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In this video I'm going to teach you how to do a simple podcast in Audacity. I like Audacity,
it's not my favorite program but for a free, open-source program that will work pretty
much on any platform, you really can't top it. There are better things but they're usually
expensive by Adobe. Apple comes with some really good stuff that's built in that you
can sue instead. But for a normal PC user, I think Audacity is a great way to do podcasts.
Now, this particular video is doing dual service. I'm using it for one of my classes where I'm
teaching my students to do podcasts, and I'm also starting a series on merihelp.net for
teachers who want to use technology to teach. Often when you're teaching an online class,
you'd like to be able to give your students a lecture. And if you're just going to stand
in front of the classroom and talk, you might as well make that into a podcast lecture because
then your students can download it to their phone or music device, or their computer,
and they can play it while they go about doing their own thing. And this has been a lot of
the success of audiobooks, which i also love. I get my books from Audible, which is another
choice if you have your students reading the book. Not every student concentrates best
sitting there and reading the page. I like to listen to books because cleaning, driving
my car, working out, they are all boring. And when I take online classes I typically,
if a teacher puts up a screencast, will take it with me on my tablet, and watch it or listen
to it while I'm folding laundry or cooking dinner because anybody who is taking online
classes is trying to be efficient and use their time well. But if it's something that's
purely audio content, I prefer a podcast. So we're going to create one. This is a site,
it's audacity.sourceforge.net and I'm going to show you how to use the software. I've
already downloaded and installed it. The best format to use when you're exporting it is
mp3. There is an extra step involved with that, so I'm going to show you how that works.
This is extremely simple software to use, though you can get fairly in depth into doing
editing and things like that. Now, for podcasting as well as for screencasting, which is what
I'm currently doing, I like to wear a headset microphone. It gives you the best sound quality.
You can go anywhere from $35-350 on prices for headsets. What I generally use is a LogiTech
headset at about $40. I'm seriously considering upgrading to one of the higher-end LogiTech
headsets because I'd like one that has noise cancellation, both for my headset earpieces
and for the microphone. Because my headset does a dual duty, it helps me as a teacher
but I'm also always taking classes and it helps me to know what's going around if i
can listen to my training that I watch. To create your podcast it's really simple. You're
going to choose, if you're already in it you can choose File, New. That's pretty much where
I'm at right now when you first open it. And then I just click the red button to record.
And you'll see that it's giving voice patterns here and later I can edit out my dog if I'm
feeling froggy. Because you hear him whining in the background. And you can also see how
my volume is up here. You should get in a habit of testing before you actually publish
things. I don't always listen to my entire lecture because it took me 20 minutes, 5 minutes,
half an hour to record it, and I know what I said. But I do spot-check for quality. So
I'm going to stop here and I'm going to play it back. Ok, so it's working fine. One of
the complains that I hear from a lot of people is "I don't like the sound of my own voice."
Well, when we're listening to ourselves in real life, we get a vibration from our skull,
we just sound different on a recording than we do when we hear ourselves talk. And that
is what's concerning and what most people don't like about listening to their own voice.
I don't like listening to my own voice on recording either because in my head, I think
I have a slightly deeper, better-sounding voice. But I've gotten over it because it
really doesn't matter. As long as I'm clear, I'm talking slow, and I'm easy to understand,
that's what is important to my students. And so I don't love my own voice but I don't think
my students for the most part are critiquing my voice, they're listening for the content.
So at this point I want to export it into something that is really usable, that most
players can work with. So I'm going to typically export and I'm just going to drop this to
the desktop. I'm just going to call it "sample" because I'm not going to use this anywhere.
And I'm going to save it as an mp3 file. I've gone through and I'm going to hit ok, and
it's going to tell me that it needs the encoding file, the .dll file to create the mp3. That's
not installed with it but you'll notice, it gives you the link to download it. And it's
kind of a busy page. As a web designer, the directions are ok. You click here, left click,
not right click, so when you download it, this is what you need. I'm going to left click,
it's going to come here and I'm going to install it. And you have to pay close attention to
where you are putting it. So mine is going into C, Program Files, Lame For Audacity.
And I'm going to hit next and I'm going to hit Install and I'm going to hit Finish. Once
I've done that, I'm going to have to go here to find it. I've already found this because
I've done this already. Typically I do my lecture at least twice because I practice.
But I know that it's in my PC, it's in my C drive, it's in my x86 file, and it is under
Lame for Audacity. And then I'm going to hit Open, and then I'm going to hit OK, and it's
giving me a problem. Let's try that again. File, Export, again we're going to name this
as "sample", Save, OK, and that time it worked. So you may have to back out of it, so that
after you've installed that you may need to try it again. Then it should work every time.
So if I were to try it again, it should work just fine. Ok. And then if you want to, it's
not a bad idea to go out and open that file. So I should have it in here as sample and
I can play it. And that's about it. So that's how you create a podcast and then you can
upload that mp3 file. You can put it into a Canvas shell, you can put it into a web
page, you can e-mail it to people. There is lots of different ways to share it.