Music Step
At freeplaymusic.com I found a couple of great clips, but after registering (Sound familiar? For this account I'm from Afghanistan as Canada didn't take for some reason!), and selecting the ones I wanted, they wouldn't download to my computer. I read the help feature, but my computer won't respond to the download click - urgh (sound familiar?!). Thus, I sent a tech help submission and we'll see what I get (closing night comment - can't remember how to get back to the site to see if an answer - too tuckered to try). I then tried CCMixter.org (Richardson: 119). The homepage option for "Instrumental Music for Film and Video" seemed hopeful, but searches for "spooky" and "Halloween" gave few results in comparison to Freeplay. Nevertheless, one appeared hopeful, so I'm just trying to download that, but I stopped the download twice as it appears to enlarge to full screen and play the music while it downloads. I have 2:57 to type here before the download is complete ... definitely "industrial" spooky! Not a fan of this download process. Potentially very time consuming for longer pieces, especially if you just want to use short parts. I THOUGHT IT MAY NOT BE WORKING! Nope no download came through. What the heck am I doing wrong? I'm closing off for tonight ...
Well, I couldn't quite bring myself to "close" that window (took me awhile to find a file I wanted so I couldn't click out of it despite the time - sound familiar?!); thus, I went back one more time and reread the instructions in the download window (slow to be smart move) and saw "To download: Control-click on title and select ‘Save Link As...’" I was only left clicking so was doing it wrong. I copied and pasted the embed code below (listed above the download screen), as I'm thinking that may come in handy! Time for sleep. Back at her ... later.
Combining Audio (Poem) with the Music Track
While Audio file importing to Audacity was straight forward, using the "envelop tool" to fade the music out so you could actually here me recite the poem, and to place my audio track to coincide with my music track took some fiddle time: more Audacity help assisted me (Audacity Forum). The Audacity wiki I found warned me that the steps to do the former would take about an hour - gulp. Success, but humbling.
Inserting Images
I searched YouTube as I love the combined auditory instructions with the visuals (Aaron & others can I "Google" for screenr publications too?). I tried Tony Vincent's "Add Images to Audacity's Audio". He made importing Powerpoint images look so easy that I thought I would try that process. "Newbie" naivety completely hung me for awhile. For the life of me I couldn't get my converted (more Audacity wiki reading) mp3 or wave file for my Audacity podcast to load into Movie Maker. Two forum posts later, and no response, I resorted to our course saviour - Monsieur Aaron Mueller. He graciously let me know that I had to add some visuals into Movie Maker first before I could import music files (Oh my Miss Newbie). In fact, our kind leader created a trouble shooting screenr for me. I was well on my way once again until I wanted to import those PowerPoint slides - again error message from Movie Maker that it didn't support the PowerPoint files I was trying to import - growl.
Google results listed me a few options; I'll paste the one I chose (& it worked) by Moyea - a company that wants to sell us converter software for $50 but they also kindly showed me how to do the conversion without their "easy to use" software:
Converting Power Point file into Images
[You] cannot import a PowerPoint file into Windows Movie Maker directly, for Windows Movie Maker's supported input files are video, picture, audio or music, so we have to figure this out with some special methods.
1, Save each slide in PowerPoint presentation to picture.
Open PowerPoint file, go to File->Save as, on the "Save as type" option, and we choose the picture formats. There are 6 picture formats you can choose: *.gif, *.jpg, *png, *tif, *bmp, *emf. Any one format would be ok. Then click "Save". A prompt will pop up, we choose "Every slide". Seconds later, a hint pops up "Each slide in your presentation has been saved as a separate file in the folder: ***".
Open the folder, you can find all the exported pictures.
Run Windows Movie Maker, you can import all the pictures and edit them, then generate a beautiful video.
The disadvantage of this method is that it cannot keep the audios and animations in original PowerPoint presentation. To avoid this, I'll show you the second method.
2, Convert PowerPoint presentation to video file.
Don't make fuss about this topic. All we need is this professional tool: Moyea PPT to video Converter. It can convert PowerPoint to almost all popular video formats like WMV, MPEG, AVI, etc. It retains the structure of original PowerPoint, keeps all delicately designed elements in PowerPoint.
You have to do only three steps:
1, Import PowerPoint presentation
2, Choose output file format
3, start conversion.
A few minutes later, the converted video comes on earth.
Now, you can import the video to Windows Movie Maker and edit it.
Source: http://www.dvd-ppt-slideshow.com/ppt-to-dvd-tips/import-powerpoint-to-windows-movie-maker.html
I converted my five slides to images and learned that I could convert them all at once or individually: handy knowledge when I went back and created a few more slides and then imported them individually.
My next issue was too few slides for all of my audio - oh my! Thus I simply copied more of the lyrics slide and added in some credit slides. I also wanted to add in a pdf image I had scanned from the book I got my poem out of. Growl - movie maker would not accept pdf files. Thank goodness for Google and kind people who share. While Adobe Pro wanted approx. $6/month to subscribe for such services, I found this converter site that did the job - simply & for free http://www.convertpdftoimage.com/. Success my first Podcast completed - after way too many hours, however. Now the upload to flickr step
Note - Tony Vincent from the YouTube tutorial above further suggested more Audacity tutorials from Arizona k123 Center: Offering Quality Professional Development for Educator's (search for Audacity; note the results take time to load; I haven't viewed the three results yet).
Uploading to flickr is still not a fluid process when Windows Live wants to get involved, but I got it uploaded. When I play the video in Flickr, however, the end part is cut off - size limits? I'm confused.
A search reveals the following Flickr upload limits:
"Free account holders can upload 2 videos a month. If you’re a pro member, your account has unlimited bandwidth and storage space which includes video content. But! Individual video files must be smaller than 150MB in size for free members and 500MB for Pro members (more because Pro members can upload HD video)." (http://www.flickr.com/help/video/)
My podcast size is 10.9 KB (11,242 bytes), and 2:39.43 in length but I have my two other Parkview Library videos in my Flickr account, so perhaps I'm at my limit. Thus, I deleted my original Parkview one and kept the edited version on it; I don't think I need to keep it stored on Flickr to be able to play it on my blog - correct? I deleted my original podcast from Flickr, edited it in Movie Maker (cut slides out) to make it supposedly smaller but no go - the time is obviously related to the music - go figure. Thus, I guess I would have to go back and edit the music track in Audacity and I simply AIN'T PUTTING MORE TIME INTO THIS ATTEMPT. I just know I'll be faster next time!
(ouch - do I use tinyurl to make that source link smaller? I made the image a live link, but suggestions how to cite this source?)
Experienced Aaron invited me to just to audio with Audioboo & not do images for this assignment, but I had a vision of future poetry projects with sound tracks and images, so I was determined to figure it out. Kinda did, but now, yup, I'm even more behind. Is there a silver lining to stubbornness? Goodnight All.
Tutorials I Used
"How to Embed a Podcast Into Blogger" (Note- doesn't give step by step of how to actually record using Audacity, but great for downloading, and exporting steps)
Audacity Forum
feedback@audacityteam.org
Other one "How to Create a Podcast with Blogger" (YouTube)
Audacity for Teachers - Installation and Basic Editing (from Audacity Wiki)
Must try Bibnet ... soon. S.
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