So the first step is always to record some conversations. If we are all in the same physical location I use an Edirol recorder (though now most phones can do the job just as well).
But for online chats I use Skype together with Pamela. When I have all the recordings then I get to work editing with Audacity. What I am aiming for are segments which are about 5 minutes long.
What I normally do is to edit the pieces I have and when I see what I have got, I plan a linking script which I then record and slot around the pieces I have. So in this podcast I have two interviews with TCE participants, one interview with an Irish political commentator and a recording of a talk given in a recent webinar to which I also contributed but I don’t want to focus on my session so I chose a snippet from one of the other speakers.
So editing the individual chats, what happens? If the recording is more than about 5 minutes long then it helps to select portions and label them otherwise you waste a lot of time just finding the right section again. See below how I have labelled Janice’s recording. (Click on image to see full size).
I delete the polite intros and ‘Can you hear me?”s. Sometimes people will lose their way and start a point again so I delete the losing their way bit too. But in actual fact I do delete much more than that as I want to end up with sections which are only about 5 minutes long (though I frequently break my own guideline). Why 5 minutes? Well we are in the sound bite culture but also I do worry a lot about sound quality which is not always good on Skype so I don’t want to subject listeners to poor sound quality for too long at atime. Of course there comes a point when I say this is just too bad and we either have to abandon it completely or start again and re-record.
Then there is the awkward question of speech tics. I do edit them out if I think they are distracting attention from the content of what is being said. Having said that I can’t edit them all out as they often run into other words which need to be kept in and also there is an argument for saying that that is part of that person’s personality and they might be unrecognisable without the ums and you knows. But I strive to make it comfortable for listeners.
You should know that this is way too much manipulation for a class podcast. I am not recommending that you adopt this approach in your class projects but maybe it is food for thought.
So the next step for me is to write and record my links.
What I did after editing the individual conversations as you saw above in Janice’s case was to put together all the individual snippets in Audacity. I try to move all the individual segments into one track otherwise it becomes unwieldy. Then I have one track for the two jingles and a third track which is my recorded linking commentary. You’ll notice that the jingle and commentary tracks are in stereo while the segments are in mono. That is a quirk of recording Skype on Vista. (Click on image to see full size).
Then I export the whole lot as an mp3 file which then has to be uploaded to our server. I do this through an ftp uploading program called Filezilla and you can see when the file was almost finished uploading in the image below. (click on image to see full size).
The next step is to prepare the blog post on www.absolutely-intercultural.com We use a WordPress blog for that and the show notes are basically the linking commentary. It is not compulsory to have a webpage/blog for the podcast but it makes it easier to have a visible webspace for people to refer to instead of a fairly abstract server address where all you can do is listen to the audio. In theory it would be possible to do without the webpage and just have the podcast listed in iTunes. Recently I have been also taking a short extract from the podcast and using it to make a dictation exercise which then goes up on Listen and Write.
I also usually send out a mail telling the people featured in the show that it has been published. Sometimes the recording has been done a long time ago so people are not necessarily up to date about when it comes out. I feel it is a courtesy to let people know.