Academia Examines Podding

Well,
in our efforts to join the Pod People and apply podding to academia we
managed to record one of
our classes. However, in terms of producing a podable product we have
run into a couple of problems.

First, we discovered that the range of the tiny "omidirectional"
microphone incorporated into our Belkin iMic has an effective range of
about 5 feet.  On the resultant .wav file, although our own voice
comes through loud and clear, it is almost impossible to hear the student’s
comments, replies and contributions to the discussions.

Although we admit to a somewhat bombastic teaching style,
in a language classroom the verbal interplay between teacher and student
and between students is essential to the development of the class content.
In order to capture this adequately we will need to a) put a wireless
mike on each of the students, b) somehow wire the classroom so that anything
said therein is audible, or c) come up with a MUCH better digital microphone
solution.  Any ideas?

The other problem involves post-performance processing.  The
.wav file (1:09 of audio) takes up 80 MB. Even after we used iTunes to
convert it to a mp3 it was 40 MB. We tried to upload the resulting file
to the Gems repository on our blog server, but were unsuccessful. Probably too big.

We know
we need to fool around with the conversion preferences to create a
smaller file.  What setting are optimal? We have seen hour-log voice
files as small as 8 or 10 MB.  How is this done? Does anybody know
of a freeware or shareware ap for the Mac that will allow me to quickly
edit the .wav file (cut dead or boring interludes) and convert into a
small mp3?

We will continue working on this and as soon as we can
get our test file down to decent size will post it so any interested
readers can listen as we embarrass ourself in public once again.