Christmas Toy Train

 

Every Christmas we put up the "Talking Silver Rail Express" toy train under the Christmas tree. My Dad gave it to us in the early '90s. It creates one of those "memory" sounds.

Download (mp3 file, 672 K, 96khz, mono)

Monster from the 50's

Can you name this famous monster from the 50's? Here's a hint. He's big and Japanese.

Amazon.com has mp3 downloads for sell and they carry many movie soundtracks.

Download file - (220K)

Alien

I discovered Gizmoz which is a web service that creates animated avatars. I needed an alien voice so I used the Mac's built-in Zarvox speech to text voice to create this short clip.

Download Audio - (23K)

Crows Before Breakfast

Crows usually don't hang out at our house. This morning when I got up I could hear a mob at the top of our fir trees having an arguement. I threw on a hat and coat and stepped out on our back porch with my mp3 recorder and a stereo lapel mic clipped to the front of my jacket. I made a beautiful 10 minute recording standing in the 30 degree F fresh air, but when I got back inside, I discovered that I had plugged the mic into the headphone jack. Dang. By the time I got back outside, most of the group had departed. So what you hear is a much smaller group. This recording was made at 7:30 am on Sunday, December 3, 2006.

Listen to the recording... (2 minutes, 128kbps, 22kHz, 1.9 MB)

Mac Speech Test

Today I was experimenting with my MacBook's built-in text to speech feature and wondered if I could record the speech. I did it by attaching my mp3 recorder to the Mac's headphone jack. I then downloaded the mp3 file, opened it in Audacity, added a music track and saved it as a wav file. I then used iTunes to convert the wav file to mp3 and add the file info.

Listen to the file (128kbps, 44kHz, 470 KB)

Audacity for Intel MacBook

I had a hard time finding a version of Audacity (absolutely the best free, open source audio editor) which would work on the new Intel based Macintosh computers. I finally found a link to a zipped file of the application. It's version 1.3 which as of this writing is a beta version. Here's the link to the zip file:

Link to download Audacity 1.3 for Intel MacBook

I've been putting it through its paces and so far so good. I've only found two things that don't work. You can't export as an mp3 file because there is not a Lame encoder which works yet. This is not a big deal. I save out of Audacity as a WAV file and use iTunes to convert to mp3 and add id3 tags. I also discovered that the program crashes when you try to use software based audio play through to listen while recording. This is not nice because you cannot listen to other tracks while recording a new one.

Listen to the sample file... (37 seconds, 595 Kb, 128 kbps, 44.1 kHz)

Neighborhood Fireworks

Lots of people set off fireworks in our neighborhood. No one seems to care that some of the big ones that go way up in the air are illegal in Oregon. I made this recording at about 9:45 pm (dusk) standing on my back porch.

Listen... (8:30, 7.8 Mb)

Morning Thunder

This morning I awoke to the sound of thunder and garbage trucks. I made this 12 minute recording standing on my back porch at about 9 am. Listen for a wide variety of sounds including chickens, crows, and other birds.

Listen... (10.8 Mb)

Podomatic.com podcast

Here's the easiest and fastest way I've found to create a podcast. It took me about 5 minutes to get set up and create my first podcast. Podomatic.com is a free service for storing and sharing audio and video files

Podcasting a Flash File

Ever wonder what happens in iTunes when you enclose a Flash file instead of a mp3 file? Well, this should answer that question. This post includes a link to a .swf file on the Breeze server at Chemeketa Community College. The file is a slideshow with music.

Here's a direct link to the file.

Photo Safari Backyard Flowers

While photographing flowers in my backyard, I recorded my voice using my MP3 recorder. Later I used iMovie to match the still photos to my voice. I saved the movie as an MP4 file and uploaded it to Ourmedia.org. This enclosed file should automatically download in iTunes.

Link to movie... (15 Mb)

Update: Later I also uploaded the same mp4 file to Google Video and to YouTube.com. They both converted the movie to Flash and in the process somehow messed up the synchonization of the photos with my voice.

I also tried using SwishPix to create a slideshow with narration. I used the same mp3 audio file I used to make the mp4 movie. The SwishPix slideshow is only 2.5 Mb compared to the 15 Mb mp4. The slideshow doesn't advance automatically. Users have to click to advance to the next slide, but it's kind of nice having manual control. You can jump around between pictures while listening to the narrative. I also like that you can add captions to each picture.

First Video Podcast

Here's my first example of a video podcast. I've enclosed a mp4 movie file. Let's see if iTunes will download it and play it.

Link to download.

Thyroid Dysfunction

This nursing lecture was given by Terri Wenzig at Chemeketa Community College on January 6, 2006.

Download the lecture.

Chemeketa Podcast #1

Listen to this cool new podcast from Chemeketa Community College.

http://breeze.chemeketa.edu/p34353859/output/audio_clip.mp3?download=audio_clip.mp3

Jim

Crickets

I made this cricket recording on August 8, 2005 at about 10pm in my backyard. It has some background traffic noise. Listen...

Welcome

Welcome to SonicSnapshots. Soon we will be adding links to resources for recording in the field and samples of recordings.