The first thing I did for this project, was decide that I wanted to do something a little more upbeat; so I decided I wanted to do a podcast about the best upcoming Christmas gifts for 2008. Luckily, my sister works for Target Corporation in Minneapolis, so she has had the Christmas catalog of the 2008 since August. So all of the items on the podcast is what Target and other retailers are going to be promoting this Holiday Season.

First, I wrote out an outline of what I wanted to say in my podcast. However, my voice did not sound enthusiastic, and I did not have a so called ‘radio voice’ that meshed with the music that I had decided to use, “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas’ by Johnny Mathis. So I had one of my friends record their voice on Audacity. I was unable to download Audacity on my computer, so I tried to use Garage Band. However, due to the many people in the library, it was difficult to record in the library. So my roommate let me download Audacity on her computer.

After we recorded his voice, I used the microphone to record sounds off of Youtube.com. In order to get the sound effects in-between the different takes, I had to highlight the recording after where I wanted to put the sound effect, duplicate it, then delete the top line portion, add the sound effect, then paste the duplicated part of the end back to the end of the added sound effect. I had to do this for the picture sound, the ‘You’ve Got Mail’ sound, the WII sounds, then the Elmo Live sounds.

Next, I had to add the music to the talking audio. I deleted the beginning bells of the song because they were just annoying and ear piercing. I then did a fade in so the loudest part was ‘It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas’, I then did a fade out so the audio was audible. Because on Audacity you cannot lower the volume to different volumes throughout the song on Audacity (you could do it on Garage Band, but not on Audacity), so I cut the song after the fade out, created a ‘new track’ underneath it, cut the beginning part of the audio up to that point, then lowered the sound to a softer level so the speaker was easier to hear. The other problem with the audio was that the song was not long enough at all. So I copied the middle portion of the song, found a similar interlude later in the song that matched the portion at the beginning, and pasted that portion in a ‘new track’ portion underneath it. I had to do this twice in order to make the song long enough for the podcast. The timing ended up working out perfectly for the length of the podcast including the additional sound effects that were added.