Another paddle-map: Now with narration!

Now you, too, can feel right there with us as we brave the soul-sucking terrors!

I’ve been told more than once that I’ve got a good voice for radio. Or was that a good face for radio?

Last weekend we decided to go lake-spanking again, and this time I brought my little digital audio recorder…

I’ve since ripped the recorder open, desoldered the built-in condenser microphone, and hacked in a short cable with a 1/8″ jack so I can plug in a “real” microphone – even if my “real” microphone is just a cheap little thing intended for a computer. (It’s still an improvement in the sound quality). I’ve been recording bits and pieces while I drive to and from work and learning to use Audacity to clean up and reassemble the bits.

I’m digusted to find that Google Maps® strips out references to embedded material (<object>, <embed>, <iframe>, etc.) so I’ve had to have the linked material (larger photographs and audio – both with an embedded player and directly downloadable mp3’s) pop up in a separate page for now – anyone know a way around this?

Oh, yes, and the mp3’s are also geotagged using the geostring format I’ve been advocating, as are the photos.

Complaints that I sound stupid and/or smell bad may be made in the comments below…

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Epicanis

The Author is (currently) an autodidactic student of Industrial and Environmental microbiology, who is sick of people assuming all microbiology should be medical in nature, and who would really like to be allowed to go to graduate school one of these days now that he's finished his BS in Microbiology (with a bonus AS in Chemistry). He also enjoys exploring the Big Room (the one with the really high blue ceiling and big light that tracks from one side to the other every day) and looking at its contents from unusual mental angles.

5 thoughts on “Another paddle-map: Now with narration!”

  1. Well, I enjoyed it! Catie needs to speak up so she can give you a hard time on your “broadcast”. It sounds like you are having a good time. Did you learn to roll the kayak? I think that is hard to do with a double as both people need to be in sync to do it.

  2. I happened to mention that I was thinking about sticking the recorder in a plastic bag (to protect it from the water) and then clip the now-external microphone to the brim of the hat I wear when I go paddling, so I could do a more continuous audio tour, and Catie mentioned wanting a microphone too…

    We may try it this weekend. Either I’ll rig up a plastic-wrapped mixer and run a microphone from it for each of us, or we can each bring our own recorders and I can sync up the sound tracks from them later…

    We didn’t double-roll the kayak – she rented a separate one so we could both learn individually. It was kind of fun…

  3. Well Catie says: I didn’t know he was recording podcast stuff! Next time I’ll be prepared for his perfidy, recording me while I innocently paddle along…

  5. I haven’t had much call to do it, but for geotagging mp3 I’d put one or more “geostr” tags in the IDv3 “comment” field of the mp3 file. A more recent concept I’ve seen would be to encode the geostr line (or lines) as a 2D barcode and embed the barcode picture as “Album Art”. (You could also cheat and embed an actual map image, I suppose…)

    I see I’ve managed to break this post’s map with the links to the sample files – I’ll fix that later.

    I use KID3 or “Easytag” to do this. The goal is that no matter how the listener gets the file, the geographical information will still be embedded in it so they can find out where (and when) the recording refers to just by looking at the “metadata”.

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