Audio

This page will give links and info about various aspects of creating and using audio.

toc =Existing Sounds= Some people like to take their recording equipment out and make recordings of their coffee makers, or wildlife, or various nature ambiances or what have you. Who would have thought there would be whole web communities devoted to this sort of thing? Most sound effect websites make you buy the files, but it is possible to record them for free using certain audio recording tools

SoundSnap.com
[] Soundsnap is not completely free; you need to sign on and pay a (small) subscription fee.

FreeSound.com
[] Freesound is exactly what it says it is: a huge repository of free sound files.

Free Stock Music for Educational Use
[] =Audio Recording Tools= To record audio at your computer, you need audio recording software. You also want to be able to edit the audio to remove coughs or mistakes. Some of these programs can be quite expensive, but if you are on campus, you may be able to find a computer lab with this software already installed (Go to the Red Lab, Heleay UL, and ask about recording audio).

Sound Recorder Pro
[] If you're visiting a web site or using an application, or even watching a movie on your computer that has a piece of sound that you like, you can use Sound Recorder Pro to "scrape" it into a .WAV or .MP3 audio file. It's like holding a microphone to your computer speakers, but all done automatically.

Audacity
[] Audacity is a free, cross-platform sound editor. It's not very full-featured but is perfectly serviceable for most common tasks. And FREE is good. Most full-featured sound editors are quite expensive, and Audacity is an excellent alternative.

Adobe Audition
[] Adobe Audition is definitely on the expensive side (350 bucks!) but it's the most powerful tool I know for audio processing. Its most useful feature for instructional designers, in my opinion, is BATCH PROCESSING. Let's say you have 200 sound files which need to be converted to a lower sampling rate so they don't take up so much disk space or take so long to download. Then they need to be renamed in order to fit a particular convention. These are very common tasks in producing instructional multimedia, and they take hours to do manually, but they can be automated with Adobe Audition.

Mina Online Audio Editor
[] This editor is online software that you can use to edit audio without the need to download and install software to your computer

Misc. other tools
Free text-to-speech applications These are featured on the UDL (Universal Design for Learning) wiki that is maintained by folks passionate about accessibility for all learners. It is continually growing and is a wonderful resource to check in with on a regular basis for new ideas that are affordable and accessible.

=Audio Recording Hardware= There's more to recording than just the editing tool. I recently moderated two focus groups for a new grant, and found a wonderful and affordable microphone that uses a USB to plug into your laptop. And that's all you need to record amazingly clear dialogue even in a conference room setting! The mic is sold by Apple, but was developed by BLUE...and it has a cute name--the Snowball: []audio recording tools

=Tip for recording high quality audio= []

=Audio Tips= This is a community of people that offer pod caste and tip on audio []

=Tips and trick for adding movies to PowerPoint presentations= []