How to create a Podcast for your heritage project:

Transcription

1 How to create a Podcast for your heritage project: Shoot for a length of 3-5 minutes Speak clearly and annunciate try not to stutter. Use musical backgrounds (known as jingles) or other non-music interludes to transition between topics or play continuously. Intro monologue (who you are, location, date, and what you're going to talk about): seconds Recording a podcast with GarageBand: 1. Create a new project on garage band to complete your podcast. 2. Create a Real Instrument track in GarageBand with your favorite preset vocal setting or build your own. (Tip: Using the Gate helps to eliminate unwanted noise when you aren't speaking, and using Compression will smooth out the overall sound of your voice. Be sure to try the vocal transformer for some really fun effects!) 3. Choose which voice track you will use by gender. Click on male for a male voice, and female for female voice. 4. Once you designate a voice style click the red circle below to start and stop recording your voice. Use the red line to control listening to it or starting a new voice. 5. Adjust the Gain control on your audio interface to set the recording level of your voice. It's good practice to test your distance from the microphone to determine where you sound the clearest. Attach headphones directly to your Mac or audio interface for the best quality recording (sound from speakers will be picked up in your recording). 6. Designate a new track so that you can record yourself. You can either record what you plan to say straight through continuously or break it up into parts, maybe by paragraphs. Begin recording, remembering to keep your original microphone position. Don't forget that if you make a mistake, you can always do a second take and fix it when editing. 7. After recording your voice open a new track to control your music. You can use multiple songs by opening additional tracks but using a single track tends to work better. 8. Add an AIFF, MP3, or AAC file, or a selection of GarageBand Apple Loops to serve as your background music. GarageBand Apple Loops allow for the most flexibility since you can vary the length easily. 9. Once you choose your song by clicking the <i> in the bottom right hand corner and choose your song then you can edit the fading of the song. To edit how loud the song will be you first click the triangle button on the track you are on which will bring up a blue bar that controls the sound volume. 10. The blue bar can be faded by adding ball points to spots where you would like to fade in or out the song. You can control how quickly or slowly you fade the song and when to do that. 11. After editing and mixing your final recording you can listen to it once more before saving it and exporting it. 12. Export it to itunes by choosing to Share with itunes. Then once it is converted to itunes now you can convert to mp3. Click on preferences under itunes tab, then choose the Advanced tab in your itunes menu bar and then select Convert Selection to MP3. Then right click the song you want to convert and click the convert to MP3 selection. 13. Finally drag your mp3 converted version from itunes onto your desktop, then to Mr. Igoudjil as an attachment.

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3 To start, just open up Garageband and click on "Create New Podcast Episode." Type a name for your file and where you want to save it. You will see several tracks including, podcast track, male voice, female voice, and jingles. Click the circle icon next to your gender to arm the track. It should turn read. Then just click the circle record button in the directions menu to begin recording. You will want to have a script or at least an outline ready, but you can always go back and re-record things if you need to. While you are recording, thy to keep background noise to a minimum. It is OK if you have to start and stop over or repeat a sentence here and there. It is better to keep recording and edit out what you do not need than to record only one version with mistakes. You could always go back and edit that original track, but you may find it difficult to exactly reproduce the background noise and tonality of the original recording. When you are done, just press the record button again to record. If you got what you wanted in one take, that is all there is to it. Most people will need to edit their track, however. You can do this by highlighting the sections of the track that you want to cut out in the bottom clip editor. Just delete whatever you want to get rid of. You can rearrange the clips as needed by dragging them in the position you want them in the mixing area.

4 Overview of GarageBand The GarageBand Window includes the Timeline of tracks; the Editor for detailed editing of individual tracks; the Track Info pane, where you can configure some details of individual tracks; and the Media Browser, which is used to find audio files and other media that you can import into your podcast. So me of these windows present different information based on what task you want to perform. For example, if you press the Eye icon, the Editor area will turn into the Apple Loop selector. In the Apple Loop selector you select music tracks and sound effects that you drag into a track. GarageBand includes default podcast tracks. This default track setup works well for most podcasts.

5 At the top, you will see the the Podcast Track. Below the Podcast tack are blank tracks set up for male or female voices. Below the male and female voices tracks is a Jingles track. Clicking a track name or track icon selects that track for recording or editing. You can use the default setup, or, if you prefer, you can delete the default tracks (click on the track head and then choose Track>Delete Track from the GarageBand top menu or use the keyboard shortcut: Command-Delete) and create new tracks. The Playhead Click the ruler at the top of the Timeline. You'll see a triangular playhead with a red line that runs down through all tracks window. You place the playhead at the moment on the timeline that you want to play or record by either clicking the ruler where you want the playhead or by dragging the playhead to the desired location. Setting Audio Source and Sound Levels After selecting a track to record narration by clicking the track name or track icon, choose the sound input source for that track.

