Editing Audio: More Than Just Fun

                                                                 By Tim Patterson

Last week I had a chance to see firsthand how important it is to have the ability to edit audio files. Using adacity and editing audio was one of my favorite activities from the second weekend, but I have to admit it was my favorite because it was fun not because I thought it was something I would do a lot. But last week I saw how editing audio saved my department a lot of time and money. Let me explain.

I have been working with our e-learning developers on a CBT that was due this week. As part of the CBT we asked two leaders to record the introduction. This was used to try to provide the WIIFM to the learner and show how important this topic is to the senior leaders. You may have noticed I said senior leaders. For any of you in the corporate world, you know how hard it is to schedule time with senior leaders and to add to this one of the leaders was in an outside office. Lucky for us we were able to get the time to record scheduled and just by chance there were others in our department going to our outside office the exact time we needed to go - so we tagged along to record the audio needed.

Sounds like everything was falling into place - right? Well, did I mention that compliance approved the scripts we used for the audio, however, when the recording took place one of the leaders made a few changes. Seems harmless, but compliance did not like the changes made and wanted us to remove some information. Oh no - now we have to schedule more time with the senior leader to re-record the entire script, we have to drive 2 hours to do this, oh and we only have 2 days to get this done.

Or ...

We can edit the current audio file we have to remove the information. Lucky for use the information that needed to be removed was at the beginning of a sentence and there was a comma after the information. This provided a natural pause that made removing the information easy and clean. I knew the information was removed, but when I listed to the new audio file I could not tell is had be edited. It worked!!

Editing the audio took minutes, while re-recording audio would have taken days. The ability to edit the audio file save us both time and money. I am learning the ability to edit audio is more than just a fun thing to do - it is a valuable skill that really helped us out last week.