Audio slideshows can be an engaging part of any multimedia package. They’ve got the strength and appeal of photography while the narration adds the power of the human voice, giving context and filling in details that the images might not otherwise provide.

One of the problems in the past was finding good tools to create them. For years, SoundSlides has been the standard but it costs between $40 and $70 and the learning curve, while not Himalayan steep, is a little uphill at first.

Now there are several tools out there that allow you to put together basic audio slideshows in a snap and on the fly, and they won’t break the bank. Sonic Pics for iPhones or iPads is a low-cost one that’s impressive. It’s easy to use, has a simple, clean interface and pretty much does what it promises.

A few simple steps

With Sonic Pics, you choose pictures from your photo library, put them in the order you want and then record audio as you swipe through them. Presto, you’ve got an audio slideshow that you can share with the world or just watch on your device.

After a $2.99 download from iTunes, I decided to give the app a test drive by using some pictures I had taken for a story on rural sanitation and toilets in Cambodia.

Starting a new project, the app asked me for a name and description. Once that was done, I found myself on the screen where I would add the photos.

A touch of + Add Images allowed me to scroll through the photos on my phone. I picked out nine, then realized I wanted them in a different order. Not to worry. Sonic Pics lets you to change the order by dragging them to whatever position you want. Here you can also add a title and image description to each picture, which can be displayed during playback on your device if you want.

That done, the next step is to add the audio. A touch of the red button on the upper right-hand corner opens a screen that puts your first photo front and center. Tap on a red button again, and you’re recording.

Say what you want to say (and it’s a good idea to have a few notes in front of you unless you’re very good at speaking off the cuff). When you’ve finished talking about one photograph, simply swipe it to the left and the next one comes up, and you can start the narration for that one. Sonic Pics remembers which parts of your narration go with which photo. There’s no more need for complicated timing or separate audio imports. It’s all done within the app.

Once you’re done, touch on a share button and the app will ask if you want to save what you’ve done or delete it and start again. I was happy enough, so I saved it.

Then you can touch the share icon again and either send the audio slideshow to your computer (it will give you an IP address which allows you to download a .m4v video file to your computer), send it by email, save it to your own phone’s camera roll or send it to a YouTube account. That’s what I did and you can see the results below. All in all, this audio slideshow took me under ten minutes to make. (Of course, I already had the pictures and I knew the story so I could write up my narration quickly.)

A few drawbacks

I was pretty impressed with the speed that I was able to put together a decent enough audio slideshow and share it successfully in multiple ways. But there’s some room for improvement.

For one, activating the built-in camera that allows you to take pictures from the image addition screen crashed the app every time I tried to use it. It’s not a fatal flaw since I was using photos from my camera roll but one that should be fixed.

Email sharing only allows projects that come in under 10MB, and you’ll reach that size quickly. My project with 9 slides at 1’53” was 23 MB.

Also, there is no way to go in and re-record narration for one single slide, for example if you stumbled over a sentence and wanted to re-do the audio for that slide only. If you want to re-record, you have to re-record it all. That can be a hassle if you have a lot of slides or trip over your words a lot, like me.

Finally, there’s no way to import music to lay down under narration or do any kind of audio mix. You need to be pretty close to your device’s microphone and speaking in a quiet environment to get decent sound quality.

Overview

Cost: $2.99 from iTunes. Once you buy it, you can use on both your iPhone and iPad.

Publishing: Share over a wifi network with your own computer, upload it to YouTube, save it to your own device or email it (if project is no bigger than 10 MB). Using a video out connection, you can also present the shows on bigger screens.

Support: The website isn’t all that extensive, although they do list an email address for support questions: support@sonicpics.com.

Languages: The Sonic Pics interface is in English.

General Opinion: For basic audio slid shows, especially for people just starting out with them, this is a nice little app. Even out in the field, you can still put together a package in no time that you can send back to your editors or put up on your site. For those with more experience or who want to use image fades or music and more complicated audio mixes, Sonic Pics might prove a little too basic.

Author: Kyle James

One of the tools that many journalists in our workshops get really excited about is Soundslides. It's a programme that produces audio slideshows by combining photos and audio. For radio and print journalists it's a new way to add images to their storytelling, and for photo journalists to add narration and sound to their photos. Plus it’s affordable and very easy to use.

In Ouagadougou last year we conducted a multimedia workshop on micro-finance. Online journalism and blogging were some of the many topics we covered and you can browse some of the results on the French blog  we produced. But the tool the journalists from Burkina Faso, Niger and Benin probably liked best was Soundslides.

Here is what Ali Abdou from Radio Garkuwa in Maradi, Niger had to say about his first experience producing an audio slideshow.

"I have very much enjoyed working with Soundslides. I think it’s a good programme – a great tool and a welcome opportunity to explore new ways to work online. The only downside is the difficulty I encountered to upload and host the audio slide show, as you have to have your own web server."

When Soundslides was launched in 2005 a lot of media houses gave it a try and the programme quickly rose to become an industry standard for audio slideshows. Interestingly it’s been the newspapers – such as the New York Times or the Guardian – who’ve made the biggest use of it.

Audio slideshows using Soundslides are basically produced in three easy steps.

1. Shoot and select your photos, always bearing in mind that what counts is telling a story. Try to have a variety of angles (close-ups, mid range and wide shots) and sequences.
2. Record and mix the audio track. This can be based on interviews, ambiance sound, music, narration or a mix of any of those. When you're gathering your material of course you might ask: “what should I do first: pictures or sound?” That really depends on your story and its context. You might have great sound that has to be recorded immediately, in that case start recording audio first. Or, if the light is quickly fading take your photographs and record later. It's difficult to do both at the same time, so it will always be a trade off.
3. Now that you have collected all your material, it’s time to upload your pictures (jpg) and audio (mp3) and assemble them to tell your story. You’ll see it’s an incredibly simple to use interface with easy drag and drop functions. And it was built for journalists, so Soundslides allows storytellers to concentrate on the story, rather than the application.

For a comprehensive guide on how to use Soundslides I suggest you check out Mindy McAdam’s tutorial. Do also check out her Do’s and Don’ts for Slideshows.

And if you still have questions or are running into trouble, Soundlsides has an active help forum that is worthwhile checking out.

Reuters photographer Finbarr O’Reilly produced a simple, but compelling audio slideshow entitled “Congo Chic” for the Global Post. It describes how Congolese women revel in their hairstyle, despite all the suffering they are facing on a daily basis in the war-torn nation.

And if you're working in African media and are producing audio slideshows we'd love to hear your thoughts. Have you used the Soundslides? How useful do you find it for journalism? Or do you produce slideshows with other programs?

Of course, as Ali Abdou from Radio Garkuwa in Niger  pointed out, there are some drawbacks. You can’t integrate video and can't rework the audio nor the photos once they've been uploaded to Soundslides. Plus you need to have your own web server to host an audio slideshow.

True. But as many journalists on our workshops have found out, Soundslides is still worth exploring because it is a useful first step towards multimedia and understanding how to adapt to visual storytelling. And, it's simply fun checking out something new.

Author: Barbara Gruber