An introductory guide on how to make and edit your own recordings. It's done in the style of a Vocalo submission, making this a meta-instructional post of sorts.
Be sure to direct your newly convered colleagues or anyone considering joining the site to this post so they can see just how easy it is to make compelling radio content.
Comments
Dan
vocalo host/producer
I love this audio guide and thought I'd add two cents or so here, with live web links: Folks who come to our make-your-radio workshops learn to use free software and other easy-to-download tools to, well, make radio. (We also use $5 microphones and $1.29 earbuds, and regular-old computers. Doesn't take anything fancy. And hey, we'd like to do more of these... do you know someone who wants to host one?)
... So I thought it would be helpful to post links to some of the tools we're using:
That free, open-source, works-on-macs-and-PCs sound editor we used in the workshop!
… and don’t forget to download the “Lame encoder,” which will let you save your edited sound as MP3 (and post it to Vocalo)
Music with Creative Commons licenses-- great to use if you want to put "bed" music under an interview or a story.
More great music and sounds, free for use on Internet stuff
Field recordings, great for sound effects!
A community project coordinated by Vocalo’s own Jesse Seay! People write in with the sounds they’d like to hear recordings of… and post the recordings. Which are licensed under Creative Commons.
An incredible collection of "ephemeral films"-promotional films, educational films, home movies, and other stuff that has fallen out of copyright- all available for download and all in the public domain. There's a lot of great, kitschy dialogue and voice-overs in these films … plus more sound effects!
(Now, how do you get the sound from the movie into Audacity? The easiest way may be to record it directly. Audacity’s main screen has a drop-down menu that lets you select where the sound is coming from—“microphone,” or “line in” or, in most cases, “stereo mix”; if you choose “stereo mix,” Audacity will record whatever sound your computer is playing. So choose that, hit record, and then start playing the movie.)
How about some photos to go with that audio? Flickr is a site where folks from all over the world post amazing images. A lot of them use Creative Commons licenses, but some of them don't. So here's a search engine that searches ONLY those Flickr photos licensed for Creative Commons. Anything you find here is fair game to use for illustrating your kick-butt audio on Vocalo.org.
vocalo 