Malaysians, the Olympics and DIY audio - the stuff I used

So I thought I'd just go through exactly what I did when trying to put together the "Olympic test" mp3 - which you can find on my blog post from the 21st November. Hopefully this will be of interest to some of my friends, plus it might be of interest to those wondering how to get started in recording some (extremely basic) audio pieces.


Equipment

I used a microphone that is supposed to used for singing and karaoke, which was lying around the house. It was a SkyTronic Dynamic Microphone. The volume was very low when I plugged it in directly into the computer, so I plugged the microphone into Korg guitar effects pedal to boost the sound by turning up the volume and using the compressor. The sound was still rather quiet so I had to get right up close to interviewees when using the microphone (which the first interviewee - Joseline - really didn't like this. In fact, she kept pushing the microphone away from her mouth).

Software

'Free Sound Recorder' - Yes, it's free - hence why I used it. It's not half bad so long as you make sure that the audio input is pretty high - since turning up the gain creates loads of background noise (I think that I set the gain to 17%).

'Audacity' - Renowned for being frustrating to use and extremely limited. However, it's okay for a free programme. I found that a lot of basic concepts that I learnt were transferable when using Adobe Audition and Cool Edit Pro.


Websites for advice

I'm a massive fan of This American Life - which is something I can talk about in another blog. TAL, and American Public Radio, places a large emphasis on DIY radio production. I paid US$5 for a great comic book produced by TAL, which documents the creation of one of their shows. I gave me some great ideas when I was thinking about how to edit the piece together, which I'll talk about more later.

It's also worth checking out Ira Glass' Transom article on radio production - it has some great story telling techniques in addition to some great short pieces of radio which demonstrate how to tell a story effectively. http://transom.org/?p=6978

http://howsound.org/ - How Sound is a great podcast, which gave me advice on how to produce radio packages. Often a small section of the show will be used to play a producer's piece, then the majority of the podcast would be devoted to explain how the piece was produced (e.g. how the story was found, how it was structured and why it was effective).