Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to today's History Fireside video. In today's tutorial I want to show you how you can record audio lectures clearly, effectively and cheaply. I might do a video later on how you can record video lectures using your phone but for now I wanted to start with something very basic and talk about just recording audio. There are many reasons in fact why you might just want to record an audio lecture rather than a video lecture. Some lectures don't necessarily need any visual elements beyond say a PowerPoint presentation that students can follow alongside the lecture. Audio lectures can also be really useful when it comes to online learning because they are relatively low bandwidth compared to video lectures. The files for an audio lecture are significantly smaller than the files for a video lecture and this means that you aren't asking your students to use all of their data to download lecture materials. Not every student is going to have access to broadband and free internet so it's something to keep in mind when you record your lectures how necessary is video lectures. There's also the other advantage that audio lectures are a lot easier to produce than video lectures. Of course it really depends on what your content is and what your lecture materials are about. Another reason why I really like audio lectures is that they are also quite timetable friendly. I'm a big fan of using audio lectures to complement any video lectures I have or even my usual lectures because it allows students to engage with your materials whilst they are doing something else. Before the pandemic I used audio lectures as a commuter friendly way to supplement some of my weekly lectures. The idea was that there would be short 10 to 15 minute audio recordings that students could listen to as they make their way to and from university. It also means that students can be exercising, walking to work, looking after children or any dependents whilst they're listening to a lecture in a way that they cannot do it if the lecture was on video or streamed. As always I really want to make sure that my tutorials are suitable for a range of teachers and academics especially early career teachers and lecturers. There are lots of tutorials out there that will tell you the best equipment to buy and that you should spend hundreds and hundreds of pounds on say the Blue Yeti microphone or on the Samsung microphones but this tutorial is going to show you how to produce high-quality audio lectures using equipment you probably all certainly have. The only equipment I'm going to assume that you have is a phone to record the audio on and a computer to edit the audio on using a free piece of software called Audacity. Otherwise tutorial is going to show you how to produce audio lectures as cheaply as possible. The first part will go through some tips to think about before recording audio, the second section will explore technique to record the audio on your phone and the final section will show you how to use that free program Audacity to edit the audio files quickly and simply. To show you some of the sort of stuff you can produce using your phone I'm going to switch to my phone now so you can hear how the audio sounds. I don't have a particularly strong smartphone it's a fairly inexpensive smartphone I don't really need a phone for many reasons so it will show you how you don't need to have the best phone possible to produce good sounding audio lectures. Nowadays almost every phone with a voice note app or a voice memo function and that's really what you want to use. There are other apps you can download but your phone probably comes with a voice recorder app that you can use and it will record your voice pretty well, pretty effectively. It is after all exactly what the phone is designed to do to record your voice clearly and possible and to send it thousands of miles to someone else who's listening to it. So the microphone in your phone is actually pretty good but there are things that you can do to make sure you get the most out of recording on your phone. For the purpose of this video I'm using a stand so it's got a consistent distance from me and so you can see me as I'm going through this and you want to have a sort of similar setup if you were just recording audio as well using those memo apps. One thing you might want to do is actually an old oral history trick and that is to make sure that what you're recording on your dictaphone or your phone is not touching the table. You want to make sure there is a barrier between the table and your phone. A napkin, a couple of pieces of paper, my preference is a stack of books. This will really help limit any interference in your recording. Otherwise every time you touch a table, every time you accidentally kick the table leg or you rustle some papers or you pick up your coffee cup you are going to hear that noise in excruciating detail on your phone. So some distance between the table and your phone will help reduce that. The advantage as well is if you have a good stack of books you can ensure that when you are sat down there is a consistent distance between the microphone and your voice. That means that you're not going to have to worry too much about suddenly getting very very loud or getting very very quiet if you're just not looking the right direction for example. Whenever you're doing any recording make sure that you have pressed the right button and you are recording it properly. Some phones require you to press the record button twice, some dictaphones do too. Other ones require just a simple press of the button to start recording it. Whichever one you have you want to make sure that you're using it and make sure the red light is on before you start going into a long lecture. I would also suggest pedagogically that you don't have long 50 minute lectures in one go. No