Podcasting with a dictaphone

I've been getting ready to do a podcasting training day in a few weeks and have been looking into different ways to podcast.

A neat little gadget that I picked up this week is the Olympus Digital Voice Recorder. I bought the WS-311M model, but there's a few different ones out there. I bought mine from Amazon for about £50 but shop around and you might get a better deal.
Basically what you get is a pocket-sized voice recorder that you can take anywhere with you. It runs of a single AAA battery and the 512MB model can record about 8 hours of audio, more if you change the recording quality (up to 130 hours or so).

This would be a very convenient way of getting interviews into a podcast since the students could take this anywhere; they could record "Vox Pops" with people around the school, or even outside the school. The Olympus has an external microphone jack if you wanted to plug a better microphone into it.

The neat bit is getting the files off the device. Basically you slide the battery compartment off, and it reveals a USB stick. Simply plug the Olympus into a USB port (You might need to use the supplied USB extension cable if your port is hard to get to) and then you can just take the files off as you would with any other USB file stick.
To process the files, I had planned on using Audacity, as it seems to be the one that everyone recommends. It's free, which is always a bonus. But this is where I hit a slight issue. The Olympus records as WMA files, and due to licensing issues Audacity cannot open WMA files.

This problem is not a major one, however. A quick look on Google turned up a nice, free, file converter that will convert WMA files to MP3 files with a single right click. It's called Switch, and you can get it here: http://nch.com.au/switch/

It was a very simple job to convert the file (or files) from the Olympus into MP3 to play around with in Audacity.

I've recorded a sample podcast with the Olympus, which I have then uploaded to Podomatic.com. I guess I could host it directly on this blog, but I wanted to see how Podomatic worked.

The direct link to the podcast on Podomatic is here.

I'm also going to test out the Podomatic embedded player, to see how that works. In theory, this should appear here:

Hope that worked!

If you want to see my presentation about Podcasting, then I've uploaded it to Slideshare here.

Podcasting

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

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From my blogging and podcasting session, here's a guide to setting up a WordPress blog.

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