You have made things so easyfor me. I am always going back to review all your blogs and tips!

Astrid Case

Always appreciate your articles. Have been training for a very long time and building eLearning for about 3 to 4 years now. Also, have been apart of a LMS implementation, etc.
Your instructions are typically easy to understand and well thought out. It is obvious you have been doing this for awhile.

A comment about royalty free photos – another decent source for a cheap investment is ClickArt Online run by Broderbund. For $39.95 a year, you can download as much as you want from their million plus photo and clip art site.
As with most sites, you cannot find everything you need, however, I have been pleasantly surprised at what they do have. The site is:
http://clickart.arttoday.com/en/

Also, from previous posts you have mentioned screen color grabber software, CoffeeCup software has great products and they are very cheap.
Their Color Schemer is one of the best programs I have seen for capturing any color and then having the range of like colors presented for you to easily use.
They have a very easy to use software package called Flash Firestarter to put together quick flash projects.

Recently found Ashampoo Snap3 which is a cheap, but really good screen capture program. You can capture any screen shot, any other custom size or even capture video or animation – virtually anything on the screen. Then add clip art, text or other pictures and do several cool editing techniques.
Right now they are having a sale of everything on their site for only $10. Can’t beat that price. Their site:
http://www.ashampoo.com/frontend/homepage/php/index.php?session_langid=2

Anyway, not trying to promote these other products, just sharing some other potentially good things that have helped me.

Thanks Again,

Mark

As a professional e-learning voice over provider, I understand your frustrations with working with audio. It can be really tricky! You chose well with Wavepad; I use that application for any voice work I do that can be in mono and doesn’t need an integrated music bed (most of them, actually).

To reduce noise from your room ambiance and computer fan, try this trick: drape a heavy blanket over your head and computer monitor while you record. (You can keep a small lamp under there with you–an inexpensive goose-neck clip-on style lamp works well–to ensure you can read the copy!) Be sure to keep your CPU and other major noise producing equipment outside of the blanket “studio.” It will feel VERY odd, but it gives a pretty decent amount of sound baffling for what it is.

I do highly recommend using a better microphone than your computer’s built-in mic; you don’t need to go quite as nice as the Sennheiser, though. In my opinion, the best mic for the money that’s also exceptionally easy to use is Blue’s USB mic, the Snowball. For between $80-120, you get a simple, quality mic that records straight into Wavepad, Audacity (also free but more robust, and accordingly a bit more complicated), or any other audio editing program you have.

Incidentally, you don’t need to keep your audio file in .wav format; Wavepad allows you to convert to .mp3 which saves file space and should work fine for most applications you work with.

Best of luck! Have fun with your blanket studio! ~Jennifer Nagel

Do you operate an exclusive Power Point blog?

Thanks for the great content here.