student is going to sit there really and listen to a 50 minute lecture without taking a break, without being distracted for a couple of minutes. You know our attention spans are not really designed to sit there for 50 minutes listening to something on a phone or a laptop. I would suggest recording smaller chunks, say 15 minutes is normally my limit if I can. That also means if you make a mistake you've only kind of wasted 15 minutes max. You haven't wasted an entire hour. So if you get halfway through a lecture and then you discover that your phone has died somehow then if you've only recording 15 minute increments that means that you haven't wasted an entire hour potentially. So I also bear that in mind. One advantage of using your phone is that you always have it on you. It's quick and easy and it's very very simple. Your phone is designed to record audio so it's got pretty clear audio as standard. It's portable so you can record part of your lecture wherever you want, wherever it's easiest for you. So if you do have a very noisy house you can even go to your car for example. Cars are very acoustically... I don't know what the word is. You can go to your car. Cars are very soundproof nowadays. They're very very good at keeping noise out so if you're struggling to find an area in your house that is quiet you can leave your house and go to your car for example. Much easier with just a phone than carrying a laptop and a microphone and all this equipment that I don't think is really necessary for it. One of the hardest things I find using this method is actually to ensure that I sit still. I like to move around a lot. I'm probably quite annoying when it comes to lectures face to face because I do like to walk up and down the podium and the lecture room and that means it feels a bit awkward for me to be sat here and just record something in a stagnant or sitting position and you can't move around too much when you've got your phone out as your main recorder. You can't really move around much when you've got any microphone because you're going to change how loud you are. You're going to change the volume whenever you move or face away from the camera. So the problem with this method is it does force you in place. It might not be a problem for everyone but I find it a little difficult. Does this method deliver the most impressive and best audio? No. I'm not even claiming that. I'm not going to suggest that but I will claim that this method will give you good enough audio quality that 99% of students are not going to notice a difference and they're not going to care even if they do. Most people are not going to notice. A lot of people who are listening to your lectures are going to be listening to it using headphones or say a laptop speaker and they're not going to be listening to it on studio monitors or getting the best quality sound anyway. If however you really feel that your phone's audio is not good enough, that it's too tinny or doesn't really work, you might have an old phone, one thing you can do that will very cheaply but effectively improve the audio quality of your lecture is actually to buy something called a lavalier microphone. These are very very cheap on Amazon. They can go from like £15. They won't offer you the best audio quality but it's again passable audio quality and the advantage I like about a good lavalier microphone is that you can connect it to the phone and then connect it to yourself and that means that if you are like me and you like walking around a lot it will give you that freedom to walk around. Excuse me but I'm going to insert it now so you can hear the difference. So now I've got a lavalier microphone which is one of these things and you just attach it to you. Apologise for the handling noise. And a lavalier microphone means that I can move around, I can move my face, I can move further away. Kind of Hitchcockian effect there. I can move kind of further away and the sound quality is going to remain consistent. And the great thing about a lavalier microphone is that you can just put your phone on record, put it in your pocket and you can walk around as normal and you'll get that consistent sound quality all the way through. A very cheap lavalier microphone can sound a little bit echoey to bear that in mind but again it's only really a cheap option if you feel that your phone is really really bad when it comes to recording things. However I think most of the time you can just use your phone as normal. Just be mindful of how far away you are from your phone. So using my phone which is a Huawei I just use the voice recorder app and then I just speak into it trying to maintain that constant distance where I can. As you'll see the screen will cut off but it will continue to record so you don't have to constantly watch it. It will show you on the display how loud you are so you can be a bit more mindful of that. Once you've finished recording, I've just skimmed ahead here, it will save it as a file and then you just want to transfer that file to your computer preferably using something simple like a USB cable which allows you to just connect it directly to your computer and then copy the file from your phone onto your desktop. If you're uncertain about how to do that or you can't do that with your phone then you can just email it to yourself. Once you've got that file you want to download a program called Audacity which you can download for free. It gives you options for installing it on Windows, Mac or even on Linux and you want to download and install that following their instructions. You also want to make sure that you install some plugins. These plugins will allow you to export the file as an MP3 and you particularly want to install the FFmpeg import export library because that will enable you to use a greater range of audio file types. My phone for example records in MP4a which you cannot