Audio Tools and Resources

Editing Software

Mac Garage Band: some pros I know swear by it.

I prefer Audacity – free download for Mac and Windows. support  (Added 10/23/12)

Hindenburg  the one I use — powerful and easy.   30-day trial version.   For Mac and PC.  The manual isn’t detailed, but there are excellent tutorials on YouTube.

Miscellaneous Tools

Dropvox, Dropbox for smartphone audio recordings. IOS only? Works great!  Record on iPhone and, voila, it’s in your dropbox.

Freesound   Sound effects — From http://www.kk.org/cooltools/:

There are sound effects libraries that cost more than a small car, and they’re probably worth it to certain kinds of users — like movie studios or audio production houses — but not to me. In search of interesting, appropriately licensed sounds for personal amusement, some google searching led me to Freesound.org, which has many thousands of freely usable, user-contributed sound recordings, all Creative Commons licensed. ..

Freesound really is free, too, though donations are accepted; it started as a project of the Music Technology Group of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. One (very small) catch: you can listen all you want just by visiting the site; downloading the files requires free registration.

 

Examples, Inspiration, and How-to: from Radio

Third Coast International Audio Festival

Based in Chicago, the Third Coast International Audio Festival (TCIAF) curates sound-rich audio stories from around the world and shares them with as many ears as possible – on the radio, on the Internet, and at public listening events all over the place. Operating year-round, Third Coast offers producers and listeners a multitude of ways to celebrate audio storytelling:

  • IT’S AN AUDIO LIBRARY This website is packed with more than one thousand audio stories of all stripes, producer interviews, weekly podcasts, archived conference sessions and the latest Festival happenings.
  • IT’S A WEEKLY RADIO SHOW
  • IT’S A NATIONAL RADIO SHOW  Best of the Best: The Third Coast Festival Broadcast showcases the winners of the Third Coast / Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Competition and airs on stations across the country each fall.
  • IT’S A PODCAST The weekly Third Coast Podcast, hosted by Re:sound producer Katie Mingle, presents Re:sound episodes and special features from our vast audio library.

Transom.org 

iA ublic radio-related site with lots of good info — about both audio content and the technology.  Well worth browsing.  And if you’re serious about audio, it’s a terrific site to follow.

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