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Building a Podcast #1
By Larry Hendrick | May 15, 2005
This project is all about starting from scratch and learning to build a podcast and make it available on the Internet. I will be following the outline in Learning #.05.
This post is on the software and hardware that will be needed to begin the process. Once this is determined, we can move on to the testing phase and beyond.
I already own a set of Plantronics headphones w/microphone that I use to write speeches for Toastmasters. They have a noise cancelling microphone and work very well with Microsoft Word for voice recognition. I seem to remember them costing about $20 or $30 dollars less than a year ago at Office Depot. Since I have these, they will do quite nicely for this project.
Now software…
For this project I determined that there were three programs on my computer that might work to record voice from a microphone. They are Windows Media Player (on most Windows computers), MusicMatch (a paid version that I use to record from cassette tapes to my computer), and Audacity (an open source audio project).
I started with MusicMatch and with mics and headset plugged in started looking for a way to record my voice audio to the hard drive. I spent about 15 minutes and decided that it could not be done with my version of the program. Scratch One!
Then I moved on to Windows Media Player and after the same time frame, came to the same conclusion. If it can be done, I could not locate it and I spent a lot of time in the help files, too. Scratch Two!
On to Audacity from SourceForge.net. I had been using this program to clean the cassette recordings I have been doing from all my old music and to convert them to MP3 format.
I started Audacity, clicked on the record button and said, “testing one, two, three” like any good sound engineer would. It showed it had recorded the sound and I clicked the play button and heard a voice in my ears saying “testing one, two, three” and decided that success was at hand.
So, for the near future, we will be using my existing Plantronic headset and Audacity audio software (freely available).
Topics: Podcasting |