I am just scraping the surface with a first experience creating an enhanced podcast in GarageBand, but software designers take note– this is the way podcast editing should happen. Drag and drop your mp3 music into a sound track. drop or record your voide in a voice track, drop image files into the podcast track where you want them, synch to music or voice, and publish. It is sweet.
The first one I did was for the opening of the NMC Second Life Campus. The music was provided by our SL performing guitarist, “Johnyy99 Gumshoe”, a song her performed into our LS space during the launch on April 20. I had some recorded audio from our speakers, recorded using WireTapPro (on my iBook) and the TeamSpeak audio server we used (quality was less than wonderful).
The enhanced cast is at the bottom of the article or directly as a 6.4 Mb download:
http://www.nmc.org/sl/audio/nmc-launch.m4a
I kept going back into SL to get more snapshot images. it’s just too fun to mix up the graphics. Some things I learned:
* create an opening graphic with a title overlay
* images are cropped to square, so you may want to overshoot or oversize the vertical dimensions if you plan to zoom and crop
* double clicking the images in the Chapter tracks allows you to zoom and crop.
* select Show Track Info (apple-I) form the Track menu to see a preview of the images when you play music
* any gaps in your images in the podcast track will display the image used as album artwork. This can be a goof or a feature
* The little arrow down button on the track exposes the track volume that you can then create edit points to fine tune the levels
* On my last edit foray, I experimented with splitting a graphic track, and then use the zoom/crop, and repeating to create a short sequence that moves “in”. Getting carried away, one could do a stilted, drunken, Ken Burns effect
* Use Share — Send Songs to iTunes to create the *.m4a this will end up in yiur iTunes music folder, buried in a folder with your name.
Built-in ‘ducking’ (automatic fading of music track when there is something in a voice track) is a gem. I am just learning and poking about, but it is a wildly fun app to use.
