Camtasia Studio and the Chipmunk Sound
October 8, 2008
Camtasia Studio is a screencast program. It costs $300. It is better than CamStudio, which is free. But it has a flaw. Well, not Camtasia, but Adobe's recent versions of Flash. They have an incompatability problem with Camtasia.
If you cannot solve this problem, you are better off with CamStudio: www.CamStudio.org.
When we watch a screencast produced by Camtasia Studio, there are annoying chipmunk sounds. They sound like Alvin. Sometimes, the entire screencast soundtrack dies.
If you use Camtasia Studio, and you want to get rid of the chipmunk sounds in your videos, go here:
Watch the screencast. Then download the file.
Camtasia for some reason has zipped it. Why, in this era of DSL, any company uses zip compression astounds me. Never become dependent on another company's product, e.g., an unzip product. Make sure the file unzips automatically. Never add a step that the user may not understand. This should be obvious, but it isn't.
I was going to warn Camtasia's tech support about the unzip problem, but the tech support people have built in a blocking system so you cannot actually contact them. They offer a form to fill in. When I filled in the boxes and clicked Continue, I got a pop-up: Product requires a value. It sure does -- considerably more value!
"Value" is techiebabble for "number."
I have no idea what number they want. I suspect they do this to reduce the number of tech support inquiries. This is the problem with tech support everywhere: unlike sales, the support people are not paid by commission -- so much money per fix. The sales force wants inquiries. Tech support doesn't. If sales set up barriers like this, the company would go bankrupt. When it comes to taking our money, sales makes things easy.