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Saturday, July 26, 2025

Adding Ancestor Songs and Podcasts To My YouTube Channel

I have had a YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@RandySeaver) for several years now, and until recently it consisted only of uploaded silent home movies from the 1940s to 1970s.  

I tried adding some of my Suno.com AI-assisted songs in MP4 format to my YouTube channel and it would not upload them.  Then I tried making a Zoom video of an ABC Biography summary, plus reading the AI-assisted poem, and playing the Suno AI-assisted song.  That worked, but the song music was distorted and haphazard. Google told me the music failure was because Zoom audio is compressed.  

I took geneablogger Marcia Philbrick's advice and tried the free Canva.com system to play the AI-assisted songs (in MP4 video) and podcasts (in WAV audio) and that worked!  Canva.com has a learning curve but now I can make a podcast audio or a song video in about 15 minutes.  Thank you, Marcia!

To enrich the listening experience, and add to the visual experience, I have been adding a life summary slide to the Canva.com page for the songs and podcasts.  Here is an image of one of the Song pages:

Here are the YouTube videos that I have added in the past week:

1)  ABC Biography summary/Poem/Song:

2)  Suno.com AI-assisted songs:

3)  Google NotebookLM AI-assisted podcasts:

Needless to say, these are not big sellers on the YouTube hit parade.  But they might entice my grandchildren to watch them in a bored scrolling session.  

It looks like I'm actually begging for subscribers and views!

4)  What is the long-term vision here?  It still is a video discussion in my voice of an ABC Biography including photographs, maps, a poem reading, the AI-assisted song, and the AI-assisted podcast audio (with summary slide).  That is likely to be more than the 30 minute limit on a free Canva video.  

5)  My perceived problem is that my voice in any video is weak and unsure (it's always been weak and unsure - I can't change now).  I have too many ums and ahs and silent seconds.   I've thought about using ElevenLabs.com to clone my own voice and use that to read the text to eliminate my ums and ahs, the embarrassing silent seconds while I think, plus the occasional expletive when things go wrong. I've often thought that I have a voice made for writing rather than audio and video. 

6)  My technical capabilities for dealing with audio and video are limited - I will probably never get to the point I can edit a video or insert funny images of video clips into my videos.  But who knows?  I told Lisa Louise Cooke in one of her first interview videos in 2008 that I would never do my own videos, and now here I am.

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The URL for this post is:  https://www.geneamusings.com/2025/07/adding-ancestor-songs-and-podcasts-to.html

Copyright (c) 2025, Randall J. Seaver

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1 comment:

  1. Waeckerlin FederowiczFriday, October 2, 2026 at 8:22:00 PM PDT

    Randy, the point about wanting your grandchildren to hear the stories is more important than making every pause disappear. I would keep some of your real recordings as part of the family record, even if you use a cleaner narrated version for a longer video. One practical route is to finish the ABC biography as a short script, split it into sections, generate a text-to-speech narration, then check names, dates and place pronunciations before combining it with the Canva slides. I work with FlowSpeech (https://flowspeech.io/), which is one TTS option for that script-to-audio step; it would not replace your own voice or the original family recordings. Your note about Zoom compression is also useful: exporting the song audio directly into the video should avoid the extra call-audio compression.

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