My throat is sore, the result of today’s mashup. First, I admit, I’ve wanted to do a podcast for about two years now, but I’ve never been brave enough to attempt it. Secondly, today is the tile people’s day to come replace the carpet in the flooded bathroom with tile. I could work through the smell of the stain and the noise of the wood saws, but I couldn’t bear the high pitched ceramic saws. Third, publication day is approaching for Falling Bakward and I have to do my final read-aloud to chase out the bad bits before I commit it to paper.
So, I picked up my draft copy and my laptop and retired to the RV–a nice quiet place to work. Quiet enough to risk recording while I read the text out loud. My new laptop came with Photo Booth, which is a cute little photo and movie recording program. I thought, “why not?”.
I opened the pages and started recording. By the time I’d finished chapter 2, I realized that this just wasn’t going to work. Photo Booth is cute, but it’s a toy program really. The recording had dropped out twice, so I ended up reading the same chunk of text again to fill in the missing parts.
Time to move up to Garageband. This was a real recording program, with filters to match the iChat microphone on my laptop and podcast support. Luckily, I was able to move the Photo Booth recordings into Garageband as well, so I didn’t have to re-read those chapters still again. (I went Photo Booth to iPhoto, drag out of iPhoto, export audio with Quicktime Player and then drag the aiff file into Grarageband. Probably there’s a lot easier way to do it, but I wasn’t after a workflow, just a one time conversion.)
Diving into Garageband with no instruction, I made a couple of errors before I learned how to slice and dice the audio tracks, and I made still more errors in exporting the podcast episodes into iWeb. But before too long I had recorded an intro and the first three chapters, posted them to the web and felt confident that I could keep it up until the novel was finished.
Of course, my throat is sore, and it will take a number of days to get everything recorded. And yes, my printout has lots of ink marks where this name gets changed to that, and this awkward description is re-worked. We’ll see just how this experiment works out. I just hope the quality is good enough. I’ll also have to decide how long to leave it up.