The soundslides for the Muslim Student Association's Hijab Day took longer than expected, because of frustrating technical issues with the Mac programs.
At first, the project seemed like a simple matter of editing sound files with Garage Band. When Risa and I first used the program, it would easily cut and paste all the portions of our sounds. It took some time to figure out how to properly add the recordings into iTunes, but from that point on, we easily cut our recordings down to two minutes and 30 seconds.
Then everything started to malfunction.
When I finished my edits on Nov. 3, I gave my Garage Band mp3 to Risa so that she could organize all the pictures to the sound file. I left campus for the day. Then Risa texted me.
"The soundslides won't open up!"
I drove back to the newsroom and tried to fix the file. Unfortunately, Garage Band had issues with the recording files we were trying to convert into a mp3. We didn't know if we had the recording files in the fight place, but nothing was working.
After what seemed to count up to one hundred program crashes, we decided to edit our recordings by using Audacity. I edited the sound files and sent them to Risa.
From that point on, we were unable to finish all our edits that week, because the newsroom closed much earlier than we expected. We had to budget our time wisely so that we could finish the presentation on time.
We finished almost everything on the Mac for Nov. 9. The next day, Risa had even more issues with the Mac.
"Im so mad!! The file i edited is longer there," Risa said in her text message. "And now im starting all over again with garage band."
Thankfully, she was able to find the file after hunting for it. We finished everything on Nov. 10. After all that aggravation with the Mac programs, we really didn't want to use a Mac anymore.
Overall, I really like how the soundslide turned out. However, Apple definitely should give their customers a free Garage Band update. The old version is riddled with bugs. Our program crashed almost every 10 seconds. It couldn't handle large audio files.
Even the Soundslides program is a trial-by-error process. Sometimes we had to rename our photo files. If we edited the photo, we had to rename it. Otherwise, it would only bring up the previous, unedited version. No matter what, we couldn't remove the previous photo with the same name from the program's memory.
I'm sure that an actual newsroom has a more up-to-date program lineup. However, even new programs cost thousands of dollars. Even if this is the way of the future, somebody should lower their prices to make matters easier. That's just my opinion, though.
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