By class on March 8th, each student, working in pairs, should create a short podcast that provides some critical discussion of digital audio. The goal of the assignment is to use the audio form to express ideas about web-based audio and podcasting that would be otherwise difficult to convey via writing or visuals. Length is flexible, but 5 minutes should be the upper limit – the goal is to convey & explore ideas, not record a creative masterwork. Feel free to check out some examples from the last time this course did this assignment.

Students are free to record audio in a range of locations if they so desire – Olympus digital voice recorders and USB microphones are available at the circulation desk at the library and recorders and usb microphones are available from the FMMC equipment room M-F from 10am – 12pm.  You are free to use found audio clips (even if copyrighted), but be sure to credit the sources of the files, either within the audio or in the associated blog post.

Amadeus Pro is the audio software that we will be learning in class to edit and encode audio, although you are welcome to use other audio programs that you might know. Amadeus Pro has been installed in Axinn 105 and in the Wilson Lab in the library.  It can be found in the applications folder or in the dock  .  Podcasts should be encoded in MP3 format – when complete, files should be uploaded to Middmedia ( http://middmedia.middlebury.edu ). Students should then write a blog post with the category Podcast, with the URL to the mp3 file posted. Then the RSS feed for that category can be added to an audio aggregator like iTunes to gather the files. Students are also encouraged to provide commentary on the process in the blog post, and comment on each others on the blog.

Server Space

http://middmedia.middlebury.edu

Middmedia documentation can be found here

You can use WordPress’s embedded audio player by typing (in brackets) audio:URL in a blog post, where the URL is the web location of an audio file. Be sure to categorize your post as Podcast.

Groups:

Hunter / Molly

Hannah / Shane

Guilliame / Mark

Patti / Toren / Liya