{"id":910,"date":"2006-08-14T19:44:34","date_gmt":"2006-08-14T19:44:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/podcast-test-audacity-and-odeo\/"},"modified":"2026-11-11T22:05:02","modified_gmt":"2026-11-12T03:05:02","slug":"podcast-test-audacity-and-odeo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/podcast-test-audacity-and-odeo\/","title":{"rendered":"podcast test:  audacity and odeo"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It is day one of my &quot;summer&quot; break between the summer and fall terms at <span>IU<\/span>, so I&#39;m going into full geek mode to try out both some old school and new school free podcasting tools.  Today, I dusted off <a href=\"http:\/\/audacity.sourceforge.net\/\">Audacity<\/a> and created a quick little ditty.  My plan was to come up with a quick, painless and (as always) <em><strong>free<\/strong><\/em> way to record and upload audio into my <span>Drupal<\/span> site as a <span>podcast<\/span> and test to see if it could be read in <span>iTunes<\/span> using the <span>RSS<\/span> feed generated by my site.  While I have iLife for my Mac, that doesn&#39;t count &#8211; not free!  Fortunately (or unfortunately &#8211; however you look at it), things didn&#39;t quite work out the way I had planned.  Here are the crazy paths I took this afternoon to create and then finally upload some audio (see more below): <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Recording audio:  Piece of cake as usual in Audacity!  Zero learning curve to click on the record button, say your peace and hit stop.  <\/li>\n<li>Converting file to .mp3:  A bit harder: <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<blockquote>\n<ol>\n<li>Plan A &#8211; Audacity:  Export as .mp3 within Audacity:  While the menu indicates the ability to export to .mp3, audacity doesn&#39;t support it by default.  Rather, you are <a href=\"http:\/\/audacity.sourceforge.net\/help\/faq?s=install&amp;item=lame-mp3\">linked to instructions to download and use a third party Lame .mp3 encoder<\/a>.  I found the instructions to be confusing, so I moved on to Plan B.<\/li>\n<li>Plan B &#8211; <span>iTunes<\/span>:  As an alternative, I exported the audio as a .<span>wav<\/span> file and then tried to converted the file to .mp3 within <span>iTunes<\/span>.  This USED TO BE a supported function in <span>iTunes<\/span>, but I see today the only option is &quot;Convert selection to <span>AAC<\/span>&quot;.  Looks like they did away with the &quot;Convert selection to .mp3&quot;?<\/li>\n<li>Plan C (circling back to Plan A): So, as suggested by the folks at Audacity, I tried to dig into Lame.  Bottom line &#8211; the instructions are lame \ud83d\ude42  Therefore, I headed over to trusty <a href=\"http:\/\/www.download.com\/sort\/3120-2001_4-0-1-4.html?qt=.mp3+encoder&amp;ca=2001\">download.com and did a quick search for a .mp3 converter<\/a>.  Looks like there are a bunch of highly rated tools to do the trick, so I looked for a simple and free solution and found it with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.download.com\/CDex\/3000-2140_4-10226370.html?tag=tab_pub\"><span>CDex<\/span> 1.51<\/a> I downloaded it and installed it in less than a minute.  It includes the LAME encoder, so I was able to go back into Audacity and use the &quot;export as .mp3&quot; function after all.  After a couple of clicks during the set up, I pointed Audacity to <span>CDex<\/span> and I should be good to go in the future.  Success!<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/blockquote>\n<ul>\n<ol>   <\/ol>\n<li>Uploading audio file to web:<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<blockquote>\n<ol>\n<li>Plan A &#8211; upload to my <span>Drupal<\/span> site.  <span>Ok<\/span>, here is where things got really squirrelly for me today.  I am having one heck of a time getting the audio module to work again.  I had it rolling awhile back, but I guess after a few updates and tweaks, it is all tweaked out.  I wasted a good hour uploading \/ installing \/ deleting before I called it quits and tried Plan B.  I&#39;m sure I&#39;ll figure it out, but I lost patience trying it today.  Also, with Plan B so much fun, I quickly lost interest in Plan A.<\/li>\n<li>Plan B &#8211; upload to <a href=\"http:\/\/studio.odeo.com\/channel\/42568\/view\">my <span>Odeo<\/span>.com account<\/a>:  Here is when things started getting much more fun.  I set up an <span>Odeo<\/span> account last December and thought it had some really fun features back then, but I didn&#39;t do much with it at the time.  From the <a href=\"http:\/\/odeo.com\/about\">creator of <span>Blogger<\/span><\/a>, <span>Odeo<\/span> is geared to bring <span>podcasting<\/span> to the masses (like <span>Blogger<\/span> did for <span>blogging<\/span>) with a slick, simple and clean interface.  I has all kinds of fun bells and whistles like being able to post from your phone, add a player on your site, a studio to create a <span>podcast<\/span>, the ability to upload your own .mp3 files <a href=\"http:\/\/odeo.com\/help\/faq\">and so on<\/a> &#8230; So, that is the direction I went today.  Check out my attempts on the left sidebar of my site.  I have it set on &quot;auto play&quot;, but maybe that will be too annoying after awhile.  You can also subscribe using the <span>podcast<\/span> <span>RSS<\/span> feed &#8211; but I&#39;m not sure why you would want to &#8211; unless you are my mother \ud83d\ude42<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<ol>  <\/ol>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>So, day 1 of &quot;summer break&quot; was truly a day in geek&#39;s paradise.  Can&#39;t wait for day 2 \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p> <!-- technorati tags begin --><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-size: 10px; text-align: right\">technorati tags:<a rel=\"tag\" href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/podcast\">podcast<\/a>, <a rel=\"tag\" href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/audacity\">audacity<\/a>, <a rel=\"tag\" href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/Odeo\">Odeo<\/a><\/p>\n<p><!-- technorati tags end --><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: right; font-size: 8px\">Blogged with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flock.com\" target=\"_new\" title=\"Flock\">Flock<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It is day one of my &quot;summer&quot; break between the summer and fall terms at IU, so I&#39;m going into full geek mode to try out both some old school and new school free podcasting tools. Today, I dusted off Audacity and created a quick little ditty. My plan was to come up with a&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[202,194,203],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-audacity","category-design","category-podcast"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=910"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/910\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3172,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/910\/revisions\/3172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designedtoinspire.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}