Thursday, April 11, 2013

Tune in to the news anywhere with TuneIn Radio

Radio is about the next best thing to the Internet for breaking news. A dedicated news team can break into regular programming at any time for important updates. And besides that, you can depend on regular newscasts every half hour.

That’s what makes TuneIn Radio so handy for news junkies. It automatically lists all your local radio stations and allows you to explore stations from pretty much every country in the world.

You can go to the News section and check out recommended stations or drill down to other categories such as Investigative News and Political News.

Or you can explore by location. Find out what’s going on overseas from the radio stations located there.

The selection of music is also good. Despite the war in Syria, for example, there are still plenty of good tunes on the air. And I’m really digging the rhythms from the Central African Republic.

The basic version of TuneIn Radio is free. For $4.99 you get rid of annoying little banner ads and gain the ability to record and play back.

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Monday, February 11, 2013

Sometimes sound is all you really need

Think outside the video box, and you’ll find there are other interesting ways to innovate on the web.

We recently did a story about efforts by a First Nations group trying to keep its language alive. Language is all about people talking to each other, so I recorded an elder speaking in his language and giving English translations.

I used the SoundCloud app with my iPhone, which made the recording easy to save and retrieve from the SoundCloud website. Best off all, I was able to embed it on the website along with the story. It definitely added a dimension not available in print.

Check it out:

As I’ve mentioned before, the big drawback with SoundCloud is that you can’t edit your track on the site. And so far, every one of the people I’ve interviewed have interjected a few words that needed to be edited out.

To do that, you need to download the track and open it in an audio editor such as Audacity. It’s actually pretty easy once you get the hang of it, but I can see where some people might find this to be a major stumbling block. For that reason, I’m hoping SoundCloud will soon incorporate some basic editing tools.

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Sunday, February 3, 2013

Two other smartphone options: Flickr and SoundCloud

A smartphone full of apps opens all kinds of opportunities for journalists. Here are a couple:

Flickr

You can easily take a bunch of pictures and upload them to Flickr as you go. The pictures go into a queue so you don’t have to worry about waiting for one to upload before you move on to the next.

Once you’ve got a good selection, you can go to the newsroom and head for the Flickr website. Pick your pictures and put them in a set. Display them as a slideshow, copy the embed code, and place it on your website.

Voilà! The event is hardly over and already you’ve got it covered with pictures.

SoundCloud

Sometime words and sounds are all you need. How about a one-minute, heartfelt statement? How about the distant boom of avalanche control?

You can capture these moments by tapping the record button in the SoundCloud app. Tap the save button and it’s uploaded.

As with Flickr, you can later get the embed code and place it on your website.

Boom! The echoes have barely died down and already you’ve got audio.

(Just one caveat, though — you can’t do any editing on the SoundCloud site, so try to get it right the first time or you’ll have to fire up a program like Audacity.)

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Sunday, December 9, 2012

Let your iPhone be your stenographer

If you’re on the road with an iPhone and need to quickly get a story to the newsroom, you could just phone it in.

But here’s another option if you prefer to write it first. Skip the tiny keyboard, fire up the email app and use dictation. It works surprisingly well if you speak clearly. No doubt you’ll have to make a few corrections, but you’ll start with a pretty good first draft.

Even if you’re proficient at thumb-typing, there are times when it can be tricky and dictation can come to the rescue — say, if you’re a passenger in a car on a bumpy road.

As I said, you have to enunciate. Another thing to keep in mind is that dictation works best in short bursts, so turn it off after every sentence so it has a chance to catch up.

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Friday, November 23, 2012

How to: an audio slideshow tutorial

The best thing about audio slideshows is that they are unique to the web. Sure, we can write stories like newspapers or create videos like TV, but where else do you find audio slideshows? Nowhere.

The second best thing is their impact. Video is fleeting. Pictures — even if they’re shown for only a few seconds — are engaging. You get to think about what you’re seeing. And with narration you’re given a deeper understanding.

The third, and final, best thing is that they’re easy to make. All you need is a couple of minutes of sound recording and a dozen or so pictures. Let’s go through the steps, starting (arbitrarily) with sound.

Recording audio

First off, you need a digital audio recorder of some kind. It has to be a device capable of recording sound in a format that can be exported to your computer. After recording, you typically plug the device into your computer to get at the file. Or it may allow for sharing via email.

I use an iPhone with a built-in Voice Memos app found in the Utilities folder. It’s super simple to use and allows you to email the recording — which I did.

Here are a few tips for recording great sound: Hold the microphone with a straight arm a few inches away from your subject’s mouth. The closer you can get without making them uncomfortable, the better the sound quality will be. Also, hold it as far away from yourself as possible so that your own breathing or bodily sounds aren’t picked up by accident.

If you record with an iPhone and export the file to your computer, you’ll find yourself with an .m4a file. The apps we’ll be using in this tutorial — Audacity and SoundSlides — don’t play well with that format so it has to be converted to mp3.

If you have iTunes installed, conversion is easy. First go in to the iTunes preferences and click on the General tab. Then click on a button that says Import Settings . . . You’ll see a new window with options for Import Using. Make sure it’s set to MP3 Encoder.

Now you can drag your .m4a file into iTunes. Right-click on it and go for Create MP3 Version. iTunes will create a new file that you can drag onto your desktop and use for your project.

