My great grandfather on my father’s, mother’s side (is that the right way to say that) was John Henry Western. Last time I was at my grandmothers house she said she had an audio tape that someone had given her 30 years ago and she had never listened to. It was a tape to tape real (if thats what you call it) and she had no idea what was on it. So I took it and had it digitized at Allens Camera in Provo. It took them a few weeks but for about $30 I had a CD with over 45 minutes of audio. It was very rough sounding with poor sound quality, lots of pops and hisses, and loud and soft parts. About half of it was him singing at a birthday or wedding party. But about 20 minutes was my grandma’s cousin interviewing him. He was 80 at the time.
I put the .wav file into Audacity and cleaned it up. Normalized and equalized it, removed the pops and chopped it into 2 files. One with his speaking part and the other with the singing. Then I saved both as mp3 files to share over the internet with my family. Overall it took about 2 hours to edit the audio. I am far from an audio expert. My biggest problem so far has been how to share this with my family. I cant upload it to facebook and my wordpress will not let me upload an mp3. Finally I had to upload the mp3 files to my own server and just link to them as a regular link. There has to be a better way. I know there is an audio plugin for wordpress I need to check out.
Listen to John Henry Western Sing. Listen to John Henry talk. (right click to save the file)
The singing was good but I really love the interview part. He talks about when he was a boy and they moved from the Pioche Nevada area to Deseret Utah (outside of Delta). He talks about a few memories and also gives some words of wisdom to his posterity.
no comment untill now