Faculty Spotlight – Philippe Seminet

Dr. Philippe Seminet, Literature & Languages
Experimenting with Audacity and Format Factory

I did a podcasting workshop last year on campus and learned how easy it is to use Audacity to do recordings for my eCollege courses. While the software allows you to do all sorts of fancy editing with background music, etc., I have enjoyed using it for the bare bones purpose of recording listening exercises for my French students. I basically just open it up, hit record, and stop when I’m through (usually 1 to 2 minutes per exercise). I use a simple headset with mic (courtesy of A&M-Commerce), and the sound quality is excellent. One problem with Audacity, however, is that the WAV file that is automatically created is too big to easily load into eCollege. You can easily reduce it to about one tenth the size by using FormatFactory (another cool, free software program) to convert the WAV file into MP3 format. You get used to Audacity and FormatFactory after you’ve done a few recordings and conversions. I’ll spell out the steps in what follows, as well as the sequence needed to load your finished audio file to your eCollege course. Beware, it looks like a hassle, but it’s really just a matter of getting the hang of it:

To create and upload an audio file, open Audacity, record, stop, then export as WAV file to folder on your hard drive. Open Format Factory, drag file from your folder to Format Factory window and click on “All to MP3.” Hit Start button, and when complete, open Output Folder (icon at top), then drag MP3 file back to your folder.

To upload to eCollege, go to Course Home, click File Manager tab, then Upload Files tab, browse to find the file in your folder, then click upload file. Now you have to embed your file within your lecture, so go to your lecture already within the course, put cursor where you want the link in the lecture, click on add a link icon at top, and make sure “Link to Content or Files” is selected (it’s the default). Click continue, then open the “Select Content from Course Folder” tab, select the MP3 file and write a title in the “text to display”, hit “add link,” and don’t forget to hit the Save Changes tab. Voilà! The same procedure is used for video files. If you’re just uploading text files, you can go straight to the lecture, add link, and upload from your computer.