I was quite timid about this assignment at first, because I’m not used to recording audio..and let’s be honest..Who actually likes the sound of their voice?  I personally don’t, but I just had to get over that!

To start the radio bumper adventure, I downloaded all of the necessities: audacity, the LAME plugin, and I opened up my soundcloud account (which I hadn’t touched).

First, I had to pick a song.  Skyfall by Adele has been stuck in my head for days, and although this assignment kept it in my head, I had to use it!  To trim the part I wanted to use, I actually used MPEG StreamClip, because Audacity wouldn’t let me do anything to the file for some reason.  Once I uploaded that to Audacity, I recorded my own voice via Audacity.

2 hours later, the audio file was edited enough that it faded well, in and out.  I barely had to line up the music and audio, because they were both so short.  There’s a little thump near the end of me talking, which I think might have been me hitting my computer by accident, but I had spent so much time on the clip already that I didn’t want to re-record.  I’m learning not to be a perfectionist in this class!

I played with a lot of the effects, but I decided to not do any effects on my voice, and the only effects I did on the music was using the envelope tool to lower it whilst I was talking.  I did have some trouble exporting it and uploading it to Soundcloud.  Everytime I tried to upload it, only the audio came through, and none of the music.  I realized I had my voice clip on “solo” so once I turned that off, the upload was finally a success!!

#ds106 Finally finished my radio bumper! Phew! soundcloud.com/lhampson23/sky…

— Lara Hampson (@l_hampson23) February 7, 2013

So, here’s my very first audio assignment EVER!