Editing audio

If you haven’t already, download and install Audacity. This a free audio editor that’s powerful enough to be used by many professionals. We’re lucky to have it — thanks to the open source community.

Fire it up and import your audio file. There are many things you can do with Audacity. In the course of recording your audio, you likely got a lot of stuff you don’t want. That stuff needs to be deleted, so you’re left only with the audio you want. You might also want to change the order of various parts of your audio. Or you might want to combine various parts of a number of audio tracks into one.

Full-blown instructions on how to do this are beyond the scope of this tutorial, but you’ll likely be able to figure it out for yourself. For example, you can use the edit tool to highlight portions you don’t want and hit the Delete button on your keyboard. You can create a new track and use the edit tool to grab portions of the original track and place them in the right order on that track.

When you’re done, export your audio in .mp3 format to a convenient spot on your computer. I use the desktop as a temporary way station because it’s easy to find things there. But you should later stash everything away in another folder to avoid desktop clutter and slowing your computer down.

Taking pictures

If you work with professional photographers, persuade one of them to take your pictures. You can be sure they’ll do a good job. If that’s not possible, the next best thing might be to have someone submit photos — depending on what type of project you’re doing. And if that fails, don’t be afraid to jump in and take your own pictures.

There are plenty of good digital cameras at affordable prices these days. If you have a smart phone, there’s probably a half-decent one built in. If you’re not confident about your camera’s abilities, go outdoors where natural lighting is almost always better. And don’t be shy about getting close to your subject when warranted — it makes for better impact.

Export or share your pictures into your computer, pick out the best 15 to 20 and put them in a folder.

Editing pictures

A slideshow works best if all the pictures are horizontal and the same size. So open up each photo in an image editing program, and crop them to 500 pixels by 350 pixels (as you become more experienced, you may decide a different size works better). Photoshop is the industry standard, but for the simple editing we’re doing, there are many alternatives that work just as well.

You’ll also want to enhance each photo so that it looks good. If you don’t know what you’re doing there are two ways to go — rely on a staff photographer to help you or use the automated enhancements built into your editing program. iPhone, for example, has this function.

One last thing — your pictures should all be in the .jpg format. They likely are, but it doesn’t hurt to make sure.

Putting it all together

Download and install the demo version of Soundslides. There’s a “plus” version, but you won’t need it for your first project.

Soundslides was made by journalists for journalists, so you know it has to be idiot-proof. The opening screen asks you to import your sound and picture files. Do it. If you followed my advice, you’ll find them conveniently located on your desktop.

You can now move your pictures around to whatever order you like and have them display for however many seconds you like. Make them co-ordinate with the audio, if you wish.

Under the Slides tab, all the pictures are displayed. Grab them and move them to your heart’s content. As you do that, their order is changed on the timeline displayed at the bottom. To change the duration of how long a picture is displayed, click and drag the white bars in between them.

Yes, it really is as simple as that. There are other things you can do, but for now this will be enough to finish a project. Click on the Test button to make sure it’s what you want. If that’s a go, click on the Export button and you’ll find a folder (once again, go for the desktop) with all the necessary files called “publish_to_web.” That’s kind of unwieldy, so change it to something like “slideshow.”

Uploading and embedding

You may have someone on staff to do this for you, but if you don’t there are step-by-step instructions at the Soundslides website. Basically, that folder you exported needs to go on server you have access to. After that, you can get an embed code from the Soundslides website and place it on your website.

Conclusion

This tutorial might seem daunting, but once you’ve got a project or two under your belt, your fears will disappear and you’ll feel like a pro. Go ahead and fumble your way through a project. The satisfaction at the end will make it worthwhile.

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Monday, November 19, 2012

Now live: my first audio slideshow

As promised, my first audio slideshow has been created and is live at the Daily News website. It took some friendly badgering of two reporters and a determination on my own part to get past the technological hurdles. The resulting slideshow has room for improvement, but now that I know what I’m doing the next one should be both easier and better. In any case, take a couple of minutes to enjoy the splendour of Wells Gray Park — one of the great parks of the world.

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Monday, November 12, 2012

And a cat named Gibby shall lead the way

Yet another milestone has been reached in the education of yours truly with the production today of my first audio slideshow.

I used an iPhone camera to take pictures of a homely old cat named Gibby and the iPhone voice memo app to record an interview with his owner. I shared the pictures to my iMac using Photostream and I sent the interview via email.

I used iTunes to convert the audio to the mp3 format favoured by the open source audio editor Audacity. I actually only needed Audacity to trim some quiet spots from the beginning and end, but it’s a full-featured editor that could be used for a multitude of purposes.

Once that was done, I fired up a demo version of Soundslides Pro and imported both the pictures and audio. This idiot-proof app — designed with journalists in mind — is super simple to use, and within minutes I had a five-picture slideshow with the interview in the background. I added captions and a title, then exported the results.

The export takes the form a folder with all the files you need for upload to a server. I named the folder “slideshow” and you can see the result right over here. (Be sure to turn on the captions!) It won’t win any prizes, but I wanted to see if it would work — and it did.

The final test was getting an embed code from Soundslide Pro and inserting it into the Kamloops Daily News website. Yes, the Gibby slideshow was briefly in the wild for any of our readers to see, but I doubt that any of them did — I placed it in a fairly obscure section. In any case, that, too, was a success.

And so I am emboldened to try my hand at a for-real audio slideshow, and already I have a project in mind. Stay tuned.

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