Today I worked on organization the hemolymph crab data and went to a workshop hosted by UW IT to learn about Audacity for Podcasts.

Crab sample organization

Today I am still working through organizing the crab sample data to follow individual crabs throughout the project. This will be used to help decide the pooling of samples after RNA is extracted. I have uploaded a mostly-organized spreadsheet to my Owl folder: here

Podcast Audacity Workshop

I attended a workshop offered through UW IT that focused on the use of Audacity, which is an open source software for creating, editing, and exporting audio files or, specifically in my case, Podcasts. It was a very basic tutorial and was helpful in the sense that it got me thinking about the importance of a strong introduction to the Podcast (sound effects, vocal introduction track, music, fading, etc) because that’s what we worked through together.

The student running the workshop provided some helpful editing tips:

  • use the equalizer to get rid of any popping sounds from vocal tracks (like “P” sounds, etc)
  • compress audio files to make the range in volume (like in a vocal track) less large, so that it softens any loud parts to avoid startling the listener

A good introduction includes:

  • sound effect specifc to the podcast
  • intro from host
  • musical “bumper” –> a simple music interlude/background during intro

He also recommended that before any editing happens, you make sure all the indivudual audio files are set by default ~ -12 db. This is called “game-staging”. This is important becuase it’s easier to increase volume of individual tracks rather than try to decrease all tracks if the sound is too loud. 0db is the max volume. Anything above that volume will results in audio “clipping”, or distortion and static.

He suggested looking into having a mic filter to avoid any issues with “P” sounds, and others.

He provided a list of resources that have free sounds/ effects:

  • https://freesound.org
  • http://incompetech.com/music/
  • https://www.bensound.com
  • http://www.pacdv.com/sounds/
  • http://soundbible.com

He says he exports things as WAV rather than MP3… I didn’t get a chance to ask what the difference is between the two, but perhaps google will enlighten me.

Anyway, overall a good experience, but I think that using GarageBand will be easier.