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.