I cannot tell you the number of times that I have completely forgotten that I had my digital recorder with me. I’ve missed many opportunities. At least I didn’t miss this one. I wanted to record some of the more familiar sights and sounds that I see every day on my way to and from work.
So, sit back and enjoy the natural sounds that both the animals and the human animal make as they coexist. It’ll only take about 2 minutes of your time.
I put this together using my Sony digital recorder, Garageband to record and edit the sounds down to 2 minutes, and SoundSlides to put it all together.
The drive from Charleston this weekend could have been summed up in one word, rainy. In Charleston, it rained all day from morning until I left. It was one of those rains that you knew would continue throughout the day and it did. Before leaving, I checked the weather map. It showed the entire way, and beyond, from Florida all the way through Virginia covered with rain. When I left, it was 52 degrees and rainy. When I arrived in Charlotte, it was 32 degrees (0 degrees C) and raining. The trip didn’t take as long as I expected, only about 1/2 hour longer than normal, 4 hours.
On Saturday morning when I got up, I looked outside. It was cloudy and cold, but there only appeared to be ice on metal surfaces and tree branches. After a while, the sun started to peak out. I went outside to have a look and saw the sun shining through the branches and highlighting the ice. Where I stood, all was a bit damp, but pretty clear. No more rain. However, only a few yards away, it sounded like quite a downpour as the sun worked to release the trees from the grip of the ice.
This time I was prepared. I had my little digital recorder with me. I recorded a minute or two of this ‘downpour’, the sounds of chickadees, as well as a passing jet. Then, off to the car to get the camera. Unfortunately, at the time, I had no way to put the sound onto the laptop, so I had to make a trip to Radio Shack to get a small cable to connect so that I could record the sound.
I put this little slide show together hastily, just to give you a bit of what I saw and heard. I call it One Minute of Winter because that’s about all that we get every year. It will probably snow again in February, and will add up to two minutes. We’ll see.
Yesterday, I asked if anyone knew of Flash-like software that could be used to create a slide show with music or audio attached. I got some really good suggestions and had a look at each one of them. As Earl correctly pointed out, there are some free pieces of software already included with the Mac Book Pro. I took a swing at IMovie and, while it did what I wanted, I still wanted something a little different, something specifically for doing this type of thing.
I downloaded Adobe’s trial version of Flash and was a bit overwhelmed at how much you had to go through to put together a small presentation. Certainly, it is powerful and full featured, but it was way more than I wanted to deal with and, at $699, much more than I was willing to pay. After reading a tutorial on Flash, at the very end it had a statement: Because so many people wanted to know how to do a slide presentation using Flash, we did it, but we prefer to use Soundslides. To quote their website:
Ridiculously simple storytelling
Soundslides allows storytellers to concentrate on the story, rather than the application. Created for journalists and other storytellers on deadline, Soundslides is designed to make quick work of slide show production.
So, taking them at their word, I downloaded the demo version. They’re right! It is very, very easy to put together a slide show complete with music or audio. Very easy! And, the price is right! $69.95 for the “Pro” version. I will be making a purchase today!
All told, it took me several hours to put together this one minute slide show and that is not because of Soundslides. I didn’t have what I needed to do things properly. I had the photos and an idea; however, I didn’t have any music, so I spent a bit of time searching for some that I could use. I ended up here, listened to quite a bit of really good music, and selected this piece: Mark Koch Trio – Falling Down.
One of the ‘constraints’, if you can call it that, of the Soundslides is that it make the slide show the exact length of the music. Well, the song that I selected was about 5:37 long, so I needed something to edit the MP3. I searched and found Audacity, an open-source sound editor. This allowed me to edit the music down to 1:12 and include a fade at the end. Audacity had a dependency on another library called LAME. LAME is an open-source MP3 encoder. You only need this if you intend to save as MP3. After I got all of that stuff, I was ready to go.
I imported my pictures into the project, ordered them (drag and drop), added the sound track, and then adjusted the sliders to correspond to certain parts of the music where I wanted my photos to transition. That’s about it. I exported the files, uploaded them to the web server, and used Soundslides embed tool to generate the HTML needed to show this inside of the blog. For those of you who are non-technical, I’m sure that this sounds like a lot, but it’s not so bad.
Assuming that I have an idea and some music, the next one that I put together should be pretty easy! It’s worth a look and at 10% of the price of Flash, it’s quite a bargain. It does only one thing and that’s put together these types of presentations. That’s all that I need. I’ll keep the other $630 in my pocket! Thank you very much!
Recent Comments