I attempted some psycogeographythis week to increase the platforms used in this blog. Using the suggestion in Daniel Meadows’ lecture last week and armed with my dictaphone set off around Cathays Park.
I’m afraid the results have not been uploaded yet*, and this raises a few interesting points. First of all the technology. Issues with formatting have meant that I have not yet managed to edit the piece and issues with Blogger have meant that I am unable to upload it. (In fact I’m so frustrated with Blogger right now, I’m just about to move to WordPress, watch this space!).
A number of people have brought up the issue of time concerning multimedia journalism, its hard enough to write copy to deadline without having to podcast it, Flickrit and create a Flash package. I ran out of time before the deadline this week. Luckily for me, a blog is an ongoing piece of reporting and I can upload that piece when the time and expertise becomes available.
*5th November 2008
So far I have tried numerous pieces of software in an attempt to upload this and my advice to anyone else attempting to add an audio file to their blog is don’t. Do a video instead.
The silver lining to this quest has been the amout of free software I have discovered available to the public for producing, editing and uploading. I am planning on using Houndbite as an external host for my audio clip, MP3 cutter to edit it into the 15 minute ‘clips’ that Houndbite requires and Jodix to convert my WMA file to an MP3 (though you can use iTunes, or any old Mac to do this).
Also worthy of a mention in the free audio software hall of fame is Audacity. Its presented as an audio editing package but its really more appropriate for producing podcasts. You can just pop in your microphone and then record and edit all on the same programme. Plus you can use it on the JOMEC computers as its already installed.
What is particuarly useful for a begginner is that most of these come with pretty good user guides, some of them created by users themselves due to the web based nature of the software.
* Here it is (finally!)
Women's Health Base 