Mike asks, “I have a 7 second heartbeat audio track. I want to make it a 5 minute track. What is it called and how do I do it?”
What you’re describing here is what’s commonly referred to a looping an audio track. This is frequently done with a section of audio that’s either repeated for a few times throughout a musical composition or a loop might be used to create a bed for an entire segment of music. The actual implementation varies slightly depending on which audio application is used, but the basic premise is the same - you figure out how long the piece of audio you want to loop is (7 seconds in this case) and then you establish how many times you need to play a 7 second file to achieve 5 minutes of continuous playback. I’ll walk through the process of creating a 5 minute loop from a 7 second track using Audacity, which works for Windows, Mac and Linux.
One of the biggest frustrations of people who record and edit audio is the amount of time it takes to fix volume level issues. If you record two people, one of them is invariably softer than the other in the mix. You might turn your head away from the microphone to look at a distraction or have the microphone pointed away from the source. This even happens to the pros on occasion. To solve this common frustration, Gigavox created The Levelator. Essentially, the software examines a WAV or AIFF file, looks for volume inconsistencies and fixes them. It’s a bit geekier than that under the hood. The Levelator handles both the gain optimization on a file and RMS normalization to make sure the volume level is consistent. The output is a new file, so you can always go back to the original if you need to. The software runs on both Windows and OS X and is free for personal non-commercial use. While The Levelator can’t do anything to make your podcast more interesting, this is the first tool I’ve ever seen that makes almost anyone sound like they hired a top-notch engineer. If editing audio has been holding you back from podcasting or making music, give The Levelator a shot, you’ll be surprised by how simple it is to sound great. [Windows 2k/XP Mac OS X $0.00]
Mike writes, I’ve been trying to embed a Windows Media Player on my website and have it play from a library. I’ve figured out the part of embedding the player itself but cannot figure out how to get the player to play from a list of mp3s elsewhere on my site.
You could create an ASX file that calls each of the files and then link to that ASX file from the embedded Windows Media Player, but I’ve never had that work consistently without setting up Windows Media Services on a Windows server. Using a simple ASX setup doesn’t allow for easy skipping between tracks or any of the normal play controls you might expect from most of the common media players. The only easy way to build an embedded playlist with Windows Media Player is to have a server running Windows Media Services hosting all the files. A better alternative is to setup an embedded Flash based player designed for playing back files. Read on to find out how to setup an embedded Flash playlist.
One of the most painful things to listen to in podcasting is a steady stream of “ums” and “ahs” interjected into an otherwise intelligent thought. I do it more than I’d like to. I’ve heard some cases where a person collecting his thoughts said “um” no less than 20 times in a 15 second stretch. You can fix this during editing, but it’s hard to reconstruct the flow of a sentence if it happens to much and editing out the “ums” isn’t much fun. The best solution is to learn how to speak without saying “um” in the first place. Mother Tongue Annoyances has a solid set of suggestions on how to eliminate “um” and “ah” from your speech. It takes some additional thought on your part while speaking and it won’t happen overnight, but a little additional effort in improving the way you speak will make your podcast sound better and make you sound smarter while people are listening.
Back in early 2002 I voiced an entire 2 hour AM radio show using a Plantronics USB headset microphone and an old 166 MHz PC. Not ideal recording conditions, but the show actually sounded quite good considering the limitations of available gear. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been testing out the new Plantronics 550 DSP Ultimate Performance Headset. So far I’m impressed. The earphones offer great audio output from a comfortable design that I can wear without getting annoyed that I have headphones on. I get up from my computer often enough that I never kept them on to the point where I was feeling any ear discomfort. The microphone positioning is flexible to the point where you can get a good microphone position without getting too much plosive impact from P and B sounds. While there’s noise cancellation built-in, the microphone is still extremely sensitive and picks up things like the click-clack of fingers on a keyboard, which means you need to eliminate extraneous noise if you’re recording audio for any kind of published project. I don’t have a way to test latency in lab conditions, but there seems to be almost no noticeable lag. Overall, I’m giving the 550 DSP a big thumbs up for both speech recognition tasks and for doing things like solo podcasting efforts. You’ll get great sounding audio from recording directly to a PC application like Audacity or Adobe Audition, speech recognition apps will effectively capture your voice and if you use voice applications like Skype, your friends will be pleasantly surprised at how well your audio sounds. At $60 from most online retailers, this headset microphone combination is a steal.
