I’m usually on the bleeding edge of technology, but have been a slow adopter of adding audio to websites and blogs I manage. This week, my Logitech 350 headset arrived and in under 45 minutes, I had online audio.

I’m going to explain how you can accomplish the same in one-third the time, assuming you have your own website and can FTP or transfer files to it and that you know how to do that. Oh, and I’m assuming you’re using a PC and not a Mac. Macs come out of the box better at doing multimedia than PCs do. If you’re a Mac guru and aren’t too haughty about it, comment on how you create your podcasts and I’ll gladly link to your site. The program I’m using has both PC and Mac versions.

• Buy decent USB headset. Plug it in. As I mentioned, above, I got the Logitech 350
• Download and install Audacity. Windows has a silly Sound Recorder program that has a 60-second limit. Audacity has tons of bells and whistles that I’ll never need. Don’t get the Beta version unless you’re feeling daring. There is also a version of Audacity for Macs.
• Download and install the MP3 LAME encoder for Audacity for your PC or Mac. This will add an Export as MP3 command to your Audacity allowing you to convert big WAV files to smaller MP3 files suitable for websites or copying to your iPod or MP3-ready PDA (I’ve got a Palm Tungsten E).
• Start Audacity. Click the image to the right to display the Audacity screen.
  1) Change the audio rate from 44000 to 11500 rate by pressing the 44000
  2) Press the red record button to start.
  3) Press the square to stop or || to pause.
  4) Press the green arrow to play.
  5) From the File menu, select Export as MP3. The first time you do this, you will be prompted to locate the LAME MP3 encoder whereever you installed it.

Upload it to your site to an easy-to-remember location like www.mysite.com/audio/2007Feb08-YourName-YourTopic.mp3

My habit is to name my files with the date, the speaker and the topic. This makes them easily identifiable at a glance.

Now listen to the result:

COMING SOON: Want good marketing content for your website? From your desk — and without a recording studio — you can record and publish 5-minute audio interviews with your enthusiastic clients on how your company solved their business problems. Oh, and aside from the headset you already bought to do the podcast recording, above… it’s FREE! Look for my next article next week as I focus on inexpensive applied business technology.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 8th, 2007 at 9:31 am and is filed under Business Multimedia, Internet, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.