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.