Incredibly Useful Open Source Software
I use Audacity in conjunction with LAME MP3 encoder all the time – almost daily. It is open source software. It is totally free and it is also advertisement free. Additionally, it does not load any undesirable add-ons to your computer, as I have experienced with some “free” downloads.
Audacity is a multi-track sound studio. It gives you the power to turn your computer into a mini recording studio. You can record sound effects, digital and acoustic instruments, and most importantly – your voice. It has got a ton of editing features, which I barely touch. I use it simply as a way to record lectures and instructions, and I use that recording in its raw form.
The LAME MP3 encoder works directly with Audacity, so once I am done recording, I can seamlessly convert my recording to an MP3 and then put those recordings into Blackboard or one of my blogs. I’d give you a direct example here, but WordPress won’t allow you to upload MP3s unless you pay for a storage upgrade (which I’m not doing for this blog). You’ll have to Click Here for a sample of a lecture recorded with Audacity. Simply click on any “play button” in the orange boxes.
Audacity works wonderfully with some other web applications that I have used, like Slide Rocket. If you want to add audio files through Slide Rocket’s recording feature, you have to pay money. With Audacity and LAME, I can do it for free. Here’s an example of a slide presentation I created using Audacity and Slide Rocket:
Yes, I could use more of the Audacity features and clean up my lectures, taking out the little pops and smooth it out. But, I’ve been lazy and have justified my laziness. I figure if I were giving a lecture live, it would also be flawed with “ums” and other verbal hiccups.
How could you use Audacity? Let’s say you’d really like to convey a problem you had with an assignment to your instructor on Blackboard. Rather than taking the time to laboriously type out what you’d like to say, you could simply speak it into Audacity, convert it to an MP3 and using the audio upload feature for comments through Blackboard. You could let your instructor hear your thoughts in audio form.
Is This Useful Open Source Software?
In my search for new open source applications, I stumbled across Notepad++. It is a source code editor like Notepad on my Windows OS, but it claims that it turbo-charges the speed of what you put up on the web, making sites load faster, and thus reducing carbon emissions, because presumably your computer won’t be on as much.
Notepad++ claims to have PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expression) Search/Replace and syntax folding. Wow! So I guess when I know what that is, I will most assuredly want that. I do believe I will download this application and try it as a text editor and see if it offers me any immediate advantage over using regular Notepad with no pluses.
Lisa the Student - Always Expanding the Mind 