After gaining several grey hairs last night from this assignment, I have officially made my first DS106 Radio Bumper!

This week is all about audio storytelling and one of our assignments was to create a Radio Bumper. It was suggested that I download Audacity to create the bumper and to install the plug in LAME that converts Audacity files into MP3 files. Both pieces of software are free.

After getting all of the softeware installed, which took no time at all. I needed to pick out a song or sound for my bumper, as well as what I would be saying. I looked back at previous students’ bumpers, but there were only a few examples. Since this was my first time using the program I also watched this tutorial about layer sounds in Audacity by Cogdog.

Once I figured out what I wanted to say I recorded myself. I ended up changing what I said a couple of times. For my music I choose “Between the Raindrops” by Lifehouse and Natasha Bedingfield. I used the first 9 seconds of the song and then repeated a segment of it to make it a little over 10 seconds. The hardest part about this was to try to get the music matched up so it didn’t sound weird. It’s still not perfect, but I don’t believe its super noticeable. I also pushed my voices to the 2 second mark so that there would be a music intro. My voices end a little before 9 seconds, so the bumper ends with the music and fades out.

For effects, I amplified my voice line. Though I feel that the beginning is much louder than the rest of the clip. I also faded the sound out at the end so it wouldn’t be an abrupt stop.

I then went to save everything and then went to check my files to make sure it had saved correctly. (Sidenote: At this point I had been working on the project for almost 1 1/2 hours because I had to re-record my voice a couple of times and play around with the music.) So when I went to pick on the file and P!nk started playing I freaked out! I then went back to Audacity and no sound would come out of my clip. Then all the lines went flat. It was like my whole project died (it flat lined, get it! haha). I literally flipped out, clearly.

After tweeting that, I went back into Audacity and the project resurrected itself. All the little lines were back up and down, not a flat line! Horray!

I then re-saved it (the same way as the first time) and went to my files to check it out again. And it played without any problems! From there I uploaded it to SoundCloud. Plugged in the necessary info and called it a night!

So here is my very first DS106 radio bumper!