Audacity to GarageBand

We have just published the first podcast of the session on Radio Sandaig. A new bunch of children and as usual a scramble to fit it into the day. A few lunchtimes and some non-class-contact time got it done. (The children are not all in my class, so I guess this is NCC).I decided to use garageBand instead of Audacity this year, just to see what the differences are. I’ve already started some children off making some simple music using Garageband, and our peripatetic music teacher has joined in working with a few children every week. So we have incorporated one of the pieces of music into the podcast.

For the first time with GarageBand, I took a lot more control than usual of recording, mostly to figure out what we are doing and these are first impressions. Garageband has a pile of useful loops, jingles etc built in, these are easy to review and pull in. For the rest of the session I hope to find time for children to make jingles that will be used regularly, this should make the show sound a bit more professional once we start to really think about this. The auto ducking is also nice, with audacity the children hand ducked the background track as they organised the segments.
One of the things I really liked about audacity was the way you could record segments of a podcast in any order and then the children could easily move them around as they made the final edit. We recorded each segment on a separate track. With GarageBand you get a male voice and female voice tracks, jingle and music tracks. This means we will have to plan out the podcast in more detail and record it in order, this will present a bit more of a challenge to my organisation. At the moment I invite children from 4 classes to contribute so have to find time when they are available at the same time as myself (playtime, NCC time), some thinking to do.

Anyway please have a listen and if you like the show you might like to leave an audio response on the Radio Sandaig page, give us our first review in itunes or on our new Scotcast.net listing. Thanks to Tim Geddes of Glaitness School for pointing me to Scotcast.net. Tim helps the children with the TV Glaitness Video Podcast, which is well worth watching.

podcasting podcasting podcast podcast radio_sandaig radio_sandaig audacity audacity garageband garageband