Category: ds106radio

End of a Good Spell

#Ds106 GoodSpell Final Season ep 8 Letting go Bullet 107! The End!

For the last episode of the DS106 Good Spell Mariana and I were joined by Jim Groom and Ronald Leunissen.

Since The DS106 Good Spell Episode 1, Marina & I have been talking DS106 0n Sunday Evenings, covering her mammoth post: DS106 in 106 posts and 106 bullets published at 1:06. This consisted of 106 bullet points reflecting on the Headless 13 iteration of DS106.

I think we managed an average of about 2 bullets per episode.

I’ve really enjoyed and learnt from the process. We were usually joined by a wee audience on twitter.

The show was futz filled and tweet distracted, we chatted and laughed our way through serious and silly aspects of DS106, sometimes circling the same territory sometimes veering of wildly. Marina’s bullets gave us a base from which we could cover all sorts of ideas to do with online life & learning.

Delightfully we were provided with links, posters and bumpers from various members of the DS106 community who we own a pile of thanks.

As we signed off each episode: DS106 Radio #4Life

Featured Image my own designed at the start of the show. CC-BY

#DS106 GoodSpell Final Season

This evening Marianna & I started the final season of the DS106 Good Spell on DS106 Radio.

The DS106 Good Spell is a podcast about the open online course on digital storytelling, DS106.

Some background to this series on The DS106 Good Spell Episode 0

As usual I’ll post the audio to edutalk.cc

One of my favourite things about ds106 is how it spawns all sorts of activities like this. The Good Spell is one of my favourite favourites.

i lifted the featured image from Marianna’s  tweet  I don’t think she will mind

 

Every Story Tell a Picture

For the Headless Group Radio Show I’ve been working with Rochelle and Seth.
I think I originally proposed this:

Thinking of stories with little narrative, without conclusions, that put a picture in your mind. Perhaps stories from your family, your people with little detail… Perhaps some other idea…

But our discussions roamed far and wide. We worked out the story on a google doc and a couple of skype calls. It turned out the stories and ideas we had in mind chimed in all sort of interesting ways, family, cross generational stories, memory which you can hear about after we put the audio up. We will be playing it live at 8:30pm UK time, 24th August, round about lunch time across the USA. I’ll leave any discussion of the content and concepts till then.
The last time I did this task, we worked in a very different manner, all on a google doc, no skype, then members of the group recorded segments and Mike put them together within a overarching narrative with voice links as if we were all elements of a radio show, ( Impending Zombie Apocalypse).
This time we all produced voice fragments, but it was left to Rochelle to put these together, when you hear the show I think you will understand why, we rely on a wonderful piece of music by Rochelle and her daughter and Rochelle’s musicality.
The way the audio came together we felt breaking it up with a commercial in the middle would not be a great idea, so decided to create separate ‘commercial’ for the piece. Here is mine.


commercial-jj
I put this together with GarageBand from short snippets of the audio from our show. Like the show it relies on Rochelle’s rendition of “Comes a Time”, it also uses an idea Seth introduced on skype of voices emerging from a crowd, the crowd created by layering our voices, this appealed to my liking for dub.
garageband-comercial

iCast Pro, Voice Record Pro and DS106 Radio an iOS workflow.

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After a couple of days fighting Nicecast and talking to the Skype lady I took a wee break today. I remembered Scottlo had blogged about a new iOS app for broadcasting to icecast and though I’d give it a spin. The app is iCast Pro.
I had occasionally used papaya but this has been discontinued. The developer has developed a new app KoalaSan which looks great, especially as it handels audio from other apps and records broadcasts. Unfortunately it does not support mp3. I konw that that will not work on EDUtalk where I do most of my broadcasting so I put my money on iCast Pro.
The setup is straighforward once you note the gotcha from Scottlo’s post. you need to choose icecast as a server in the settings, the icons are not, imo, easy to spot.
I made a couple of quick tests on both EDUtalk and ds106 radio and the app works with both. You can setup multiple stations.
The interface is a wee bit distracting, full of cogs but most of the buttons are clear.

The next bit I wanted to figure out was how to record the broadcast. I had looked into this before with out much success. i have two apps on my iphone that support background recording, Audio Memos and Voice Record Pro. i gave them a quick test and the quality was a lot better in Voice Record Pro so when for that for my main test:

  1. Opened Voice Record Pro and started a recording
  2. Switched to iCast Pro and started broadcasting.
  3. When I finished I stopped broadcasting and returned to Voice Record and stopped recording.
  4. In Voice Record I converted the file to mp3 and uploaded that to dropbox.
  5. Opened the mp3 in audacity and trimmed the start, exported to mp3.

I didn’t try to adjust the audio in audacity at all.

Here it is:

download iCast-Pro-Voice-Recorder-HD