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.
