Download Episode 19
This week Chris and Russ talk about using Audacity to edit your podcast. Audacity is a full featured audio recording and editing application that is available for Mac, Windows and Linux. You can use Audacity to delete the coughs, ringing phones, crying babies or anything else that detracts from your podcast. If you are going to use Audacity to edit, you probably also want to record with it in the first place.
Remember that silence is your friend. Leave some silence at the beginning of your podcast: It will help if you want to eliminate noise later. In addition, you'll want to leave some silence after a mistake, simply because when you are editing it is easy to spot those stretches of dead air, which means that it will be easy to find the mistakes.
Speaking of editing, remember: Never ever edit the one and only copy of your recording! Keep that original recording in case you need to go back to it. We have screwed up enough editing sessions to know how important this is.
To cut out a that cough or ringing phone, you simply find the part of the recording that you want to cut, select the graphic that corresponds to the unwanted sound and hit the DELETE key. Always listen to a few seconds before and after your edit to make sure that it sounds OK. Audacity supports unlimited undo, so if you mess it up just undo your change.
If you seed to change the loudness of part of your podcast, select that part of the graphic and hit the effect/amplify menu item. You can use the slider on the resulting dialog to make that part of your recording louder or softer. But don't over-do it!
Using Audacity to remove noise is a two step process: First you select some silence (remember the silence that you left at the beginning of your podcast?) and select the effects/Noise Removal. When the dialog comes up, you hit the "Get Noise Profile". Now Audacity knows what the noise sounds like. Now you go back, and select the part of the podcast (maybe all of it) that you want to clean up and select the effects/Noise Removal menu item a second time. This time around, select the OK button.
Exporting your podcast to MP3 is pretty easy: Go to File/Export, enter any tags and make sure you ask for an MP3 file.
Finally, our bonus suggestion: Start with the best quality recording that you possibly can.
Happy Podcasting!
Russ & Chris
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Sunday, August 23, 2009
AG18: Why We Will Miss Les Paul
Episode 18
This week Chris and Russ remember the life and accomplishments of Les Paul.
Les Paul, who passed away on August 13, 2009 was one of those amazing individuals who got more done in one sitting than most people accomplished in a lifetime. Les Paul was an easy innovator in electrically amplified guitars and anyone interested in popular music will know the Gibson Les Paul guitar, which was designed by Ted McCarty in collaboration with guitarist Mr. Paul. The Les Paul is still one of the most popular guitars made today.
Les Paul started out as Jazz musician, was an early television personality and did pioneering work in multi-track recording. You can find more about Les Paul at the Official Les Paul site. If you want to read about the guitars, have a look at the official Gibson page
Les, we're gonna miss you!
Russ & Chris
This week Chris and Russ remember the life and accomplishments of Les Paul.
Les Paul, who passed away on August 13, 2009 was one of those amazing individuals who got more done in one sitting than most people accomplished in a lifetime. Les Paul was an easy innovator in electrically amplified guitars and anyone interested in popular music will know the Gibson Les Paul guitar, which was designed by Ted McCarty in collaboration with guitarist Mr. Paul. The Les Paul is still one of the most popular guitars made today.
Les Paul started out as Jazz musician, was an early television personality and did pioneering work in multi-track recording. You can find more about Les Paul at the Official Les Paul site. If you want to read about the guitars, have a look at the official Gibson page
Les, we're gonna miss you!
Russ & Chris
Saturday, August 15, 2009
AG17: So You Wanna Do Some HTML?
Download Episode 17
This week Chris and Russ look at the basics of HTML: What is is? How do you write it? And just what does your browser do with it?
HTML was invented by Tim Berners-Lee along with Robert Cailliau.
HTML is a language for describing the layout of text and graphics, the kind of thing that a person will read; In fact you are reading a rendered HTML document right now. The main problem that HTML tries to solve is: How do you describe a complicated page of text and graphics using only what you can type into a simple text editor and some image files. The solution is tags: A tag is just a word that is wrapped in less-than and greater-than signs, like this:
<body>
The idea is that any ordinary text in an HTML document just ends up as ordinary text on the screen, but things that look like tags tell the browser how to display the other stuff. In short, tags are like the stage directions that a director might whisper to actors on the stage.
Every HTML document should start with a magic incantation that announces to the world that it is, indeed, an HTML document. There are some variations on this, but they all look more or less like this one from Google:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
Once you get past this special but, you get to the actual HTML. Every HTML document should be wrapped in start and end HTML tags:
<html>
... GUTS OF THE HTML DOCUMENT ...
</html>
The example above shows an important aspect of HTML: The start of the html document is marked with <html> while the end of the document is marked with </html> . Note the / in the end tag. In HTML <something> is the start of something while </something> is the end of something.
Inside of the html tags, you have the two things: The head part of the document and the body:
<html>
<head>
... INFO ABOUT THE DOCUMENT ...
</head>
<body>
... THE DOCUMENT ITSELF ...
</body>
</html>
The most common thing that you find in the head part is the title:
<head>
<title> This is an example HTML document </title>
</head>
The title part of the HTML tells your browser what to put in the window title (way up there at the very top of your window) when it displays the page.
The body tag holds the actual document contents:
<body>
<p>This is my document.</p>
<p>This is <b>my</b> document.</p>
</body>
You can control how your text display by putting in tags like <p> for paragraph and <b> for bold.
Finally Russ was mistaken about the image tags: your specify the source of the image like this:
<img src="picture.gif"/>
You can learn a lot more about HTML from W3 Schools. If you want to know all the really gory details, have a look at the specification.
This week Chris and Russ look at the basics of HTML: What is is? How do you write it? And just what does your browser do with it?
HTML was invented by Tim Berners-Lee along with Robert Cailliau.
HTML is a language for describing the layout of text and graphics, the kind of thing that a person will read; In fact you are reading a rendered HTML document right now. The main problem that HTML tries to solve is: How do you describe a complicated page of text and graphics using only what you can type into a simple text editor and some image files. The solution is tags: A tag is just a word that is wrapped in less-than and greater-than signs, like this:
<body>
The idea is that any ordinary text in an HTML document just ends up as ordinary text on the screen, but things that look like tags tell the browser how to display the other stuff. In short, tags are like the stage directions that a director might whisper to actors on the stage.
Every HTML document should start with a magic incantation that announces to the world that it is, indeed, an HTML document. There are some variations on this, but they all look more or less like this one from Google:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
Once you get past this special but, you get to the actual HTML. Every HTML document should be wrapped in start and end HTML tags:
<html>
... GUTS OF THE HTML DOCUMENT ...
</html>
The example above shows an important aspect of HTML: The start of the html document is marked with <html> while the end of the document is marked with </html> . Note the / in the end tag. In HTML <something> is the start of something while </something> is the end of something.
Inside of the html tags, you have the two things: The head part of the document and the body:
<html>
<head>
... INFO ABOUT THE DOCUMENT ...
</head>
<body>
... THE DOCUMENT ITSELF ...
</body>
</html>
The most common thing that you find in the head part is the title:
<head>
<title> This is an example HTML document </title>
</head>
The title part of the HTML tells your browser what to put in the window title (way up there at the very top of your window) when it displays the page.
The body tag holds the actual document contents:
<body>
<p>This is my document.</p>
<p>This is <b>my</b> document.</p>
</body>
You can control how your text display by putting in tags like <p> for paragraph and <b> for bold.
Finally Russ was mistaken about the image tags: your specify the source of the image like this:
<img src="picture.gif"/>
You can learn a lot more about HTML from W3 Schools. If you want to know all the really gory details, have a look at the specification.
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