It is day one of my "summer" break between the summer and fall terms at IU, so I'm going into full geek mode to try out both some old school and new school free podcasting tools. Today, I dusted off Audacity and created a quick little ditty. My plan was to come up with a quick, painless and (as always) free way to record and upload audio into my Drupal site as a podcast and test to see if it could be read in iTunes using the RSS feed generated by my site. While I have iLife for my Mac, that doesn't count – not free! Fortunately (or unfortunately – however you look at it), things didn't quite work out the way I had planned. Here are the crazy paths I took this afternoon to create and then finally upload some audio (see more below):
- Recording audio: Piece of cake as usual in Audacity! Zero learning curve to click on the record button, say your peace and hit stop.
- Converting file to .mp3: A bit harder:
- Plan A – Audacity: Export as .mp3 within Audacity: While the menu indicates the ability to export to .mp3, audacity doesn't support it by default. Rather, you are linked to instructions to download and use a third party Lame .mp3 encoder. I found the instructions to be confusing, so I moved on to Plan B.
- Plan B – iTunes: As an alternative, I exported the audio as a .wav file and then tried to converted the file to .mp3 within iTunes. This USED TO BE a supported function in iTunes, but I see today the only option is "Convert selection to AAC". Looks like they did away with the "Convert selection to .mp3"?
- Plan C (circling back to Plan A): So, as suggested by the folks at Audacity, I tried to dig into Lame. Bottom line – the instructions are lame 🙂 Therefore, I headed over to trusty download.com and did a quick search for a .mp3 converter. Looks like there are a bunch of highly rated tools to do the trick, so I looked for a simple and free solution and found it with CDex 1.51 I downloaded it and installed it in less than a minute. It includes the LAME encoder, so I was able to go back into Audacity and use the "export as .mp3" function after all. After a couple of clicks during the set up, I pointed Audacity to CDex and I should be good to go in the future. Success!
- Uploading audio file to web:
- Plan A – upload to my Drupal site. Ok, here is where things got really squirrelly for me today. I am having one heck of a time getting the audio module to work again. I had it rolling awhile back, but I guess after a few updates and tweaks, it is all tweaked out. I wasted a good hour uploading / installing / deleting before I called it quits and tried Plan B. I'm sure I'll figure it out, but I lost patience trying it today. Also, with Plan B so much fun, I quickly lost interest in Plan A.
- Plan B – upload to my Odeo.com account: Here is when things started getting much more fun. I set up an Odeo account last December and thought it had some really fun features back then, but I didn't do much with it at the time. From the creator of Blogger, Odeo is geared to bring podcasting to the masses (like Blogger did for blogging) with a slick, simple and clean interface. I has all kinds of fun bells and whistles like being able to post from your phone, add a player on your site, a studio to create a podcast, the ability to upload your own .mp3 files and so on … So, that is the direction I went today. Check out my attempts on the left sidebar of my site. I have it set on "auto play", but maybe that will be too annoying after awhile. You can also subscribe using the podcast RSS feed – but I'm not sure why you would want to – unless you are my mother 🙂
So, day 1 of "summer break" was truly a day in geek's paradise. Can't wait for day 2 🙂
technorati tags:podcast, audacity, Odeo
Blogged with Flock