Guideline 12: Record high quality audio
Many students find it difficult make a high quality recording of themselves narrating the script of
their digital story. This is not surprising since there are many factors involved in creating a high
quality sound recording for use in their story. These factors include the specific audio recording
software being used, the type of microphone, the quality of the computer’s sound card, the
recording volume setting on the computer, how loud the student speaks, and the amount of
background noise that can be heard during the recording process.
We recommend that digital story creators record their narration with USB microphones and
Audacity, a free digital audio recording and editing software program available for Windows and
Macintosh computers from: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/. When using Audacity,
students may choose to save the recorded audio files as either MP3 or WAV files. Since MP3 files
will be approximately one-tenth the file size of WAV files, we strongly recommend that when
students use Audacity, they export the audio clips as WAV files, which are uncompressed, instead
of MP3 files, which are highly compressed. Saving audio files in an uncompressed format becomes
even more important when the digital story is saved, because many software programs used to
create the final version of the digital story will add its own compression to the file, reducing the
audio quality even more.