Excited to announce my very own podcast on podcasting. I’ve finally taken my own advice and started a podcast about my passion – Podcasting Advisor. This will fit in well with the book. If you go to the website there’s a voiceline to leave questions or you can just email me and I’ll answer them on the shows.
From now on any posts on this blog will be strictly to do with the book only. I’ll write general podcasting issues posts on the podcast’s site.
Meanwhile I’ve just uploaded draft 5 of the book. It’s a lot prettier now that I’ve moved away from LaTeX and onto Pages on the Mac. It’s not that I have anything against LaTeX, but I just find it more productive and inspiring to write in a WYSIWYG tool that allows you to embed pictures so nicely. The proof reading functionality is pretty cool too. The only thing I miss is automated index creation – blast!
I’ve had a few people recently asking me for help while recording. A common concern is that they can’t hear what they’re recording at the time they’re recording it.
Usually when you record from any source (such as a USB mic), whether or not you hear what’s coming in from the source is determined by the settings of whatever software you are using to record it.
For example, if you were using Audacity on the Mac, you’d need to go Preferences, then tick Software Playthrough. Once you do this, as soon as you hit record, you’ll hear all the sound that your chosen input source can pick up.
The non-ducking technique involves removing the major frequencies in the voice from the music bed, this ensures that the main frequencies in the voice are not fighting against the same frequencies in the music. Clever!
I thought I’d experiment and I’ve made 3 recordings below. The first is just my voice competing with the music, no ducking or anything – a bit of a din. The second recording utilises traditional ducking. The third uses this new technique, I like to call it frequency accommodation. My voice has prominent frequencies between 200-500Hz and again at about 5kHz, so I reduced these frequencies from the music. The differences are subtle. What do you think?
Latest word count: approx. 17,930. Yes, I know it hasn’t gone up much – I’ve been tweaking the Planning chapter.
Recently I’ve been setting up some WordPress blogs for clients who have their podcasts transcribed. As I mention in the book, I believe WordPress blogs make fantastic websites to host podcast, when used with the Podpress plugin. Transcriptions can be quite long and if you’re not careful this can cause the RSS feed automatically created by Prodpress to be too large for Feedburner which has a maximum size of 512KB.
If you find yourself in this sticky situation there are a couple of setting in WordPress to take a look at under Settings > Reading:
For each article in a feed, show: select the Summary radio button. This causes only the first few lines of the post to go into each item description of the RSS feed for both the blog AND the podcast RSS feed created by Podpress.
Syndication feeds show the most recent: select a reasonable number, not too big. This limits the number of items in both blog and Podpress feeds.
Meanwhile the book continues apace: approx word count: 17,600.
Just learned that TypePad have introduced the Posterous-like ability to accept an email with MP3 attached, to create a post with the audio embedded in a nice player complete with RSS feed. Here’s my first attempt complete with pelling mistales and with me doing a very arrogant, Jeremy Clarkson style voice – sorry about that.
This is another useful tool for first time podcasters who want to dip their toe in the water, although, it’s limited by email’s inherent dislike of large attachments.
As work on the book progresses, I thought I’d write a few thoughts on the ikky subject of archiving. Do not confuse this with backup, which is a completely separate and very important subject in its own right.
As podcasters, we do tend to produce some pretty big files. A typical WAV file comes in at around 10MB per minute. Record three 30 minute interviews a week and thats the best part of a GB per week if you want to keep those high quality WAV originals around. Add to that the file infrastructure that editing and mixing software adds, and the situation becomes even more scary. I have eight episodes of our Internet Marketing podcast languishing on my hard drive right now, taking up 8.93GB of disk real estate (284 files).
The problem is that as time progresses, your hard drive can get clogged up with huge files that you probably don’t need to access any more. We need a way of moving those files off our hard drive, but in a way that makes finding them again easy, just in case a client says, “You know that podcast you did for us two years ago. Well…”
Let me tell you about the archiving strategy I use on my MacBook.
I have an Archive folder directly in my home folder. Inside that I have a Pending folder. As I identify stuff that needs to be archived, I move it to that Pending folder. I like to preserve the folder hierarchy of the files I’m archiving because it makes more sense when you come to search for things later. Every so often I check the size of the Pending folder, (select folder, Command-I), and when it approaches the golden size 4.7GB I know its time to burn another DVD pair. Now here comes the nice part. In order to make it easy to find stuff later we need to make an index. To do that I use the find command to make a list of all files in Pending and capture the results to a text file. In terminal just type:
cd Archive/Pending
find . > 20091113.txt
Notice I name the archive as today’s date. I then copy the resulting .txt index file into the root of my Archive folder, so I have a growing index there. At this point I burn the content of Pending onto TWO DVDs, label them with the same name as my index file, keep one DVD in the office and one at home. Then I purge the contents of Pending ready for the next archive.
If I suddenly need to find a file or folder I use the grep command on my index files. Say I need a file called ninja02.wav, in terminal:
cd Archive
grep 'ninja02.wav' *.txt
> 20091026.txt:./podcasts/2006/061109_dSCAPE/tue/ninja02.wav
The output from grep includes the file containing the search string at the front. So we can see that the DVD we need is the one labled 20091026.
Happy archiving.
Book progress: Approx. word count: 17,200.
Update 14/11/09:
To achieve similar results to find in Windows, use the recursive dir command:
Another few sessions on the planning chapter – this has been the toughest so far. However, I’m really pleased with how it’s shaping up and I think people will find it useful. On an exciting note, the evolving book can now be purchased at an early bird discount.
Excited to announce my very own podcast on podcasting. I’ve finally taken my own advice and started a podcast about my passion – Podcasting Advisor. This will fit in well with the book. If you go to the website there’s a voiceline to leave questions or you can just email me and I’ll answer them on the shows.
As work on the book progresses, I thought I’d write a few thoughts on the ikky subject of archiving. Do not confuse this with backup, which is a completely separate and very important subject in its own right.