 I have always wanted to podcast this blog as people tell me that my Scottish accent is one of my assets. Here in Germany, everybody loves the accent and I have always been one of those bloggers who think that adding a human voice to your blog does wonders. In an internet full of anonymous blogs, it helps sometimes to put a bit of a "human face" on what is written by adding a bit of sound. Plus doing it in a nice Scottish accent is just a big bonus! I downloaded the open-source recording software Audacity months ago but I couldn't really use it as my headset & microphone combo were slowly dying. The sound quality through the microphone sounded like someone farting in a tunnel and I knew that I needed both a new headset and a serious look at my PC's audio controls, before I could consider starting podcasting. Today I finally got round to buying the headset and when I got home, I started looking at the audio controls on the computer (accessible via the Start Menu then the Control Panel). Several hours later, after lots of fiddling around, I finally got crystal-clear audio quality and I started recording! If you look to your right (underneath my photo), you'll see an audio welcome message from wee me. Plus from now on, I will be podcasting all of my blog posts which you can listen to here on the blog or you can download the MP3 file to your own computer to listen to later. OK, I don't delude myself into thinking that everything I say is that interesting but to me, the fun is in the doing. I like doing experiments like this and seeing through personal projects. If people listen to the mp3's then that's great. But if not then I will still have fun doing them nevertheless. "Audacity" really is a powerful recording tool. Not only can you record audio but you can also edit existing audio files, convert audio files from one format to another (say a "wmv" file to a "mp3" file) and lots more that I haven't even begun to try out yet. I've only scratched the surface with this amazing program. I'm going to look into the possibility of perhaps composing a radio-like "jingle" for my podcasting audio files. When I can finally get the webcam working, the next stage in the development of this blog will be video entries, playable via YouTube and embedded here on the blog. But I was looking at webcams today and the cheapest one (which isn't total crap) had my blood pressure racing. So I guess that will have to wait for a while! Labels: audacity, podcasting |
