Thursday, 11 January 2018

“I’m not a technician!”




“I’m not a technician!”

In the 1990s, if you wanted the world to hear your thoughts on ‘Doctor Who’, audio tape was the popular way to go. You’d record your tapezine in chunks on a C90 from Woolworths to produce a master copy and people would send you a blank tape. You’d make them a copy in real-time and send it back. Unless their tape was really, really cheap… in which case it would either snap or turn into ferromagnetic spaghetti half way through Side Two…

But everything’s digital these days, so we’re told, and doing a podcast requires a bit more technology than the Olden Days. So, what on Earth could we use?

A bit of searching on Amazon and we soon stumbled across something called a Tascam DR-05 digital recorder. A relatively inexpensive piece of kit that could still capture our dulcet tones in living stereo. We soon found that this was easy to use and gave very good results.

Then came the question of what choice of software was the best way to go. Now, not being that technical when it comes to audio matters, we didn’t want anything too elaborate. There was the danger that we’d still be trying to edit Episode One a year later if we couldn’t get the hang of it…

So, discovering that there was a thing called Audacity that was free and easy to use was a very nice surprise. It soon became a piece of cake to copy the files to the timeline, trim the ends, fade them in and out... Sorted! And it can even make your voice go all wibbly-wobbly if you like. Even if you haven’t been on the ale!


(By Andrew Trowbridge)



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