Madness in Audio

It's been a long hard road, but Radio Active #8 is finally online. This is the Atomic Swindlers-focused podcast, in which I do an audio review of the band's album Coming Out Electric and play two of the album's songs.

I originally recorded this poddcast back in late May using my normal GarageBand 1 setup, but when I listened to it I was horrified to find that the songs sounded like crap. After mucking around and actually reading some of the documentation, I discovered that GarageBand only allows you to have one "tempo" for a recording, normally 120 beats per minute. If you try and import something with a different tempo, then GarageBand alters the song to match the default GarageBand tempo, effectively speeding up or slowing down the song (depending on what it's tempo was relative to GarageBand).

You can change the tempo in GarageBand, but since the Swindlers had several different tempos for their songs, I would have only been able to match the tempo on one of the two songs I played.

Annoying eh?

Frustrated, annoyed and a little panicked -- I was trying to keep Radio Active on a regular schedule -- I decided to fire up Audacity, an open source sound recorder and editor. That led to a series of abortive podcasts which I thought everything had worked, but in fact, portions of the podcast -- particularly the songs -- kept dropping out. Turns out that my great plan of using generated "silence" to space out the audio clips was causing all kinds of havoc during the export; that's when I discovered how to use the "align to cursor" function to line up the segments.

After about two weeks of work on the podcast, I finally got something useable up. More than useable actually -- I think the podcast sounds pretty good. Heck, although it was much harder to use than GarageBand, I think Audacity produced a better sounding podcast. For Radio Active #9, I think I'm going to try Audacity again, and see what folks think.