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I sent my Gmail account a 53kB AMR sound file (about 1 minute of audio) from my phone and when it showed up in my Gmail inbox the attachment was a ~512kB WAV file (mono, 8-bit). I checked my phone to make sure it hadn’t auto-converted the file before sending it and it says it didn’t. This means Gmail could be a handy part of an AMR-to-podcast solution. Besides its conversion and email gateway roles, it would serve as a handy data archive.
I’m getting the majority of my political news from the Meet The Press podcast and NPR. This issue of the Florida and Michigan primaries, which were held early and without the blessing of the Democratic party, now needing to be counted since the Clinton/Obama race is so close. MTP just played two quotes from Hillary Clinton, an earlier one dismissing the primaries, the current one saying that those voters were disenfranchised. Let the “flip-flopper” name calling begin. PA, please vote for a person whose opinions seem a bit more thoughtful and consistent: Barack Obama.
Scott and I recently started recording weekly “Zubritsky’s Corner” podcasts, both to talk about sports in general and to prepare for the third full season of the BDFL podcast. This week was a watershed moment in our podcasting history. After I suggested that Scott and I could greatly improve the quality of the ‘cast by having each of us record our side of the Skype call with separate mics at CD-quality and then mixing the results together, he quickly purchased a decent recording kit. After setting it up with Audacity and sending me a test WAV, we were all set.
I haven’t sung the praises of REAPER in a while. It’s software I purchased last year that’s been my main audio recording/editing tool ever since. I used it to record my side of last Friday’s conversation; the signal chain was my venerable Radio Shack mic plugging into my Mackie 1202-VLZ mixer, which was monitored by my M-Audio Audiophile 24/96 card. It was very easy to monitor my recording level in real-time with REAPER. Once we were done I saved out the new REAPER project. The next morning I received Scott’s recording and after about 15 minutes in REAPER I’d cut, cued, and panned our conversation. In another 15 minutes I’d pulled in our intro/outro music (Brad’s “Look and Feel Years Younger”), spliced it in with fades, set all the channel levels and applied the excellent W1 Limiter to the mix. Then it was simple work to render the project as a FLAC and hand it off to Foobar 2000 for tagging and MP3 conversion. The results are here. Compare it to our podcast from the previous week. To my ears it’s a dramatic improvement. What do you think?
So Apple is apparently going after companies that use the terms “podcast” and “pod” (as it relates to podcasting) under the guise of trademark infringement. Sorry, but this doesn’t pass the smell test. “Podcast” was certainly inspired by the iPod, but it was genericized to imply “syndicated, auto-downloaded audio content” within its first year of use. I see Apple’s embrace of the vernacular when they integrated podcasts into the iTunes Music Store instead of calling them something like “iPodcasts” as an acceptance of this fact. Cool your jets, Apple lawyers.
Scott and I have been discussing the start of the upcoming Brutal Deluxe Football League podcast season and improvements we can make. I’m going to try to clean up the audio even more this season by making the recording less complicated. We’ll probably still use Skype, but probably only with the two of us, to try to keep levels in check. I’m going to do a little bit more in post-production as well. I dislike spoken-word podcasts where different speakers are at different levels, and I’m going to do my best to make sure my podcasts aren’t among them.
I’ll also avoid publishing the BDFL podcasts through more feeds than just the official BDFL website feeds. I don’t want us to waste bandwidth by publishing the same podcasts on my feeds. I will still post pointers to the episodes and encourage anyone interested in listening to subscribe to the BDFL website.
I’m also thinking about doing a little bit of underwriting this year, so that we can get a little bit back for the time that we spend producing the content. I estimate we will probably produce about 26 episodes at 40-60 minutes a piece. We’re thinking about making the show more formatted as well. Any suggestions in these areas?
The Airport Express combined with Podcasting and iTunes is enabling me to time-shift audio even more effortlessly. I’ve got the laptop fired up in the living room, browsing podcasts sitting on my upstairs PC. I’m listening to NPR’s weekly Technology podcast on the stereo in the family room while I’m doing chores.
