“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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