Tag Archives: audio

Information on Audio Recording Software, Format, & Transcription

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ITF ed. note: This resource guide was originally crafted by ITF Maggie Galvan for use in Professor Paul Moses’s 2015 Seminar 2 course where students were creating oral histories. Read the original post here.

In addition to the recorders that you can check out from Macaulay, which you used to record audio during the Night at the Museum last semester, you can also check out recorders from the Brooklyn College Library. However, you may want to use your smart phone to record audio. In fact, you may want to have both a recorder and your smart phone along, for, “Good standard practice is to always use two recorders, so that if one dies you have a running backup,” as ITF Stephen Boatright pointed out when the ITFs discussed this issue. Other good, practical advice for recording includes:

  • test your device(s)/apps at home; asking yourself questions like:
    • Am I comfortable with how recording works, and do I know how close I need to be to get good sound?
    • Do I have my settings correctly configured (see below)?
    • Do I have enough space and battery life to record a 30 min.-1 hr. interview?
  • do a test recording at the interview before you start the real interview so that you’re sure that both you and your interviewee are audible
  • check in periodically during the interview to make sure your device is still recording
  • make sure that your recording environment has as little background noise as possible. It’s easier to get a good recording in the first place rather than trying to correct it later.

While the recorders you can check out are fairly straight forward (and we can discuss this more!), when it comes to your smart phone, you may wonder: what app should I use? The following answers, suggestions, and resources come from the cohort of ITFs across the various Macaulay Honors College campuses. Continue reading →

Audio Resources

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Note: This post was originally composed for use in Professor Sharman’s Seminar 2 class in Spring 2013.

During our audio workshop, we’ll be discussing how to construct an audio narrative about a specific neighborhood. We’ll be drawing on resources from This American Life, a popular weekly radio show that thematically reflects on contemporary society.

In an episode from 1996 entitled “New Year,” host Ira Glass and teenager Claudia Perez introduce the listeners to 26th Street in the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago. We’ll listen to a clip from this episode to think through how Perez and Glass include details to build their location-based narrative. I encourage you to listen to the entire clip when you have the time. It runs from approximately 5:35 to 22:00 in the episode.

We will also watch and discuss the first part of “Ira Glass on Storytelling” where Glass introduces the two elements that he believes are essential when creating an audio narrative.

 

I encourage you to listen to the other three parts (roughly five minutes each) of “Ira Glass on Storytelling.” In Part 2, he reflects on the importance of giving yourself time to find your story and editing out the boring parts. In Part 3, he talks how it’s hard to get an adequate reflection of your good taste in your early work, and he analyzes the problems in one of his earlier recordings. In Part 4, he details two common pitfalls of audio recording and how to avoid them.

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Uploading Audio Projects & A Note About Plugins

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Uploading your audio project from Garageband to the course blog is a fairly painless process, which will allow you to share your work in a public-facing manner. I’ll describe the process below and provide some take-away points applicable to further instructional technology work you’ll likely do in the future.

1. To convert your audio into a format that you can access outside of Garageband, you will need to go to the Share menu (pictured) and select the “Export Podcast to Disk” option. This option will compress the file into m4a format, which you can use outside of Garageband, and it will make the file easily findable in whatever location you have saved it in. When working with the Brooklyn Museum audio earlier in the semester, you may have used the “Send Podcast to iTunes” option, which works well when you’re planning to continue to use the audio with iLife suite software (like iMovie), but it’s potentially less helpful here because it makes the file more difficult to locate to upload to the web.

2. Login to the WordPress site and create a new post where you will want to post this project. Select the category “Audio Project” from the Categories list in the right-hand column.

3. Click “Upload/Insert” media, which you will see in the space right above where you write your posts. When the pop-up window comes up, locate and upload your file. Basic information about your file will appear in the pop-up box (pictured at right, click to enlarge). Scroll down to where the Link URL is listed. Copy the URL and close the media uploader. (Note: Do not insert the file into the post. Doing this will simply put a link to the file rather than embedding the audio, which I will walk you through.)

4. To embed the file in the post, you will use the podPress plugin. Plugins (basic info here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins) allow you to extend the in-built functionality of WordPress, and you’ll likely encounter and interact with them more as you start to build your own sites and take on more advanced roles in further course sites. Different plugins, based on their functionality, live and are controlled from different spaces within the WordPress Dashboard. Sometimes they’ll get their own special menu, sometimes they’ll be  listed under Settings, sometimes they’ll be in the Widgets area (Appearance>Widgets), sometimes they’ll be in the page/post editor, and sometimes they’ll be manipulable in a combination of those areas.

5. The part of the podPress plugin that’s important to you for this assignment lives directly in the page/post editor, under the area where you write your post (pictured at right). You’ll want to click “Add Media File.” Doing so will open up a set of fields (pictured in second image at right here) where you can give the information about your file. You will paste your file location (that you copied in step #3) into the Location field. You can give your file a title, as well, here. Type/file size/duration should be auto-detected by podPress.

6. Once you have all of that information filled in, you just need to take the line of code [display_podcast] and paste it wherever in the post you want the audio player to appear. You can also put whatever contextualizing information necessary to situate your audio project.