“Hey All You Radio Fans…”

Welcome one and welcome all to my first assignment post for DS106! For the first assignment I decided to do something a bit challenging. Since I have almost zero experience with sound engineering and recording, I decided to do an assignment that was a little outside of my comfort zone. This assignment, titled “Create A DS106 Radio Bumper” is located under the Audio Assignments on the DS106 Assignment Bank. According to the assignment rating, this assignment is only 2/5 stars, but since I’ve never done anything like this I wanted to try and give it my all!

This assignment, while not that hard in theory, was a little time consuming since I had to figure out what I wanted to say. Radio bumpers are usually those little interjection you hear while listening to a radio station, reminding you which station you’re tuned-in to or advertising their broadcast status. The ones I’m most familiar with are Superhits 95.9 and 96.9 The Rock. These are both stations based in and around the Fredericksburg, VA area, and often have accompanying jingles while advertising their broadcast range. Since DS106 Radio is based online, I only needed to come up with a tagline. This made things simple. I found inspiration by visiting the station’s website and looking at their current logo, which says “Your new old radio friend.” I thought that sounded like a good tagline, and thus it became part of this assignment!

Next up came the slightly harder part. I currently do not have any audio editing software installed on my computer. I did take a look at Audacity, but it proved to be a little too complicated for me to navigate at the moment, leading me to use slightly more creative means to finish this assignment. I own an iPhone, so I was able to use the voice recorder that comes pre-installed on the phone to record my lines. Unfortunately I only own headphones with a built in microphone, so I tried to hold the microphone close to my face to avoid any background noise. I uploaded that file to my computer and then opened the video editor that is available on Windows 10 computers. I’ve used this editor before on a previous assignment, so I felt confident in my ability to manipulate audio files in it. Basically, I used a random placeholder photo to “start” the video, extending the duration to the same length as my audio recording of myself. I then used one of the songs that comes built into the video editor titled “Weekend Getaway” as background music. I then slightly edited the voiceover and music files so they lined up and finalized the project.

Last but not least was uploading the radio bumper! I thought I might have to convert the video to an MP3, but the Windows Video Editor saves its files as an MP4. And guess what? You can upload MP4 files directly to SoundCloud! I did so, and now the radio bumper is available for everyone to listen to and enjoy!

So there you have it! Please give the radio bumper a quick listen and leave a comment if you like it! I’d love to hear everybody’s feedback!