Turn up the music

Today we're going to play around with audio creation.  We'll mostly be playing with a free program called audacity.  You'll want to download this to your computer at home, since it's not an online program.  It allows you to record, edit, mix, and do a whole lot more with audio tracks.

One thing to keep in mind with audio and video production is the idea of tracks.  A track is one recording unit.  When you have more than one track you can do things like fade in or out, play things in stereo (a different sound in the left speaker than the right speaker), and so on.  It's really quite simple.  So let's play around with it a bit.

So your assignment is to create your own mini podcast. You can find a bunch of music you can use here You will need the following elements:

1. An introduction song (only a few seconds)
2. A fade out or cross fade (music fades out while your talking fades in)
3. A minute or so of you talking about anything you want
4. Music fading in
5. An exit song.

You can play around with things like adding white noise, echos, distortion, changing the quality of the sound (making everything louder, removing pops, etc.).

And then, when all is done, save it as a .wav (.mp3 is the best sound file type...just like .jpg file type for pictures, it allows the best compression with the least loss...however, due to copyright laws, you can't save as .mp3 without following these steps, which you can only do on your home computer). 

Then you can convert it to .mp3 using Zamzar.

Add the .Mp3 as an attachment to a new page on your website called "audio" or "podcast" or something like that.  If we have time we'll look at embedding a .mp3 player onto your page.

For Wednesday

• Play around with Audacity at home.  Learn how to do something new.  You'll need to know how to do it to do your next big project.
• Remember, your chapter 5 reading guide is due on wednesday.  This is the 4th reading guide, so if you have already done three, than this is your last one. :)