This chapter explains how to work with different types of audio files to include sounds, music, and podcasts to Moodle courses. These recipes will teach you how to use different tools to record, edit, and convert different audio file formats, covering common scenarios for multimedia Moodle activities.

The sense of hearing plays an important role for effective learning due to the fact that there are plenty of students whose ability to learn depends on their musical intelligence. Besides, inserting this type of ingredient into our activities makes them more interesting to our students.

You can combine several pieces of recording with not only our own voice, but also with somebody else's speaking or sounds, therefore, podcasts won't be dull for students when they have to listen only to the teacher speaking. The mixture of sounds, audio, and music is interesting because students can listen to small pieces of recordings or music as well as ourselves explaining what they are hearing.

Podcasting is an excellent way to share different elements with students. We can combine parts of recordings to provide our students with facilities to listen like a radio show created by their own teacher, depending on how creative you can be. Once you are confident with podcasts, it can be easily enhanced by them.

Students can record their podcasts too. Some of the skills that students develop by creating podcasts include writing scripts and their listening and speaking skills. They learn how to speak better because they have to pay attention to what they listen to. It would be advisable that students listen to our podcasts first and then make their own.

The baseline topic of this chapter is Music and sounds around the world. Therefore, we will design several types of activities in which we need to use this multimedia element in our recipes. We can combine several types of ingredients to make our recipes quite spicy!

Creating podcasts using different resources available on the Web enhances them further. Therefore, we need to know which are the resources that we can bear in mind in order to use them. One of these resources are the free sounds available on the Web. They can be incorporated into Moodle courses or they can be used in order to create a podcast with different sounds. It all depends on what type of activity you want to design.

The software that we use in the first three recipes in this chapter to create a podcast is Audacity. It is free and open source and works with several Operating Systems (OS). It would be advisable to read the recipes in order because they are designed in such a way that they are threaded to one another.

In some of the recipes, we leave aside Audacity, but this does not mean that it cannot be used in order to combine the audio files that we mention. However, it would become a chapter on Audacity if we go on with said software. We can also add sounds available on the Web to the podcasts. We create Audacity software that cannot edit MIDI files, but TuxGuitar can. It is a free and open source software that supports several OS systems and is a great tool for editing MIDI files. Besides, you can create a TuxGuitar Community account and share files with other users. After signing in, you can upload, download, comment, and rate files. You can also ask for help from the music teacher or work with students with said software, especially music lovers.

We will learn how to allow students to record audio after listening to us speaking. It's time for us to listen to them. Create this type of activity in order to make our virtual classroom more vivid. Thus, students practice other skills, as we have stated before, when they have to record themselves.