The Audacity continues...

Gregory's Creature  Click to hear  the story.

It always takes longer than you think it will.  My students began uploading their stories to our class blog in audio format on Friday and we are about halfway through.  I am hoping that my new deadline of Wednesday, tomorrow, will mean all my students will have their stories uploaded.

As I have mentioned previously, we are using Audacity.  It is an open source program which first came on the scene in May 2000.  It is a good program and by this I mean it is intuitive.  I personally, find that a program that is easy to use the first time is one I will use again.

I looked through other features and was impressed at how you can do a lot different kinds of audio work with Audacity.  You can combine tracks of music and voice into a MP3, WAV, WMA, AIFF just to name a few.  You can play with all kinds of effects such changing speed, tempo or pitch.

Audacity creates two files.  One is a .aup file that looks like a Word document.  It has an icon.  The other file is a folder of audio packages or data files.  I learned that when transferring from computer to computer or computer to server you need both the .aup file and the folder other wise you have no recording.  This is important at school, as my students were transferring and handing in files on a server drop box.

The loading of the audio files to the class blog was the easiest part as kidblog.org easily imports MP3 like other blog programs.  I can see how podcasting can be done by anyone with a fairly good microphone and good computer.  Overall, I can say that Audacity is a program I will use in the future.  In fact, I am trying to dream up a project in which my students can use the effects and include musical tracks.



Reference:
Audacity: Credits. Audacity: Free Audio Editor and Recorder. Retrieved from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/about/credits