AUDIO MEMORIES and AUDACITY- Editing is FUN and REWARDING!
There is nothing more heart turning than hearing a loved one's voice, especially when they are no longer with us. I decided to start interviewing my dad via cell phone call recording app and it was a wonderful experience. As I started working with his audio I regretted that I didn't have any audio of my mother who had passed away fourteen years prior.
Suddenly, I recalled that she had started making a cassette recording of her life two weeks before to her death. She died too young. It was a year before I could emotionally handle listening to that recording to transcribe it. Later, that transcription was added to FamilySearch and I dismissed it from my mind.
I was so excited to remember that cassette, that I ran to find it. Unfortunately, the recording was less than ideal. The shhhh of background cassette noise and my mother's constant starting and stopping of the cassette player creating many... many annoying clicks, made it very difficult to enjoy. AUDACITY TO THE RESCUE!
Example: Mary Lynn and FireFlies with Cassette Noise
Example: Mary Lynn and Fireflies with Noise Reduction
I just plugged a cassette player into my computer, using the audio jacks, and recorded it digitally into Audacity. I then edited it. It turned out beautifully! I chose to group by topic with segments only 1-3 minutes long. I figured somebody might actually listen to them if they were shorter with interesting titles. I found the cassette almost exactly fourteen years from the day my mother started recording it. I posted the segments to FamilySearch on the Anniversary of her death, two weeks later. I notified my family so they could listen on that date and hear her voice for the first time in fourteen years.
Audacity website for App Download
Link to Necessary Audacity Plug Ins- To read and export various File formats you will need "LAME" and "FFmpeg" (I didn't know about this and ended up buying a file converter program to convert my phone files to WAV and then from WAV to mp3-NO NEED, THIS IS FREE!)
Enjoy!
Please let me know what experiences you have by commenting!
Comments
Post a Comment