Using Gizmo — warts and all

As part of the K12 Online Conference, I have been most active in the Flat Agents of Change Ning site. One of the tools introduced there is Gizmo, an alternative to Skype that is designed to allow for easy recording of phone conversations.

Gizmo is a free phone for your computer

I set up and had a wonderful conversation with two of my fellow Ningers, Cheryl and Sarah, yesterday morning, via Gizmo. We chatted for about 30 minutes or so and it all seemed to work fine.
But then I ran into trouble.
First, the .wav file that Gizmo recorded would not open up in my Windows Media Player. It said that my player would not support the file type. So I tried to move it into Audacity, hoping I could convert it into an MP3 there. No luck. Then, I tried to send it to Zamzar conversation site and it came back as an empty file. No luck.
Sarah had also recorded the session, so she loaded her file up into her PodcastPeople, but it sounded all squirrely in the playback mode. However, if you did the direct download from her show as an MP3, the audio file worked fine.
So I took that downloaded file and then tried to upload it into my PodcastPeople site.
Again, no luck. Like Sarah’s, it was all gobblygook.
I didn’t give up (the mantra of Web 2.0ers everywhere).
I took the MP3 download from Sarah’s site, and moved it in my Audacity, and the exported it as an MP3.
I tried to then upload that into my PodcastPeople and, 18 hours later, PodcastPeople is still trying to digest the file.
So, I went over to my handy Box.Net site (where I normally host podcasts) and uploaded it, and that worked fine. (Note: the file is big and the flash player seems to buffer forever, but it works quicker if you click on the direct link)

So here is the conversation.

It was too long of a process, however, and I need to figure out if Gizmo is worth it.

Peace (in the process),
Kevin

PS — Another element of the K12 Conference was a flickr group, where people from around the world submitted a photo or two of dusk on the last day of the conference (Saturday), and I took this photo of the set-up of a pumpkin contest in our neighborhood — I also took some video that I will try to share later this week.

Here is the link to the When Night Falls flickr group.

2 Comments
  1. When we spoke via Skype I used a program called Call Recorder to record it…not sure if it’s Mac only but it worked terrificly well. It does cost but I think only like $20.

    P.S. My computer crashed or the podcast would be up by now. It was almost done. It is coming though I just have to give the hard drive a new home.

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