subject verb agreement podcast

I made this podcast using audacity and it wasn't too difficult as it combined skills I've used before, though I've never put them all together in one. I already had audacity installed since I've used it to edit music files before, which also gave me a basic understanding of how it works but I had never used it for live recording. I also have experience using the mic and headset for real time conferencing in elluminate and, yes, world of warcraft, but had not recorded through it either (okay, well I did try to record my elluminate session once but gave up when I learned my school's account doesn't support recordings so I couldn't access it). So setting up the mic and a new project in audacity were no problem. But I had to look at an internet tutorial to find the record button. After recording, I was also familiar with the playback and editing functions but there was one snag. In audacity, every time you start recording, it opens a new sound track so, when I finished, I had a bunch of little sound snippets in separate tracks, instead of one continuous file, so I had to play around for a while to figure out how to move everything into the same track and the delete the extra ones, saving every couple second to make sure I was safe if I accidentally deleted the wrong thing.

I was very frightened of doing this project because every recording of my voice I have ever heard sounded horribly nasal. I hate the way my voice sounds on tape or over the phone so recording my voice and playing it back was not something I was super comfortable with. But it turned out much better than I thought. I don't know if it's because I have a good mic (I doubt it) or because audacity has very faithful sound reproduction, but the voice came out very clear and normal sounding (still doesn't sound like me but since it also doesn't sound like a five-year-old with a cold, I'll take it). I did learn by looking at the sound wave diagram that I take a lot a breaths when I speak, which can create overly long pauses, but these were easy to edit out. I'm very happy I did this project because it convinced me that creating audio recordings is quick, easy, and doesn't mutilate my voice. As I said, I was leery about this but it was so painless, it's something I'd certainly do again. In the future, I might want to get creative and sync the audio file with a screen capture program so I can include a video of a word document or power point presentation to include visuals as well.


Click here to listen to the Subject/Verb podcast