Oct

29

You need Audacity to do a podcast

Filed Under General 

I’ve been working on creating podcasts with my Canadian social studies students. They’re supposed to research a late, great Canadian and then “interview” him or her. We’re recording the interviews using cheap microphones picked up at The Source and a cool piece of free software called Audacity.

Audacity is a sound recorder and editor. You can record audio on it, as well as importing other audio tracks into it from outside sources. (One great source for free sound and musical effects is Sound Snap.) You can amplify soft students, reduce loud ones, and disguise the voices of anyone you like so two students doing a project can sound like several. The possibilities are almost endless as there are a ton of built in ways of modifying your sounds. You can fade out, change the tempo, reverse the sound, or add “wahwah” to it as well as about a dozen more.

Audacity is a nifty piece of open source freeware that you can download in two different flavors. One - with Windows, Mac, and Linux variants - is meant to be installed on your computer. The other - which seems to be only in a Windows version - can be run directly from your Flash Drive. This can be really useful if you don’t have permission to install programs to your school’s computer network. It’s also neat because your students, if they get fired up about the project, can take it all home and work on it there.

The only problems we’ve discovered are that the program is not 100% stable so save frequently. (In fairness, MS Word is not exactly 100% stable either.) As well, if you find the program does crash, we’ve noticed that when you run the program a second time your computer will probably reboot. The problems are annoying but considering you’ve got a sound editor with a great range for absolutely nothing down, well, you can’t complain too much.

Now all I need is a place to host the completed podcasts.

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