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Audio editing on the move
I've been preparing three different talks which I'll give on three
successive days next week. Here's the schedule:
Wednesday: At the International
Council for Information Technology in Government Administration (ICA),
in Guadalajara, Mexico.
Thursday: At the STIET
(Socio-Technical Infrastructure for Electronic Transactions) Program, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Friday: At the Interdisciplinary Committee on Organizational
Studies (ICOS), University
of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
The UM is my alma mater, so it's a real thrill to have the opportunity
to speak there.
When I blogged
about preparing talks back in June, John Mitchell suggested
something I had never tried before: dictation. With three different
talks to juggle, I was ripe for a new and better way to organize my
thoughts, so I gave it a whirl. It's worked out pretty well.
Because one of the talks involves a speculative line of thinking that
I haven't fully articulated before, I wanted to have it mostly written
in advance. But I dictated the first draft into my Creative MUVO on a
couple of long walks, then wrote it out with revisions.
The other two talks involve more familiar material, but I used
dictation to rehearse it. And then yesterday, on another long walk, I
came up with a slightly bizarre but remarkably useful solution to a problem.
The problem was that I had more than an hour of audio that I wanted to
condense into a list of talking points that I'd write out as private cues for
the talk. It was a nice day, and I didn't want to spend my time on the
computer, I wanted to be out hiking. Could I listen to the hour of
material, and dictate the condensed talking points, while on the move?
I'd tried something like that before, but the device wasn't up to the
task, and I suspect no handheld recorder would be. Say the raw
material is in a series of files, 1 to 47. It's easy to listen to them
in sequence, but awkward to interrupt the sequence, switch from
playback to recording mode, dictate a note, then switch back.
Then I had a brainstorm. I had recently bought a second MUVO for household
use. (The combined cost of both is only what I paid for the iPod Mini which I now almost
never use.) Why not use one MUVO for playback and the other for dictation?
It worked like a charm. I held the playback device in my right hand
and listened through headphones, I held the recording device in my
left hand, and I worked through the material dictating my talking
points. In the course of a two-hour hike I'd edited an hour of
audio down to five minutes of talking points. Later it took me ten minutes to
transcribe them.
There weren't any people on the roads and paths I hiked, which is
probably a good thing because I'm sure it looked pretty weird. But it
was effective, and it was a great change of pace from sitting and typing.
More broadly, it's interesting to think about ways in which portable
audio playback devices can (and should) morph into production
tools. For example, it would be really handy to be able to mark ins
and outs while listening to audio on the move, for later use as sound bites.
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