Devices’. Clicking on the ‘Audio’ tab at the top allows you to change levels for different devices including your microphone. (you can also change the volume and microphone levels in Audacity through the fairly self-evident sliders, but you’ll want the microphone set up properly for all applications…)

3. The recording and playback functions of Audacity are very easy to use. Simply click on the button with the red dot in the middle to begin recording, and then on the button with the yellow square to stop. You can then use the button with the green triangle to play back what you have recorded.

4. You’ll notice that when you first pressed the record button a window opened below the playback buttons. This shows, in wave form, the audio that you record. You can have more than one audio track open together and perform some fancy tricks with them. But we’ll get to that later… For the time being, simply notice that playback starts from wherever you click on the waveform. This can be useful if you want to skip straight to a certain piece of the audio track.

5. To avoid mistakes and slip-ups record short sections at a time. You can put these together seamlessly later on. After each recording, go to File/Export as WAV and save your file with a sensible filename, perhaps with an additional numerical indicator (e.g. ‘podcast 01′). WAV files are uncompressed audio. To maintain the highest possible sound quality we shall compress to MP3 only at the end.

6. Now that you know how to record audio and save it as a WAV file, record all of the pieces of speech you want to include on your podcast. You should also get together any songs/samples that you might want to use as background or introductory music in preparation for part 3 (putting your podcast together)

Note: There are other ways of getting content for your podcast. If you wanted to include an interview with someone not in your present location, for example, you could use Skype (free telephony software) and either the Hot Recorder or Powergramo plugin to record conversations. Or you could include parts of answerphone messages left for you using the SAM (Skype Answering Machine) plugin (an easy way for asynchronous class-to-class collaboration?) More plugins for Skype are available on the official site here.

Streaming audio files can be downloaded quickly and easily using the shareware Net Transport.

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