Is Soundslides for you?

You want to make a photo slideshow with sound and put it online. You know how to shoot photos and you have some idea how to gather audio and produce an MP3 file. But you don’t even own Flash, let alone know how to use it.

If you haven’t heard of Joe Weiss’ Soundslides, then listen up. Soundslides is for you.

You must have Mac OS X. It will not work on Windows or Linux. But that is the only bad news.

If you’re still reading, then get ready — the price tag is super-easy on the budget: $39.95.

On Saturday our local daily newspaper posted some nice Soundslides work. These are five good examples of what you can do very, very simply with Soundslides, one MP3 file, some JPGs, and a couple of hours (per slideshow):

(1) David Blackburn (2) Jonathan Brown (3) Charles Harriott (4) Riyaana Hartley (5) Raul Quintana

I’d love to link you to a package that explained the story (college students make up Gainesville’s Hip Hop Collective, and there was a big competition on Saturday night), but there is no package. And these five slideshows are not linked to the newspaper’s story, which is on the newspaper’s Web site — but this is where CMS (content management systems) have left many newspapers today — hog-tied and incapable of delivering multimedia in a seamless format that’s easy to use.

But I digress. The CMS does not interfere with the ability to use the fabulously user-friendly Soundslides tool, and if you’re NOT hampered by a multimillion-dollar CMS forced upon you by an oh-so-wise corporate owner in the world of professional journalism, then YOU can use it in all kinds of neat and wonderful ways.

The five hip-hop stories were shot by student photojournalist Briana Brough. The sound was gathered and edited by Gainesville Sun online producer David Houder. Soundslides was created by Joe Weiss, a multimedia producer at the Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer.

Technorati tags: Flash journalism | photojournalism | audio | multimedia

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 26, 2006, at 6:22 pm and is filed under examples, slideshows, multimedia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.