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.

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