Have you ever wished you could wave a magic wand to make your narrated voice work sound clean and crisp? Well, there is no magic wand, but a digital audio workstation (DAW) comes close. Broadcast professionals spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars creating their ideal audio post-production environment, but with careful planning you won’t need to spend a penny.

In this session, you will discover techniques and technologies which will enable you to create clean, authoritative, professional-grade audio for online presentations with a minimal impact on your budget. You will learn about digital audio techniques such as basic editing, compression, de-essing, gating, noise removal, and normalization—all using robust digital editing software you can get for free or as part of a software bundle. You will see how easy it is to import your professional-sounding audio files directly into your authoring software, with a small price tag to make your manager smile.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to acquire DAW (digital audio workstation) software with robust features for little or no cost
• How a DAW can be used to minimize or eliminate background noise (even including the barking dog down the street)
• How a DAW can be used to move or remove sounds at the phrase, word, and phoneme levels
• How a DAW can be used to emphasize or deemphasize frequencies in your voice, resulting in a bold, professional sound
• The next steps and resources on learning, practicing, and perfecting these skills

Audience:
Intermediate designers, developers, and project managers.

Technology discussed in this session:
Adobe Audition and Audacity.