The Podcast, 14/03/22, Designer

 The Podcast, Week 9, 14/03/22 - 21/03/22

This week my role was the product designer. This meant my job was to edit the raw audio files into a podcast.

On Tuesday we interviewed Vics Brown, the vice manager of the student guild at the University of Exeter. We again visited the Drama Department, where we borrowed a laptop and microphone. We then went to Vic's office to conduct the interview. This was not a flawless endeavour, as we quickly realised our microphone was not connecting to our laptop. After some troubleshooting, we managed to connect it, however we then realised, after talking to Vics for a few minutes, that the microphone was not recording audio. Unsure of the problem, we decided to use my phone's voice memos app to record the interview, and the phone's microphone had to suffice. From this point onward the interview flowed smoothly, with Vics being a clearly capable speaker.  It was fortunate that our group was able to work together and figure out a solution, and continue with the interview, however, in retrospect we should have checked the equipment rather than assume it was all working before meeting with Vics. After we had gained about fifteen minutes of raw conversation, we thanked Vics for her time, and I went home to begin editing.

Attempting to set up the podcast equipment.

I decided to use Audacity, a free audio editing software. Although slightly outdated in user interface, the app's ease of use and myriad features made it an obvious choice. I began by inputting all the audio files we had recorded into Audacity. I then sorted them into order, and began to listen through, cutting any unnecessary or unusable sections. This left me with about three minutes of audio. I then recorded an introduction to the podcast, and an outro. Once these were added, the total length was a perfect four minutes. I then found some royalty free music for the intro and outro, and used the fade feature. Then, all that was left was cleaning the audio. One of the features I found extremely useful on Audacity was the noise reduction filter. The app will analyse a moment of silence in a recording and then automatically filter out anything it deems non-speech noise. 

A screenshot of my first attempt at editing the introduction:


In my opinion, this was our best week as far as teamwork. Everyone put in the effort to ensure things ran smoothly, and, of course, we posted our podcast to the Instagram before the deadline. A link to the podcast uploaded to Podbean can be found below.

Podcast on Podbean.com


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