Techno smug

I'm feeling quite pleased with myself as I recorded a podcast yesterday with James Brown (not the recently deceased hardest working man in showbusiness, but the bloke at Melcrum).  And it's so easy...

Actually, even when I made it hard for myself it was easy...

James wanted to do a podcast to promote our forthcoming major publication about the 12 competencies (fear not regular chums we'll let you have a mini report).  He rang me over skype and recorded my pearls of wisdom (so far so good).

However when he sent me the rough recording I thought I could have phrased a few things better and perhaps been a little less rude about a few people. 

Well, I thought I can't really ask him to record the whole thing again, but how difficult can it be to do it myself....?  An hour later I'm trying to send a completed MP3 file to James!

What did I do?

First stop was a Google search "How to podcast" from which I learnt that I had to download an audio editing program called Audacity which comes with a couple of basic tutorials and a program to convert the finished products in to MP3 file.  After a quick mic check I was off!

The tutorial proved to be a good investment (of about 10 minutes) because I needed to learn how to cut and paste and insert silence sections.  But I recorded about 15 minutes in about half an hour (there was a bit of back and forwarding).

Funnily enough the tricky thing was sending the file over to James.  After I'd finished it,  it turned out to be a little over 14mb which, with my basic broadband connection takes a while to send anywhere.  There was the added problem that the Melcrum firewall rejects anything over 10mb (which also happens to be the limit on Hotmail and Yahoo).  Luckily we found someone with Gmail and got it over (the transmisson bit took a couple of hours to sort out).

You can judge for yourself when James puts it up on the Melcrum server next week if it's worth listening to and I'm seriously thinking about signing up for a radio production course as it's a stuggle to maintain a level of interest in my voice over a list of 12 items.

My son Dan says he'll show me how to import music and wants to teach me how to use Cubase (a more fancy program) and Peter Riddelsdell (my mate at DFID) has been raving about a program called Soundslides which allows you to make animated photomontages with a voice-over (here's a very moving example from the BBC).  Perhaps I might get dragged kicking and screaming into the digital age - stand by Shel Holtz!

Liam