For this model, I would place the laptop between the teacher and the student, screen parallel to the axis of the conversation. The microphone on a MacBook Pro (Apple laptop with CD-Rom) is on the top left corner of the case by the screen. The orientation of your laptop can also help in making the best audio recording of your students.

Of course when you record audio, you should be in the quietest room you can find, with a minimal amount of echo. You can either extend the section by dragging its side on the navigation bar, or you can zoom in and out by scrolling up or down directly on the waveform. The part which is highlighted in the navigation bar, is the part which is shown as a waveform and which you will hear when you press the play button.

Notice the navigation bar at the top of the window which displays the waveform. Once your voice recording is done, the next and most important skill is to learn to navigate the sound file.

Press the record button again to stop the sound recording.

What may be disconcerting at first is that the counter at the top of the window is not running, in fact, you should use the time display at the bottom to measure the length of your recording.

When you are ready to record your student’s speech, click OK, and the recording will start.

You can keep the default Sample Rate (44,100 Hz), Channels (Stereo) and Resolution (16 bits). Click the record button (red circle) to start a new audio recording.

From the Finder, go to your Applications folder and launch oceanaudio (my favourite alternate way to do this is to use Spotlight, the lens in the top right corner of your screen, which I call out by its keyboard shortcut Command + Space).

Installing oceanaudio is fast: double click the downloaded image file (dmg file) and drag the application icon into your Applications folder.

Ocenaudio app