So listen to it first!

I learned a lot this week by working on audio stories. Mainly how perfectionism and indecisiveness do not work well together, but I learned some other things, too.

For this week’s assignment, I created a bumper for DS106radio.

As per this wikipedia article, a bumper is

a brief announcement, usually two to [fifteen] seconds that can contain a voice over, placed between a pause in the program and its commercial break, and vice versa. The host, the program announcer or a continuity announcer states the title (if any) of the presentation, the name of the program, and the broadcast or cable network, though not necessarily in that order.

So with that knowledge and with some examples from the assignment page, I went off to download everything I needed to be awesome at this bumper thing.

MY ADVENTURE

First things first — I downloaded Audacity, an audio editor.

I am that person who does not read directions. I jump in, press buttons, and get messy for a few hours. If I still can’t figure out how to do something after that, I look for help.

So, I didn’t look at the suggested video detailing how to work with Audacity until Wednesday night.

By then, however, I had basically given up on Audacity. I didn’t like the sound effects, and I wanted something that resembled the video editors I have worked with before.

That’s when I remembered that I am subscribed to Adobe’s Creative Cloud!

I get access to all of Adobe’s creative software. I figured that they just had to have something for audio. I mean, it’s Adobe.

That’s when I found Adobe Audition CS6. It was like being home.

I picked up on everything much quicker and started working on my bumper.

Here you can see the difference in workspaces:

AUDACITY

ADOBE AUDITION CS6

What you see in that last screenshot of Audition is actually my bumper mixtrack. The green tracks are ones that are actually playing. The gray ones were ones I was just messing around with.

I recorded my voice right into Audition. Tracks 2 and 4 are my voice. Track 2 has been modified to have less static/noise. Track 4 also has my voice, but as you can see by the lines going up and down on it, I played around with this one a lot more. It has a “Far Away” effect and also goes up and down in volume.

The final track that is green, Track 5, is the song “Sail” by AWOLNATION. (Here is the YouTube video for those who haven’t heard it before.)

And here is the final product

I could have done more with it, like adding more effects. I just got so frustrated trying to find the sounds that I wanted on Freesound.org.

Sound isn’t something I’m entirely comfortable with yet. Give me video, and I’m on top of my game. But with sound, I can’t find what I’m looking for without making it myself.

On top of making a radio bumper this week, we also had to dabble in sound effects!  We were challenged to create a short story using nothing but sound effects.

To begin, I went to Youtube to find the various sounds I wanted to use.  The ds106 handbook  says that I could have used KeepVid.com to download the videos, however that site just would NOT work for me!  Instead, I googled what else I could use, and came up with iLivid.  After finding my sounds and downloading them via iLivid, I used MPEG StreamClip to trim the sound to exactly the amount I wanted.  I then opened Audacity to put the sound into there.  Looking back, I probably could have just trimmed the sound in Audacity, but I was having trouble with that when making my bumper, so I didn’t try it again.

After all that, I came out with this story!  It wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but I went with whatever sounds were easily available.

I used a whistling and walking sound effect, bugs bunny “Eh, What’s up doc?”, a shot gun sound effect, bugs bunny screaming, and a running sound effect all from Youtube.

The other audio assignment that was assigned this week was called the Sound Effect Story. Making a story with only sounds was definitely a challange, but it was fun to do!

I got the sounds tying shoes, bang, water bottle, and running from freesound.org. The girl drinking her water and saying ‘ah‘ at the end is yours truly :) I chose to do combine these sounds because, I’m sure you all know by now – I love to run. I layered these sounds in a program called Audacity. I couldn’t download LAME, which is a mp3 converter. I had the hardest time with that {rather lame if you ask me}. But after many downloads, many frusterations, and many failed attempts, I finally got it to work. I honestly don’t even know how! I just started clicking buttons. {I think I might have installed the wrong one at first because now my internet is acting funky and won’t open new tabs! Uhhh} However, it was very easy to put these all together after I watched Professor Levine’s video on Audacity.

‘Seriously, if I didn’t have the DS 106 handbook and the weekly check-list, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself!

Well here I am, doing both audio assignments for the week in one night! Typically, I spend about two days brainstorming ideas on what I want to do my assignments on, and then spend the rest of the week working on them. Not having class on Wednesday and Friday really are quite the blessing because I get to spend all day in my royal throne (my bed), in my royal attire (a tiara and pajamas), and do my royal work (of ds106). However, like every week, there has to be a villain and there were TWO this time. But for now, I’ll only mention one: my computer charger.

Yes that is right, after finally getting my computer back to it’s normal state and being virus free (I missed having google chrome so much) my computer charger decides to make my life more challenging. So, the new charger that I got right before Christmas (to replace the 4 year charger I was using) broke. It was not fixable and I had pretty much no battery left on my laptop. So I was pretty much screwed and found myself the next day having to go to Best Buy. But instead of boring you with the details, I’ll let you listen to them.

https://soundcloud.com/krisavball08/karissa-goes-to-bestbuy

What is that screaming at the end? That’s me, because as soon as I got back to plug my computer in, I realized I bought a charger for a netbook and not a laptop. I just seem to be having the worst luck when it comes to technology this semester which is unfortunate since two of my classes are completely online.

So when originally thinking about what to create for this Assignment, I thought about making a part of Cinderella. But then I realized that the story has already been told, and I should make one up on my own. So I decided to do something that  I knew I would talk about no matter what in my blog, the villain of the week. Finding sounds was not hard at all, I used freesound.org to get the typing, walking, car doors, starting car, scanner, and cash register and then I recorded the rest. Importing everything together with Audacity, I noticed on a few of these recordings, especially my own ones that there is a lot of background noise. So that’s when the Noise Removal tool and I became best friends. By simply recording a portion of the static noise, I was able to really make the presentation a lot smoother. Pretty much once I found the sounds it was just simply putting layers everywhere. I wanted to organize it in a nice fashion, so I named each layer and would move them in the order in which they would play. Something which I found the be very useful as well was making the height of each sound bar small so that I could see how everything played out like so:

By making these small, I could see every layer together to make sure that things were going well. After working and messing around with Audacity, I can say that I am really excited about the program and can’t wait to work with it more! Who would have thought this princess would fall in love…with a computer program (well at least my computer scientist Dad will be happy with that)!

Princess Karissa