Academic Aesthetic Netcast 118

I was on the radio today. Leo Laporte does, among other things, a weekend radio show about technology. I had a question, so I called in with Skype and asked away.

I'm thrilled that I got to talk to the Tech Guy himself. Steve Dembo may have inspired me to start podcasting, but I wouldn't even know what a podcast was if it wasn't for Leo's radio show. I'm a fan boy, I admit it.

Mr. Laporte also netcasts all of his shows, which you can find in iTunes by doing a search for "Laporte." You can also go to TWiT.tv to see his many, many netcasts.

You may not have noticed it, but lately I've made a bit of a switch. From the beginning I've used a Mac program called GarageBand to edit my podcasts, or netcasts, or whatever, and I've always been happy with it. I don't have the latest version, but what I have has worked very well.

And yet I've started using Audacity instead. Why? Two reasons, really.

First, I think my friend Chris Craft has been rubbing off on me a bit. He's seriously into open source software, and has been using a lot of it in his classroom. You can follow along with his adventures at opensourceclassroom.com, thinkingaboutteaching.com, christophercraft.com, and I'm sure he'll eventually register ihavewaytoomanydomainnames.com.

... um, I'm pretty sure that last address is a joke. I think.

The other reason has to do with the presentations I gave last month.

More than once I recommended a free, open source program called Audacity to people who either didn't have Macs or didn't have Macs that were new enough to run GarageBand. That was all well and good, but those people still had a bit of a learning curve ahead of them. I had barely used the program myself, so anyone asking questions more advanced than "Where do I download it?" didn't really learn much from my responses.

So now I'm playing with Audacity for all my audio recordings. My last two Academic Aesthetic netcasts were recorded and edited in Audacity, and my new Art Club netcast is edited in Audacity as well. The students use an old Creative MP3 player to record their audio, so I can't give Audacity all the credit for that one.

I still use iTunes to convert the whole thing into an MP3 at the end, since I've already plugged my presets into it and I like the results, but the rest is done with a marvel of open source ingenuity.

[tags]Leo Laporte, Chris Craft, podcast, netcast, KFI, KFI640, Audacity, GarageBand[/tags]