Sound Editing

As an alternative to the expensive option of using BT's service for recording a telephone conference of £280 per event, I spent £44.50 + VAT to buy the Telesto Telephone Conversation Recorder device, cables and software to allow me to record our lunchtime briefings conference calls. I piloted it yesterday on the 1hr session on SOA.

Having recorded the call I ended up with a 74Mb WAV file. I then needed to convert this to something that I could upload to the CSC Portal (with its 10,000,000 byte file limit). (Yes it's true. The limit is 10 million bytes, not 10 Mb. Wacky!). Having tried a shareware tool called MP3 WAV Converter, and used up the 5 free conversions without getting a usable result (My final attempt with MP3 WAV resulted in a file of 10,077,000 bytes. It took me ages to figure out why I couldn't upload it!), I looked again and came across this rather good Freeware tool Audacity.

Not only is it free, but it has got lots of useful functionality, including mixing, editing and format conversion. It allowed me to turn my 74Mb WAV file into 2 MP3 files of c 8.5Mb each. Then all I had to do was upload them to the portal....

Oh, by the way, I did also experiment for quite some time with using Skype, dialling into MeetMe with SkypeOut (including playing a file of the touchtones of the PIN code using Dialabc's generator) and trying to record that. I tried various shareware/freeware tools for recording the sound, but there's not a good solution (yet) to the problem of getting an echo when you use the Mono or Stereo Mix sound source to allow you to record. A pity. That solution would only have cost 84p/hr (the SkypeOut cost to a UK landline).

Now that's cracked, how about podcasting?