Sunday, March 25, 2012

Audacity Tutorial: How To Make A Simple Podcast

This tutorial will show you an easy way to create a podcast using Audacity (for Windows only), which is a free sound recorder and editor that can be found here: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

(For those who don't know) A podcast is pretty much a talk show where people record their voices and distribute it on the Internet. It’s best to have your podcast centered on a topic, and when you record that you have a script, or at least a list of things to talk about if you’re doing it impromptu.

Things you will need:
Audacity
LAME MP3 encoder (allow you to export your final podcast file as an MP3) found in the above link as well.
A microphone
And a quiet place to record your voice

Step One: Click the link above and download and install Audacity, then the LAME MP3 Encoder.


Step 2: Open Audacity. A new project file is created automatically, so you may want to go to File > Save Project As… to have it set up right away. You will get a warning box saying that the file type you’re trying to save it as (.aup) can only be opened in Audacity. Click OK and choose your file name and destination, then click Save.

Step 3:  Make sure your microphone is hooked up to your computer, and that you’re in a quiet area where no one will disturb you or where excess noise will be picked up. Click the Record button and start talking! Don’t worry if you mess up. You can easily press the Stop button to stop recording and do it again.


Step 4: Now that your first try is done, you’ll want to press the Play button to review what you’ve just recorded. If there is an unwanted section within the track you just recorded, no matter where it is, you can easily snip it out by clicking and dragging on the audio track, then pressing the Delete button on your keyboard, or by going to Edit > Remove Audio > Delete in the toolbar.

To navigate and get precise measurements, go to View > Zoom In or Zoom Out.


Step 5: Chances are you didn’t say everything you wanted to say during your first take. That’s fine! Audacity allows multiple tracks of audio to be played simultaneously. The trick is, you need to mute the track(s) you have already recorded before you record again; otherwise you’ll literally be talking over yourself! To mute the tracks already laid out, simple hit the mute button on the track. You’ll know it’s muted when the blue lines become grayed out. Once all of your previous tracks are muted, you can start recording again!



Step 6: Once you’ve recorded everything you want to say and edited out unwanted parts, you need to string together the tracks in order, to create a cohesive narrative. You don’t want the tracks to be playing over each other or be out of order. Using the Time Shift Tool on the toolbar, you can drag the individual tracks along their track. You’ll know when it’s lined up with another track when a yellow line appears along the edge.

You’ll also want to get familiar with the arrows on the left side of the track bars. You can rename tracks and reorder them to be in chronological order to make things easy.

Step 7: Now that you’ve laid out everything they way you want it, you’ll want to eliminate excess noise from your microphone (read: static). An easy way to do this is to go to Effect > Noise Removal at the top of the tool bar. When it says Get Noise Profile, select a few seconds of your audio where you do not talk. Then go back to the tool and you can mess around with the settings. I find the default setting to be sufficient, so make sure ALL of your audio is selected, and click OK. Voila, you’ve lessened that annoying static in the background!


Step 8: So you’ve perfected your script or otherwise edited your audio the way you want it. Know what you can do to make it more professional? Add music, of course! You can add it to the beginning as an intro, use it throughout as transitions, and/or use it at the end as an outro. Be careful here, though. If you distribute your podcast on the Internet, you must own the copyright to the music, have permission from the copyright holder, or use royalty free music. Once you’ve selected the piece(s) of music you want to add to your podcast, simply go to File > Import > Audio… and there it is! All you need to do is chop up the pieces you want to add and slide them into position.

To add more flair to your podcast, you can also have music playing in the background while you talk. Simply lower the volume of the music track by sliding the volume bar to the left. You may need to slide the audio to the right for the other audio tracks depending on how loud the music is. Keep playing it until you get it the way you want.


Step 9: Now that you’ve recorded and edited your voice, removed excess static, and add music, you’re pretty much done! You can fiddle with the effects, but you’re pretty much ready to export your file. This is where the LAME MP3 Encoder you were supposed to download and install comes in. By itself, Audacity is unable to export its audio files as MP3s, which are probably the most common and easily used format for audio files. The LAME Encoder allows you to do this. Simply go to File > Export and all you have to do is give it a name if you haven’t already, and save it to your destination of choosing!