I wanted to come up with a master copy of my podcast subscriptions that could be imported into any podcatcher I chose. My current podcatcher is iTunes. It doesn’t currently provide ways to import or export podcast subscriptions via OPML, the dialect that most podcatchers/aggregators use. I already had a “Podcasts” folder in my Bloglines account, so I updated that to reflect my current subscriptions. I’m already using the excellent MT-Outliner plugin to power my blogroll (based on the public contents of my “Blogs” folder in Bloglines). So I created a new MT template that generates an OPML file with my current podcast subs.
It validates against the OPML Validator (which is currently in beta), and I’ll be tweaking it as the aggregator subscription data interchange space matures. I haven’t tested it much yet, so if you decide to try it, please let me know where it does and doesn’t work. I know Doppler likes it, but Google Reader (which is beta) does not. Feedback is welcome.
iTunes does allow per-subscription imports/exports by dragging and dropping a podcast entries and PCAST files, but apparently the PCAST format is limited to one “channel”. I couldn’t aggregate podcast subs into a single PCAST file with multiple channel elements and get it to import more than the first feed. Here’s the template I made in case you’re interested. I think Apple should be a good sport and give iTunes OPML import/export capabilities for podcast subscriptions. They could continue to support PCAST as the point/click/drag/drop solution, and add OPML as the menu-selectable solution.
I’ve yet to fully listen to this podcast from CBC Radio 3 that Tim Bray pointed to, but I had to blog about it. It is the most impressively produced podcast I’ve seen anywhere, from a container perspective. They’ve made excellent use of bookmarks and multiple embedded images in the 128kbps AAC file they produced. This was the first bookmarked file I’d seen and used on the iPod Nano; when I first saw the little ticks on the progress bar I thought the darn thing was broken. 
I’ll comment on the content after I’ve had a chance to listen. These comments concern podcast #25.
Update (11/16): I’m listening to it this morning. This is some great music and a great format. Subscribe!
NASA - Steve Robinson: First Podcaster From Space
I don’t mean to diminish the importance of STS-114 with this comment: the linked article merely references a downloadable MP3 recording. A key element of podcasting is syndication via RSS enclosures. A quick scan of NASA’s RSS feeds doesn’t reveal that this was syndicated content. This is the only NASA podcast feed I’ve found.
I’m just picky, I guess.
Please arrive home safely, Discovery.
Getting all my audio gear set up for the podcast. I’ll probably have a few kinks to work out after this session. We will be starting at 9 or a little earlier. Email or Skype me at “aharden” if you want to join the conference call. And make sure you’re running the latest version of Skype!
Scott and I will be recording our “warm-up” BDFL pre-season podcast this coming Tuesday at 9PM. Don will be joining us, so there’s no telling what else we might talk about. If you want in on the fun, you can join our Skype conference call (Skype me at “aharden”). It looks like I can host two more people on the call. We’ll probably be on for 40-60 minutes.
Please leave a comment, email or Skype message if you’re planning to join. Thanks!
Another fantasy football blogger, Dr. Soos, is podcasting. His current FantasySacs podcast features his analysis of the first week of free agent moves in the NFL. Check it out.
Due to Ed’s talking about them last night, I’m now subscribed to the Dawn & Drew Show and WebTalk Radio podcasts. I’m now subscribed to 16 podcast feeds; here’s my OPML subscription file (generated by Doppler). I’ll try to keep that up to date.
Of course, I don’t have time to listen to all of the content that flows in, but it gives me plenty to pick and choose from.
I was pleased to see two Ogg Vorbis podcasts come though today on the Indy Media Radio podcast feed I’m subscribed to. Both were mono 22Khz spoken-word ‘casts at ~35kbps (probably quality 0) and sounded great. Thanks to their producers for helping to push Vorbis in this space.
I’m catching up on some feeds and podcasts while watching the game tonight (which is in OT!). I’m a pretty regular listener of Adam’s and was mildly entertained when, earlier this week, he featured excerpts of Madge Weinstein, and he podcast a phone interview with “her”. Apparently Madge is really Richard Bluestein (name dropped in the latest Trade Secrets), according to this reference. I’m surprised to find out that Adam and Dave didn’t think Madge was an act before today; Madge seemed way over-the-top to me (and certainly like a man) the first time I heard “her”. In the referenced TS podcast, they both seem miffed that someone would present a false persona as real in the blogosphere/podosphere.
It would probably be nice to know what’s real and what’s scripted in this community, but, like many things online, you gotta take it at face value. I think I have more of a problem with Dave and Adam being miffed at Madge (indeed, appearing to subscribe to the notion that “non-real” blogging/podcasting should be noted as such) than the fact that Madge is an act.
