all embedded!

Audio? ODEO? AVS4You? FreeRip? Audacity? Soundboard? use my Olympus digital recorder, download to laptop, then encode to mp3 from digital using online application? Lame? (Okay, if you are inclined to skim, not read, blog entries because you just want the bottom line, click on the title above. The link to my embedded audio is there and you'll be on the Capstone page that features the audio crafted for this assignment. If you want to understand my journey, read away, but don't say I didn't warn you!)

I begin my entry with questions because that's the journey I faced with the audio entry (nice assonance, don't you think?) When I estimate that I invested close to eight hours on this tiny assignment, you'll understand why I was determined to finish the assignment and get credit for the work. If I documented every step of my path, this would be a BLOnG...get it? A long blog? (I think I crafted that myself, and wanted, actually, to put it in Wiktionary before I read the directions and saw one had to document that the word had been used before, actually cite usage...so that was out, and I was slightly disappointed. I thought it would be cool to insert a term into Wiktionary and see what happened. I'm creative, if nothing else!)

In any event, I initially hoped to use a free audio clip from a movie (that was before I understood "we" had to create the audio). I considered the well-known clip from "When Harry Met Sally" - the "I'll have what she's having!" clip, and found I could choose TWO versions from that audio site. I wasn't certain everyone would listen long enough to get to the words, so I was opting for the shorter version and trusting that everyone would have seen the movie so you wouldn't click off the sound before you got to the word portion. BUT...that was Meg Ryan, not me, so that was no longer an option. I also considered a donkey quote from Shrek, but again...not an option.

Soooo, I do have a digital recorder. Finding the connecting cord that would allow me to actually transfer the digitized information from the recorder to the PC was problematic, but it eventually surfaced (unlike my missing keys...if anyone gets a vision, let me know...). I dramatically read two pages from my Capstone project - the introductory page AND the help page (which is craftily crafted NOT to help!) - downloaded those to my laptop, and I was ready to rock and roll! Enter translators...long story short, I was never able to follow anyone's step-by-step instructions to get the digital recording converted to mp3 format and uploaded to soundboard.

I looked at software touted to be free, which wasn't; toyed around with software I couldn't successfully navigate, and was pretty darn excited when I read about the iMac and GarageBand (although I referred to that as GarbageBand to Scotty when I asked if I could use her Mac). Soooo, off to Scotty's to look at an introductory video online, to navigate GB. I opted to use the computer instruments and began laying down tracks. Now you would think at this stage of the game that I'd be happy to have ten seconds of one track successfully uploaded, but nooooo. I had to toy around with guitar, drum, and bass tracks and THEN add applause, laughter and cheering! Mix those up, go to iTunes and play the creation and....hmmmm. The converter option to change that to mp3 player doesn't appear. Doesn't look like the tutorial, and when we phone Scotty's son Chuck for help, his software version isn't the same as hers. I'd literally spent three hours at Scotty's by now, so I opted for this: I wrote a script for Chuck, asked him to record it (which he did) and send it as an e-mail attachment, and I uploaded that to my CMSimple capstone project. The script was brief: "The Contest is over!" Since I'd crafted an audio technician into my tweets and blogs as the culprit in me not having audio on the website, it made perfect sense for the technician to come to the rescue...slightly after my 7 PM EDT close of the contest, but hey, I got the audio!!!

So, click on the title of this blog and it will take you to my Capstone project page where it's nicely embedded! If you use the term BLOnG, let me know how long it takes for you to get folks to grab it and run!

Enjoy!
Anne