Step 10: Now that you have an easy-to-use audio file, it’s time to decide where you want to distribute it. You can use YouTube, or a podcast-friendly website such as PodBean or iTunes. Search around and choose one that fits you best. After you create an account and upload it, time to share it! Spread it around and point your friends towards it and ask for feedback.

Podcasts are typically episodic in nature, so you can choose to keep going, or just be satisfied with your one-off. Audacity is a good program, but it’s not just limited to podcasting. See what you can come up with!

Friday, March 23, 2012

Halo and What It Means To Me

Earlier this week I mentioned a game franchise called Halo being important to me, and today I'll be expanding on that. I was originally going to submit something similar to ageofgratitude.com which is a website that was put up where people submit "letters of gratitude" for Halo becoming so important to their lives. I may still submit this to it, and if I do I'll make sure to share it here.




Now, I could go on and on about the story of Halo and how engrossed I have become in the lore, but I'm not here to do that right now. I'm here to talk about how Halo as a franchise has affected my life and steered me towards a different destiny. Okay, maybe that's a little dramatic, but it has definitely altered my life in more ways than I could have imagined.

I was never much of a gamer when I was young. I played Pokemon on my Gameboy, I went to other peoples houses to mess around on their Nintendo and Sega systems. I owned a Playstation and later a Playstation 2, but I didn't use them that much. I went outside a lot and did other things.
Fast forward to late 2003/early 2004. Halo was released in 2001 for the original Xbox, but I had not known this at the time. Xbox was relatively new compared to Sony and Nintendo, and I didn't play games that much. We had the TV on in the living room, and a commercial came on advertising Halo 2. I thought it looked really, really cool, but I unfortunately didn't own an Xbox, as the commercial clearly stated it would be exclusive to. I figured I had time since it wasn't coming out until November of 2004, and I wanted to play the first game before that anyway. Aside from my PS2, I also played a couple of games on our PC. It wasn't great my any stretch of the imagination, but I enjoyed it. I played my first RTS, Dune 2000, and that got me into RTS games, but that's another story.

So I went to Walmart, not thinking about Halo 2 being exclusive to the Xbox, and went to see if they had the first one on the PC. My story could have well and truly ended right there, but unknown to me at the time, Gearbox Software ported the first Halo game to the PC in 2003. If they had not done that, my story would have taken a different turn.


So I bought it (well, my parents did), and I booted up our crappy PC. The graphics were horrible because of it, but I couldn't have known that at the time. The point is that I was instantly hooked. The story, the gameplay, it grabbed me and didn't let go. No other game I had played before had done that. I played through the story until about halfway through, where the parasitic organism known as the Flood was introduced. This introduction was both intense and terrifying, and I took a break from the single player as a result.

Since I didn't want to face the horrors of the Flood in single player, I decided to try out the multiplayer. This was the first game I had played online against people that weren't in the same room I was in, and it was an interesting experience. If buying the game and getting hooked into the story was the first step, the multiplayer experience I had with the first game definitely sealed the deal. I was a Halo fan for life after that.

Now, you might be asking, how does becoming a fan of a game change your life in the way I'm alluding to? Several things happened: by playing Halo's multiplayer constantly, I inevitably made some friends. One of the first people I met when I started playing online was a girl who went by the moniker [DA]kits. I met her in 2003/2004, and we became best of friends. Later we ended up dating; we've been together for almost 3 years now. I joined a group of people, called a clan, through a guy I met who went by Coyote. This clan used names of animals as identities, and I assumed the Cobra persona. Through Coyote, I connected and bonded with this group of people. The clan might not be official anymore, but most of us are still good friends to this day.
I got an Xbox  for Christmas after Halo 2 came out, and I got both games and became addicted even more. My dad wasn't convinced about signing me up for the online service, so the PC version would have to do for now. I played Halo 2 constantly, splitscreening with some of my friends from school. In both games (Halo PC and Halo 2 on the Xbox), I became rather adept at the multiplayer, much to the fear of my friends, both online and in person.

One day in middle school during a field trip that I didn't go to, one of my teachers brought in his Xbox so the few of us that didn't go had something to do. He played Halo 2 online about as much as I played Halo PC online, so I was the only match for him. Obviously PC and Xbox are different, so he kicked my butt up and down the street, but I was the only challenge for him out of everyone, which I thought was funny. He told me he was impressed with how good I was with no online experience.