Doug Kaye of IT Conversations wrote a superb essay on the subject of the various stereo modes available when encoding MP3 files. I knew of the “Joint Stereo” setting and how it is different than “dual-channel” stereo, but knew nothing of the tunings one can do to JS encoding. I’ve been encoding the Cygweb podcasts as 48kbps CBR 22kHz mono MP3’s mainly because I didn’t want to sound quality to suck too bad. I’m going to go back and try reencoding some of the podcasts with the settings Doug recommends, then compare them to originals.
This was my first trip to the IT Coversations wiki, and I’m finding it has a lot of good technical info in it.
Thanks, Doug!
I’m catching up on my favorite podcasts and was sort of tickled when Reel Reviews’ Michael Geoghegan went over his new podcasting setup and mentioned he just got the Behringer Eurorack UB802 (he said “820″, but I’m sure he meant “802″) mixer. That’s the one I just purchased. The first podcast using it for will be recorded tonight with Scott. Like Michael, I’m recording off the computer (at least for now). My server running Skype is patched into the mixer, but I will be recording the podcast to MD and playing it back into the computer for final encoding. I’ve had issues with Total Recorder and Skype, and I only have one full audio interface on the server to play with. For the voicework we’re doing on the podcast, the multiple A/D and D/A conversions shouldn’t be a big deal.
Apparently the MD unit I’ll be getting for Christmas may not be arriving in time - supposedly there aren’t any in the country currently. Good things come to those who wait, right? When I get the Hi-MD unit, I’ll be able to digitally upload my recordings to the PC and avoid that last D/A/D conversion.
As I mentioned here, I think that Ogg Vorbis is an excellent container/codec combo for podcasting, from a technical sense. Obviously MP3 has much broader compatibility and should be used for wide-audience podcasts. However, as a proof of concept I’ve made my first podcast available as Ogg Vorbis, with roughly the same bitrate and audio specs as the MP3 version. However, there is more metadata packed into the file, and the multiple tracks within the file go a step towards addressing the bookmarking issue.
If you’re interested in checking it out, it’s here. (14.2MB Ogg Vorbis, Q0 Mono 32000Hz.) I’ve intentionally kept this file from showing up as an RSS enclosure in my feed due to the fact that most people aren’t expecting OGGs to be podcast at the present time.
Please let me know what you think of this format, should you decide to check it out.
Doppler is working swimmingly for me (its scheduling works). For a few days now I’ve been pretty regularly listening to the following feeds:
DSC has been interesting to keep up with. And the recent Wil Wheaton items that IT Conversations put out were entertaining.
Brandon (who recently released an MT plugin to support RSS enclosures) spoke about his attempts to get a podcast recorded on Windows, and moving back to the Mac platform. I’m still feeling out what I’d need to set up to record one of my own; we’ll see.
I have to admit I’m getting sucked into the vortex that’s forming around podcasting. Adam Curry (yes, that Adam Curry) is probably the foremost evangelist right now and his “Daily Source Code” podcasts do an excellent job of framing the phenomenon; they also provide some cool music to listen to. I hadn’t heard Prince’s “Musicology” until I heard it on DSC.
One of the things Adam mentioned on a recent DSC was helping to document toolsets and practices for creating podcasts on various platforms. In my mind, an intriguing podcast would be one that integrates recorded speech from a directly-attached microphone, music, digitally-recorded VOIP conversation(s) (meaning: not recorded via microphone on the receiving end), and cool bumpers. Being able to record and mix the entire podcast in realtime would be a plus, but it would be a technical challenge. The Windows tools that come to my mind specifically for this are Audacity for recording/mixing, and Total Recorder for extracting VOIP conversations. Adam and others have been talking about Skype as a VOIP solution, but I haven’t tried it yet.
I may try some of this stuff out; if so, I’ll document it. I really don’t have much to share podcasting-wise at this point; maybe interactive NFL discussion with other BDFL members would be interesting to some. I have enough audio hardware on my main PC to allow some flexibility: the onboard C-Media audio, an Audiophile 2496 connected to a Mackie 1202-VLZ console, and a Xitel USB analog audio out.
We’ll just have to see where this goes. Please let me know if any of this interests you.
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