Audacity Project

The project that we were given this week is a project based on using Audacity software. Audacity is a free open source software for recording and editing sound. The task was to create a podcast that is a narrative about something. I was allowed to pick the topic but the podcast had to be a mix of my voice and a minimum of 8 songs, sounds, linked together on a common element or combined to enhance the theme. Excerpts from the songs had to last 5-20 seconds with minor exceptions when necessary.

Taken this is all in was a tad bit overwhelming and to tell the truth this was the most time consuming and difficult project I have had to date in this particular class. Not to say that the challenge wasn't fun because in a way it was. It was quite the feeling after accomplishing this because by reading the directions I was about as lost as a deer in headlights. Good thing that Dr. Pierce is wickedly awesome because, as always, he provided great examples to listen too. Now if you listened to his example you were probably even more intimidated by this assignment. I listened to it and thought to myself, "oh yeah right I have to create that"?!? But alas with some Audacity tutorial help the project started to become a reality.

The content of this project came mostly from us speaking. We had to use a microphone either built into the computer or an external microphone. Then we had to pull media content, (songs, or sounds), from whatever site we chose. I gathered all my song content from either what was already on my computer through my media player or youtube. By using youtube I still had to get that particular video clip downloaded into MP3 form that's where our past assignment, bender converter, came into play. By using bender converted I was able to download those clips from youtube into mp3 titles and then I was able to import those files into my audacity project.

Once I watched all the tutorials on how to navigate and use the audacity program I then began to make my project come to life. With the aid of editing tools I was able to edit  my "audio tracks" by time sequence, delete unwanted parts of media, and then add special effects such as fade in and out to imported media clips. Once I got into the flow of how Audacity works the task became more and more simple you just had to establish a rhythm and keep going for it. One thing I did notice that probably made the project the most time consuming is the need to go back and listen to your project after each addition of a new audio track. If I wanted my project to flow it took precise timing and a lot of editing to make sure the fluidity was there. I also had to go back and do volume control so that music wasn't overpowering my voice. It was these little things that made the task very time consuming. Below you are going to view my audacity project.

I am going to publish a second blog to show you the completion of this project.