Thoughts on my recent podcast

This is the first group podcast that my team completed for this semester. Thanks to last semester, I had a little experience on conducting interviews and editing the audio. However, things did not go smooth at all, and I would like to document the difficulties I went through this time.

Conducting interview was considerably easier to me since I've done a few of them before. One thing I recalled, though, was that there was a lady at University Bookstore who was very concerned about talking with us. Chrystal and I could tell that she was afraid to say something inappropriate or harmful to her workplace. So when we asked her if it's okay to ask her a few questions, she had to get an approval from her manager. And when writing her name down, she refused to give us her last name. I guess it's never harmful to be careful, but I was just a little surprised that she treated us as if we were reporting something controversial.

My main difficulty came when I was editing the podcast for the group. Because Chrystal downloaded all our segments to her career account, I just used the same computer to do the editing. The editing was fine, but not when I tried to export it. For some reason, the computer kept rejecting my request of sending the podcast to iTunes. And without sending to iTunes, I could not find a way to send the podcast as an MP3 file to my teammates. After hours of researching and trying, I finally did it from my own career account, and finally sent out the MP3 file to everyone in my team.

Given that I always planned ahead, and I always turned in my projects at least a day before the due dates, I felt a little frustrated this time. I thought I knew how to use Garageband, but I didn't realize that the differences of software versions could lead to a total different editing experience. I'm very familiar with the iMovies and Garageband on my laptop, but not the one on our iTap computers. One thing I learned from this experience was that I should be more careful and I should get more familiar with different softwares so I can limit the problems I had this time to its minimum.

Well, creating podcast was not completely frustrating and unhappy this time. I learned something new about Garageband too. Thanks to Maura, I played along with the "Jingles" options this time, and I also used two of the effects on our podcast to make it sound like a newscast with opening sounds and closing effects.

I hope you will enjoy our podcast about Purdue campus life, and I look forward to hearing other people's podcasts too.