Using Audacity® for Podcasts and Sound Editing

Podcasts are a great way to share your interests with an audience. We will cover basic sound recording using Audacity® which is a free sound editing application available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.  There are some nifty little features in this program to create a smoothly edited final product.

Audacity can only record a keyboard played into the computer using the basic Midi Sounds.  There is no way to create different sounds in Audacity (can't use a VST instrument nor edit the file).  This will be covered in a class on Waveform 12.  

Weekly Summary (We value learner-led learning so we will be following the focus of the learners in our group so this summary might change depending on their interests): 

Week 1: Let's find out what this program can do!
We will create our first project file and create a track, import sounds, see if we can record using our microphones (we might need to troubleshoot this part so patience with each other will be needed) and talk about mono vs stereo tracks, using someone else's music tracks for source material, what is free to use and what is off limits.  With our introductory project, we will walk through a couple of the available filters (normalizing and fade in/out) and export to mp3 or wav file forms. 

Week 2: Let's get an idea and work on it. 
 Our assignment will be a basic podcast.  For this we can decide on a topic, what we want to say about it, practice recording our voices and talk about sound effects and how we can incorporate music as a background.  Let's discuss theme songs and how we can create something distinctive that will be recognized as soon as our podcast begins.  There's some free online resources we can use. Save your project!

Week 3: 
By now we've had time to plan out our ideas for our podcast.  Please bring any issues you've had recording into Audacity and we can brainstorm solutions.  I will show how to edit parts out of what we've recorded and how to avoid clipping sounds that can happen with digital files.  Let's work with some filters for fun and practice layering and overlapping sound files. This will explore syncing, time stretching and balance/panning/effects.  Save your project!

Week 4:
At this point I'm hoping my constant "save your project" reminders have anchored!  Trust me, I've lost tons of good ideas due to power outages, computer blips and cats turning off my power bar.  This is our last week!  We can either share a short clip of our favourite part of our project or we can continue to troubleshoot issues, talk through solutions and share any other sources for materials that we've discovered in our online travels.  At this point, if students have midi instruments we could play more with creating sound layered backgrounds.  By the way, save your project ;). 

*This class applies to the curricular requirements for Applied Design, Skills, and Technologies B.C. Ministry of Education Grades 6-12  and directly relates to B.C. Curricular Competencies for ELA Grades 6-12 under Comprehend and connect (reading, listening, viewing) Create and communicate (writing, speaking, representing).