I'm in the process of creating a set of slides at work to describe a software product we're working on.  Making slides is easy.  I just use OpenOffice.  Publicizing the slides is just as easy.  I use Slideshare.net.  An interesting feature of this site is the ability to add audio to each slide after you've uploaded the slides.  You just create the audio file in MP3 format, upload it and then use their on site editor to sync the audio with the slides.  I haven't tried their editor yet, because I'm the process of trying to create the audio.

Creating audio in linux is supposed to be easier than editing video.  Until recently that was true simply because of Audacity and the lack of any easy-to-use non-linear video editor for Linux.  Sure, there are Cinelerra and Kino and LiVES but these haven't been particularly easy to use.  There wasn't a tool that let you drop in a video file, open it and edit it, merging multiple video files with simple transitions.  Then along came OpenShot.  Now video editing on Linux is a breeze. 

I'm not saying OpenShot is sophisticated.  I'm saying its easy.  What extended features it might have I don't know because I haven't needed them yet.  But its just plain easy to make a few screencasts with recordMyDesktop and stitch them together with OpenShot.  The learning curve was less than 1/2 day, including figuring out how to run it from source on fedora (for which there is no premade package).  Compared to the others, that's pretty good.

As for Audacity, its the power tool of audio editing.  As such, and by the needs of its users, its not particularly easy to figure out.  What I mean is that it isn't completely obvious how you open a file, drop it in a project, open another file and stitch them together.  I'm sure with some fiddling I will find it *IS* easy, but its not obviously easy.  And that's the rub.  For tasks like creating audio to drop into Slideshare it isn't easy.

Which leads me to Jokosher.  This handy little tool is the audio equivalent of OpenShot.  This one had a learning curve of just about an hour, mostly since it was prepackaged for Fedora.  It may not have all the bells and whistles of Audacity, but its easy to use.  Which means more of us can create audio to merge with our slides very quickly.

My task is simple.  I wrote a script to go with the slides.  I read the script to make recordings.  I NEVER read the entire script straight through without mistakes.  So I need to read the script for each slide one at a time and then later stitch the good takes together.  It isn't rocket science and there are lots of command line tools to do this.  But I like the ease of a desktop tool for this kind of thing because working with audio isn't something I do a lot. 

So having found Jokosher (mixed with gnome's sound recorder to create the individual takes, though I can probably do the recording with Jokosher too – I just haven't tried yet), this task is much simpler than I first imagined.