SoundSlides Post

Ok I wrote this post a while ago but just got access so now I can post it..

Blog entry for 4/2/07

The Sound Slides program is a pretty simple, easy to use program. It has a very professional template and it only took me about 15 minutes to have everything up and running. As far as audacity goes, I did not like the format of the program. While it was free, the problem I ran into occurred when I tried to convert an Audacity project file (.aup) to a MP3 file. Audacity prompted me to download the LAME encoder to encode the file to MP3, which after a few tries, I was able to find a mirror site that was not a dead link. The 3.97 Lame file was coded as a .tar file, which was not recognized by Audacity. I did a quick search on .tar files, and discovered it is a compressed data file that needs gzip or bzip2 extraction programs to extract the .tar file. Not wanting to have to download another program, I finally gave up and went with a shorter sound clip. The benefits of this were I did not have to edit down the audio, so I did not have to use Audacity to try and convert the sound file from .aup to .mp3. A little confusing, I know, but I was able to get around it.
Sound Slides is a program that I think I will use outside of class. It is remarkably easy to add photos and music or audio together in a short time frame. I hope that I will be able to insert custom audio by using my copy of Cool Edit Pro 2.

-Phil