use in the normal Audacity without that library plugin. So make sure you take time to install them. Audacity has a brilliant set of instructions that will guide you through the whole process step by step so it's nice and easy to do. Once you've got Audacity installed you just want to find the file that you want and then you just want to click and drag it onto the Audacity panel and it will load up automatically. It's very nice and simple to use Audacity compared to other ones. You want to press play and check the sound quality. Hello and welcome to today's lecture on the First World War. What we're going to be doing today is exploring some... So the audio is working and what you want to do now is edit it but as I said you want to edit it very very simply and Audacity allows you to do that quite quickly. As you can see you just want to highlight the bits that you don't need or want and press the delete button. It's as simple as that to edit it. Again I would recommend not over editing it, don't edit all the mistakes, don't edit the ums and ahs, just focus on editing any big gaps. You can add audio files to the lecture very quickly and easily. Again you just drag the file that you want and it will appear underneath on a different track and then if you want to add that to the end of your lecture, maybe it's a second part or maybe you would want to add a sort of conclusion to it, you just highlight it and then press ctrl X or cut it and then you can paste it to the end very very quickly. It's quite simple, you don't have to go through a lengthy process to do it. Once you're finished with the blank track you just press the X in the top left to get rid of it. You also want to make sure that you convert your track to mono by clicking in the top left corner the downward arrow and then clicking split stereo to mono and the reason for that is there is no need to have a stereo audio lecture or stereo podcast. There is no benefit in terms of sound quality to having a stereo. You know stereo is for if you've got two different audio sources and you don't need that for a ordinary audio lecture. It also means that you reduce the file size significantly. If you forget to do that or don't do it that way you can also do it when you're exporting it. So when you're exporting it go to file, export and export as MP3. From there you want to make sure that you've clicked the box which says force stereo to mono and that would do the same thing for you and again it will bring down the file size quite a lot. You do want to make sure that accessibility is at the forefront of all your lecture materials, even audio lectures. So if you haven't got a script that you used as a basis for the audio recording then you can produce one, a transcript, using the subtitling video lectures quickly video that I did a few weeks ago. All you have to do is upload the audio file to a blank video file and then you can go through the same process of using YouTube's auto-generated subtitles as a basis for a transcript. Otherwise you can use paid software like I think it's called Otter or Dragon. They will provide transcripts for you but it is paid so using the method of just using YouTube is a nice quick way of doing it. So that's how you can use your phone to record lecture cheaply and how you can use Audacity to edit them for free. There are of course loads of other recording suggestions available and these are just mine. If you really feel that your phone isn't good enough then there are other fairly affordable pieces of equipment that you can buy. Dictaphones are always an option. They are designed to record voices, they're designed for vocals, they're old-fashioned but they're very effective and nowadays very affordable. This Dictaphone only cost a couple of quid from Amazon. I think it's 15 pounds from Amazon so it's nice and affordable and it just plugs into your computer directly. Plus one good thing about Dictaphones is they always have a nice sort of Twin Peaks feel about it. The trail narrows Diane, I'm close, but the last few steps are always the darkest and most difficult so you get to play around with that a little bit as you record your lectures. If you're using a Dictaphone some of the same tips apply that I said earlier. You want to make sure that it is consistently the same distance away from your voice in order to make sure that you're not peaking too much or going too quiet. Other options are USB microphones. The internal microphones on laptops and PCs are awful so be mindful of that. A very cheap USB is often better than the microphone that you have with your computer but the danger is USB microphones can get very expensive very very quickly particularly to get a very good one and the question you have to ask yourself is do you think anyone is going to notice the major difference in quality? As I said earlier most people listening to your lectures on audio are probably going to be listening to it while they do something else. They're going to be paying attention but they're also probably going to be sorting out their desk or maybe doing some chores doing the washing up so they're not going to be sat there scrutinizing every aspect of it making sure the audio quality is a hundred percent perfect all the time. Again one of the reasons why I recommend that you save it in mono rather than stereo because most people are not going to be listening to it in stereo they're not going to be able to tell a major difference between whether you recorded it on your phone or if you recorded it on a microphone. You are not producing a podcast it doesn't have to be perfect. I hope this tutorial has been useful and I hope it helps when it comes to recording some lectures in the future. If you have any questions or there's anything I can do to help please just comment down below and I will answer as quickly as possible and I will do my best to help as much as I can.