Yesterday I decided to test out the VoiceThread (VT) technology that I would like to use to share my experiences in Africa. Click on the link below to view it. Granted, it is a bit lame but I’m sure you’ll find the posts from Africa (Tanzania & Uganda) more interesting.http://voicethread.com/book.swf?b=1986215

Overall, though, the final product is exactly what I hoped for in terms of my ability to record Voice Memos with my iPhone in real time and take pictures with either the iPhone or a camera and upload to VT. But, it was really good that I ran this experiment because there were some critical glitches to work out and so it has probably taken me about 5 hours to get this VoiceThread posted.  Fortunately I’ve worked out the problems and I’m sure future threads will go more smoothly.  Below are some of the issues I encountered.

1. I usually only sync my iPhone to our home computer but if I am taking my laptop with me, I will need to set up the iPhone to sync to that and hopefully not lose all the music and media that is contained. For this VT I just synced to my home computer, but I’ll have to look into this further (in the past I had tried to sync to both the laptop and home but ran into problems so I stopped doing that.)

2. The Voice Memos from my iPhone are .mp4a files, and VT only accepts .mp3 files. I only realized this AFTER I uploaded all of the voice memos and then found out they wouldn’t play. I was able to convert them within iTunes, but it took some investigation to figure this out. (just google for instructions) And then, I couldn’t find where my computer put the .mp3 files and it took awhile to figure that out. Just in case anyone needs to know (and so I remember for the future), go to home, music, itunes, itune music, karenbeth iphone, voice memos.

3. I was hoping that I could upload pictures and voice memo from my iPhone directly to VT but apparently you can only VIEW by choosing their “universal access”. Since there is no flash player for iPhones, you can’t create or modify VoiceThreads. That is a bummer, but I will still be able to record and take pictures/videos and upload them to my laptop at the end of the day.