Arggh. This is the second time I am writing this post as I inadvertantly forgot to open a new tab for a Google search. Poof! went a complete draft!
Thanks to Pat D for reminding me of an owed post about an Audacity workshop I did last week. This was a hands-on workshop for the NMC 2006 Pachyderm Users Conference in Austin. For those who are elephant un-aware, Pachyderm is an open source Flash content creation tool that grew out of one developed for museums, and through a grant shepherded by NMC, has grown into a more robust tool for the wider education community.
So there are Pachyderm screen templates where you can attach audio, and it works quite well to create context around some detailed content using perhaps the voice of an artist, an expert, or even member of the public’s response. So we most highly recommend using the cross-platform software that is easy to use, records audi, published MP3s, and is totally free – roll the drums for Audacity.
So the internt of the workshop was to learn by doing, and participants recorded audio directly into a computer (using those high end $8 microphone/headseats), trimmed unwanted intro/exits, identified the waveform known as “umm”, cut out unwanted words/noise, cut and pasted audio like a word processor, used bits of background noise to create a dramatic pause, add a second track of a recording, move tracks around in time, imported audio for intro/exit music (of course, using only Creative Commons licensed audio), and finally exporting to MP3.
Nearly every attendee produced something much more coherent than what I was doing at the podium.
So I am not sure if my materials are all that useful one page is mostly an outline of what we covered, the second page is a list of resources and other useful things like the Levelator. I did not have to make a handout for a reference to the software buttons and functions; I simply used Wes Freyer’s Audacity Quickstart Guide.
Audio Recording with Audacity [604k PDF]