I didn't play many games other than Halo and Command and Conquer (RTS games are part of my gaming roots, too), but that changed when the new Xbox came out. I finally got the online service, but the newest Halo game, Halo 3, wouldn't be released for another year at least. In the meantime, I got into other games, such as Gears of War and Far Cry: Instincts. The wait for Halo 3 made me realize how many other good games there were out there, and as I got older, I had more money and could buy these games and enjoy them.




So there you have it. Almost 10 years ago my life changed. Before becoming an avid gamer, I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do when I grew up. I threw around the idea of joining the military (which isn't a bad thing), but I ultimately didn't know. Now I have a pretty good idea. I love playing games, and I want to try my hand at making them for a living. Obviously any game developer would say that the two aren't the same, but if you don't have the passion for video games, I doubt you would be a good developer.

As a side note, if any of you were wondering what those words meant from Halo related piece in my portfolio: Spartans are genetically altered super soldiers that are central to the games; ODST's, or Orbital Drop Shock Troopers, also known as Helljumpers, are special forces that drop from orbit in single man capsules. 34 is my favorite number, mostly because there's a Spartan who shares my name who's number designation is Samuel-034. Now you also know how I decided on the name of my blog!

I'll talk about why I like Halo another day. For now, I hope this was some good insight into why I've embarked on this path to becoming a developer.

Monday, March 19, 2012

2D Design Portfolio

It's been a bit since I've posted anything, and today I'm going to do something a bit different. I haven't taken any classes that deal directly with designing or developing video games, but I am taking the prerequisites. Last semester I took 2D design. This semester I'm taking Drawing I, but that's a topic for another day.

Anyway, the following is some of my best work that came from this class. It was my first studio class, and it was tough in the beginning, but in the end it was enjoyable. Keep in mind I have no natural artistic talent (in the visual sense), and I had really no prior experience.





Since this is a video game related blog, I figured I would start with the one piece that had to do with video games. This is a "contemporary synthetic cubism" painting done on panels of matte board using gouache paint. I started by painting very abstractly onto a small piece of matte board using the assorted colors you can see, and then cutting it into pieces, and pasting it onto a larger piece of matte board. I then used stencils of words that I had created and painted over and within the panels.

The words are all related to a video game franchise called Halo. Spartan, ODST, Helljumper, Xbox, and the number 34. I can go on and on about the significance to Halo to me, so I'll leave that for another day.




This next piece is a watercolor painting focusing on an abstraction of Gothic architecture with an inclusion of gargoyles. This was the second painting we did in class (with the previous being the third and final), and I had an easier time with watercolors than I did with gouache.




This is the first painting we did, and it is a gouache painting with a focus on values. I had a hard time learning since this was the first painting I ever did, and I had trouble with the technique - especially the details and different values. However, I feel I did a very good job considering.




The last three pictures are from a series involving shapes and sharpie markers. We were instructed to make about a dozen sketches using squares or circles exclusively, following a central theme of a word, such as "direction". The first piece we did was to take our four best sketches and combine them in the above composition. The words I used, from left to right, starting at the top, are: cluster, asymmetry, symmetry, and direction.




The next one we were instructed to take one of our sketches and make a similar composition, but this time using the sketch and its mirror image into the four corners. This is my direction sketch; I really like how it came out, especially how you can flip it 90 degrees and it's almost completely different.




For the last one we were told to take one of our sketches and create a repeating tile pattern. I used my symmetry sketch. This one was the most time consuming of them all - especially since I had to shrink the original sketch down to half of its size and then repeat it 24 times.


All in all, it was a decent class. I learned to have fun with it and I made some friends. The shape series was probably my favorite due to its simplicity and focus on composition. I'm not much of a painter. The very last project we were working on was a perspective piece, but we never finished it because the semester ended. I really want to go back and finish it some day because I think it would turn out pretty cool. Plus, we were just working on perspective in Drawing, and it should help a lot.

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

The Zero Three Four Podcast Debut

The first episode of my podcast. I'm not sure if I'll continue it after this class, but hopefully it's enjoyable to listen to! I discuss an article that I read, which can be found here:

http://www.xbox360achievements.org/news/news-10809-CoD--Black-Ops-Voted-Best-Videogame-Ending-of-All-Time.html


Podcast Powered By Podbean

Test Podcast

This is a test for my podcast that will go up later today.



Podcast Powered By Podbean