Audio on the Go
I don’t know about you, but my life is pretty hectic right now. I apologize for being completely MIA from this blog; today was the deadline for an article I’ve been working on through Spot.us about school meal programs and the challenges in offering more nutritious food, which has been sucking up all of my time. More about that to come shortly, but alas, it is out of my hands — at least for the moment — so let’s talk about some of my audio mishaps and discoveries throughout the process.
So, if I haven’t already made this clear in previous posts, I’m broke. Consequently, I’m also very cheap in terms of the equipment I use for reporting. To record audio, I still use an old-school tape recorder or an $80 voice recorder that attaches to my iPod, which I bought four years ago to record lectures in college. Both of which have been doing an adequate job, aside from the times my iPod is full of music and doesn’t have space to record. But what’s not broke, I can’t afford to fix. That is until it breaks…
So a few weeks back, I started noticing that some of the interviews I proudly conducted and recorded on my iPod, would skip and conveniently pause, usually amid the most golden of quotes. I’ve been getting more interested in posting audio files online and using interview clips to accompany photo slideshows, but these glitches have made editing an absolute nightmare.
Then I discovered Cinch, a service of BlogTalkRadio, which allows easy recording from the convenience of your cell phone. What’s more, the recording is automatically uploaded into an mp3 on your personalized web archive making it easy, a cinch even, to use in digital projects.
So, when you find yourself out in the middle of nowhere for an interview, as I was recently…
…searching for an office among greenhouses and acres of farmland, with nothing but a dead iPod and tapes full of interviews that I hadn’t transcribed, all I had to do was whip out my cell phone, dial a prearranged number and voila–I was recording…the sound of trucks bouncing down the dirt road…people giving me directions to the office…and ultimately the subject of interest.
I’ve also been using cinch for phone interviews by three-way calling the cinch number and then my sources. Just make sure you have reception and a phone plan with enough minutes, because I had some serious overage on my  last two phone bills—probably around the cost of a new recorder…
Aaaanyway, register your phone number here and give it a try.
I’ve also heard that Utterli and FreeConferenceCall have similar recording programs, but their websites are not nearly as user friendly. Let me know if you have any other affordable suggestions because Izzy the iPod is definitely seeing her dying days.
