A couple of people have asked how I make the audio recordings I have uploaded here. It’s actually a very low-tech and low-price setup. I make the recording on my iPad, with an app called Audio Memos. I think I bought the pro version, but it was not expensive. You can use this on an iPhone too. You then need to get the file, which will be large, onto a computer – I upload it through dropbox as it’s too big to email, but there are other ways (I guess you could do the next steps on an iPad as well). The file will be a .wav file, and it’s easy to get software that will convert it into .mp3 which is smaller, and for voice recordings is probably fine. I use the free Audacity program to do this – you can edit the audio with this too. I do that to clean up the beginning so it starts at the right place, and to tidy up the end. Applause, even from a small audience, is much louder so you can normalise the volume for that too, fade it, etc. With the discussion after the King Lear paper, the questions from the audience were very quiet, so you can amplify the volume, get rid of excess noise when there is no speaking, tidy up the bits where my over-active listening (‘yes’, ‘right’, ‘um’, etc.) drowns out the question itself – I’m of course much closer to the internal mic.

It doesn’t take long at all to do this, especially if the initial recording – for one voice or a conversation between two people close by – is of decent quality. I’ll see if I can record the AAG papers and put them up here too. Although I post the links whenever I upload something, I also keep a permanent list on the ‘Free Downloads’ page.