6 Look at the Track Info pane at the bottom right of the GarageBand window. If you don't see the Track Info pane, select your track and then choose Track>Show Track Info from the GarageBand menu at the top of the screen. You can also press the small i button as shown below. With the the Real Instrument highlighted, click the Input Source option menu. Select your audio input the Logitech USB Headset in this example. For simple narration from a single monaural mic input, choose Mono 1 rather than the default stereo option.

7 Click the track name or track icon to select a track. Make sure the record button in the Track head is red (if the record button is not red, click the button). Speak into the microphone. The sound levels (simply called "levels") move as you speak. The green level bars will move to the right as you speak louder. Press the large red Record button to the left of the playback controls or use the keyboard shortcut: r. Start speaking. The Record button will glow red and you will see the sound waves of your voice appear, in red, on the selected track. Press the Spacebar to stop recording and stop the playhead. Split or join Move the playhead to a point where you want to split an existing single segment into two segments. Then select the segment. The segment will turn blue as in the image below. From the GarageBand menu select Edit>Split or use the keyboard shortcut Command-T. This splits the segment into two pieces, and renames the segments in their upper left corners, in this case, "test track" becomes "test track.1" and "test track.2". Click off of the segments to deselect both, and then click to highlight one segment. That section can be moved or deleted independent of the other section.

8 Segments can also be joined together. Highlight two or more consecutive segments by holding Shift while clicking each consecutive segment. Then choose Edit>Join from the menu or use the keyboard shortcut Command-J to combine the selected segments. If both of the tracks start at the beginning of the timeline, it probably won't sound right. Instead, start the podcast with music, play that for a few seconds, then fade it out and continue fading as your narration starts. Fades are key in creating smooth transitions between different audio segments. The first step is to drag your narration several seconds down the timeline so that the song will play first, then the narration will start. Simply select the audio segment and drag it to the right. If you have several segments in the same track, be sure to select all of them by pressing the Shift button as you click each one or press the track head once. Next, you should change the audio levels of the music so that it starts at a normal level and then fades away as the narration begins. Instead, you should directly manipulate the volume of each track, controlling the timing and volume as you prefer. To do this, click on the little inverted triangle button in your track header, just below the name of your track. Another "volume track" called "Track Volume" will appear below the track you're working with. This shows your volume level for the duration of the track. Right now, the volume is the same from beginning to end, so the volume line is a straight line. But if you click once on that line, a little marker will appear.

9 Click again to make another marker. Then click and drag that marker up or down. If you pull that second marker all the way down, you've created a basic fade. You can drag the markers left or right to adjust the timing, up and down to adjust the volume. And you can add as many markers as you'd like, if, say, you wanted a sudden fade from loud to soft. One caution about markers: some users have noticed that adding too many markers can hurt the sound quality. So use only as many markers as are necessary to achieve your fade effect. To delete a marker, simply click once on the marker, then press the Delete button. Here is an example of how you might fade the music (the blue track) into the background as the narration (the purple track) begins. Notice how the volume level of the music track decreases from normal level to silence. Now, if you press Return to go to the beginning of the Timeline and then press Spacebar to begin playing, you should hear the music play normally and then fade out as the narration begins. You can fine tune the volume markers as needed. WRAP-UP Your final step is to export your audio from GarageBand by using the Share with itunes option. From there, you can convert the file to an MP3 and upload to your hosting service.

10 itunes > Preferences > Importing, Click Setting "Custom" and choose 32kbps for the Stereo bit rate, Quality Medium, Sample Rate khz, channels stereo and Stereo Mode: Joint Stereo. We may ultimately change these, but for now it sounds good the file it will create is under 10mb. Click OK and then click the song and Click Advanced > Convert Selection to MP3. Select the recording that you would like to convert to MP3 Click on Advanced in your itunes menu bar Select Convert Selection to MP3 Wait a couple seconds, and voila, an MP3 has been created! The universal standard audio file for delivery on the Internet is called MPEG-3 or more commonly known as MP3.The MP3 file should be encoded at the bit rate of between 128kbps (standard) to 160kbps (medium) to 320kbps (highest) for optimum quality yet maintaining a relatively small file size for delivery over the Internet.MP3 File Equation: When trying to estimate how large a file your voice-over demo will be in MP3 format, consider this equation. 1 minute of stereo digital audio, encoded at 128kbps = 1MB MP3 file