I found that this process was not nearly as intuitive as it was made out to be. I did not download either the SoundCloud or the Anchor.fm app. I have a very small iPhone and simply do not have space for a lot of apps on it. Instead I simply used the services through my browser. SoundCloud did not offer an option to record audio straight through the browser window. At least, not that I saw. Instead, I used GarageBand to record my audio and then simply uploaded it to SoundCloud. That was simple enough as I am familiar enough with GarageBand. This is where things became far less intuitive. I copied and pasted the URL from the audio file, but WordPress did not automatically embed the SoundCloud player. It simply published the URL. To get the SoundCloud player to embed I had to use the embed code and paste it into the “Text” (code) of the post. This was all fine, but was just not as simple as it was made to sound. If I had known I had to embed the code from the beginning it would have saved me time. I do wonder if this has something to do with the privacy settings I used on SoundCloud to have the link private rather than public.
As for anchor.fm, it was simple enough to record the audio via my web browser, however, this version of WordPress strips out iframe code as a security precaution. Anchor.fm gives iframe code to embed their player. Clearly this did not work to embed into this post. Instead I simply linked to the audio. While the recording through anchor.fm was quite simple, it did not give any post editing options, which could prove to be extremely frustrating if any errors are made during recording. One could record and upload their own audio to anchor.fm, however, I do not know why a person would not simply use SoundCloud to upload if using a different software to record the audio. As I said in my audio recording, I was also unimpressed that anchor.fm did not give an option to make audio private. It makes sense that they are wanting to help people create podcasts, and most people would not want their podcast to be private. For the things I imagine I may use audio for in the course of the MAL degree, I do not want it to be able to be viewed publicly. For this reason, I will not be using anchor.fm as I do not feel that it offers what I want when it comes to recording and sharing audio.
Did others have similar experiences? If you preferred anchor.fm why was that? Which option would you pick and why?
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