This began as a review of Audioboo, a relatively new service that allows you to create voice podcasts either on your computer or on the go using an iPhone, or an iPod touch in quickly and easily upload them to the net and share them with the world. In the process of creating this review I decided to make a brief podcast of my very first recording and realized that it actually might be more useful and, I hope, more interesting, if I did this post more as a “how-to” than a review.
Step One — Visit the AudioBoo website and create account.
Step Two — go to the App Store, download the free AudioBoo app and put in your credentials.
Step Three — Use the application to record whatever it is you want to say. The app itself is quite simple… too much so in its current form. While this makes it easy to use it means there is little you can do except record.
When you start recording the app offers a quick audible and visual countdown from 3 to 1 so you know when to start recording. This is important since you are not currently able to crop a Boo.
Once you are recording the appt has a nice graphic interface to show your volume so you can hopefully avoid having too much distortion. A good noise canceling headset will help a great deal here.
One of the nice features of the iPhone application is that you can easily pause while recording and start again at will. This is great if you need to take a break or have some interruption. As noted above, though, you cannot trim the recording at all. This is one of the downsides that will hopefully be addressed in an upcoming update.
Step Four– If you are happy with your recording you simply tap “publish”. This is not immediately publish the recording but rather it will give you the opportunity to add a description, some tags, and even a photograph.
Step Five — I wanted out custom photograph for this first test recording so I left the AudioBoo app, used Safari to jump to Gear Diary and grabbed a screen shot of the logo. Then, using Photogene (an app I find myself using more and more) I quickly cropped the picture and saved it to my library.
Step Six — I went back into the podcast I had created to finish the process. A nice feature of AudiBoo is that if you close the app in the middle of publishing a Boo it will keep your information intact. I added the new image I had created and hit “Publish”.
That’s it for the iPhone application.
Step Seven — Back on my MacBook I went to the AudioBoo website and clicked on “my boos”. From there I just embedded the new recording into this post just the way I would with a picture or a YouTube video.
A nice feature is that, if you allow it, the iPhone app also includes the location from which it was recorded and even a map… a map that is a bit too accurate if you ask me since it pinpointed my current location within a few feet. 🙂
Hopefully a future update will let you turn off the location feature on the site rather than just on the iPhone.
So how hard was it to create and upload a podcast using AudioBoo? Pretty simple. It took just a few moments and…
In short, this is a simple, quick, and easy way to record a podcast and it share it with the world.
Two final things…
First, a strange aspect of embedding the two Boos included above was the I needed to go into the HTML code and increase the height of each recording in order to not have the top cut off. I’m not sure why this was so and will to a little bit of research to figure it out.
Second, word is SpinVox will be providing voice to text transcription for AudiBoo posts. SpinVox already provides transcription for voice notes created with the iPhone app QuickVoice Pro and I’ll be interested to see how well it works and what the cost incurred with using will be.