Week 4: Audacity & Podcast

Like many of the other devices/projects we have conducted so far in class, I have never worked with any type of sound or video recording before and I thought our week long discussion and class activities were extremely beneficial in learning about the new software. I thought that going into our podcast assignments would be a breeze, but as I worked more and analyzed research of what it takes to do a proper podcast recording project, I was amazed to learn how much actually goes into each detailed piece of the sound recording. As defined in my portfolio, podcast is actually described as "a type of digital media recording device consisting of an episodic series of files (either audio or video) to and downloaded through web syndication".  Audacity is free software, developed by a group of volunteers and is easy to use, and multilingual audio editor and recorder that applies to Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. Thefollowing is a list that audacity can do:
1) Record live audio

2) Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs

3) Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files

4) Cut, cops, splice or mix sounds together

5) Change the speed or pitch of a recording


Audacity can redord live audio through a microphone or mixer, or digitize recordings from cassette tapes, records or minidiscs.  With some sound card it can also capture other streaming audio. You can record up to 16 channels at once, dub over trackes recreating multi-track recordings, and level sound quality levels before, during or after live audio.  Programs like audacity are also called open source software because their source code is available for anyone to study or use. There are thousands of other free and open source programs, including the firefox web browser, the OpenOffice.org office suite and entire Linux-based operating systems like Ubuntu.  As far as our Podcasts are going in class, I feel like learning the audacity function online was a great tool in order for us to get better educated on the subjects of audio and other details regarding our podcasts assignment. The videos below demonstrate a few tutorials for learning the different functions of audacity and podasts. Hope this helps:

Sources:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hrBbczS9I0

http://webdesign.about.com/od/podcasts/a/aa013006.htm

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/