The number of assessments that I’m supposed to submit for the end of the first year (just over a week) has suddenly caught up with me and I was doing fairly well at staying on top of things, but a pretty big hiccup occured yesterday. We were in the studio working on our radio production assignment on voter apathy in the upcoming General Election, which was basically us interviewing people of certain demographics for two minutes. It was on target to wrap at noon when we’d have to vacate the studio so that we could submit it then or today (due date).

At 11:40 in comes the tutor to check on our progress, who listens to it and tells us that it’s unusable and a guaranteed fail if we submit it in its current form because the assignment can’t just be vox pops.

Shit.

We had to pretty much redo our project in less than 24 hours. Grabbing a MiniDisc recorder, finding an “expert” to interview (the president of our student union – he must know about student apathy, right?), and recording some generic links to patch together what we could use from the old piece and the new one was done in record time. After grabbing the audio from the MD it went onto my USB drive and I bombed it home to edit it.

I use a Mac so I don’t have access to Cool Edit/Adobe Audition which we use in the studeo (hopefully the Adobe purchase means that Audition 2 will get a Mac release) but the developers of Audacity really saved me. It took me four hours to put together something fairly decent so I got to know the program pretty well and it really is a great piece of work. This is why open source is important – I would have been screwed if the only software was the £200 Adobe Audition, but because of enthusiast developers there’s a perfectly good completely free alternative.

Anyway, my copy of Mac OS X Tiger is listed as “out for delivery” on the TNT tracking site so assuming it does arrive today I’ll post some impressions when I have it installed and have had time to play with it.