Audio Adventures

How appropriate: this week's multimedia assignment gave my group a lesson about the simultaneous joys and pitfalls of modern technology.

We eagerly prepared for the audio piece about someone who "makes UNH work" - along with great B-Roll.

Brittney had the idea to cover someone who drives one of the UNH buses. It worked - so many people use the buses, both on and off campus to places like Portsmouth and Newmarket, we decided to go for it. Brit offered to hop on one of the UNH buses for some B-roll. All of us found a bus driver, John Steere, who was known for animated anecdotes.

The lack of batteries on Brittney's first trip on the bus hardly put a damper on things. She simply replaced the batteries and made a second trip, returning the recorder in time for Steere's awesome interview. It was great. Steere could ramble on and on, and somehow every half minute or so, he would have one of us rolling with laughter.

Crazy bus incidents, his opinion that a lot of UNH students could be "lazy" and probably wouldn't make it to class half the time with the buses, the 70 laps required of a night on the Woodsides loop, and his first day on the job...he was full of good stories.

Then it came time to edit the audio. We had used an audio recorder of Cam's, which worked well - until we found out that it wouldn't work on the mac operating system, and he no longer had the software with him (or with his old computer, where it had been downloaded.)

Panic.

We finally decided to get the software express mailed so we could do a late edit. So here we go, banking on the disk's arrival and quick edit before class - a day later than the deadline.

Such is the downside to poor planning/operating-system-specific software.

Things to keep in mind when purchasing my own audio recorder - make sure it can work with multiple operating systems.

Back to work on it tomorrow, crossing our fingers!