John Coyne's Radio Weblog

Sat, 14 May 2005 16:27:47 GMT

Bitty Browser

Sat, 14 May 2005 15:17:26 GMT

B. F. Skinner. "The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do." [Quotes of the Day]

Sat, 09 Apr 2005 17:42:02 GMT

Accenture-ating the Positive. One of the biggest names in consulting disappoints the Street. But should investors be upset? [The Motley Fool]

Mon, 13 Dec 2004 02:26:01 GMT

Blaise Pascal. "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction." [Quotes of the Day]

Sun, 12 Dec 2004 23:40:04 GMT

How To Make a Podcast.

Yesterday I posted my first podcast. I thought I'd take a minute to write down how I did it for anyone else so inclined.

Equipment

After asking some friends for advice (like Doug Kaye, Thanks Doug!), I used the following equipment:

Behringer Eurorack UB802, an inexpensive 6 channel, 2 mic input mixer.

Behreinger Eurorack UB802 mixer. This is an inexpensive mixer with two mic inputs. Both have phantom power, which is needed to power the mic I used (see below). I spent about $45 on this. There are other options, like the UA-25 USB Audio and MIDI interface which goes direct to USB, avoiding lots cable woes. Its much more expensive and is not a mixer, but its also compact and runs off USB power. Perfect for mobile use. I may pick one up yet.
Griffin Technology iMic USB Audio Interface. This is not strictly needed if your machine has a line-in port. In any event, I like it because I use USB as a poor man's Powerbook dock and this eliminates two cable plugs.

Behringer B-1 Studio Condenser Mic
Behringer Studio Condenser Microphone. This is a great mic at a great price. I picked mine up in Orem for less than $90. Its not portable, as you can see from the picture. It comes with a case, shock mount, and wind sock. The stand, I picked up at Radio Shack. I was a little worried about noise from the floor and desk through the stand, but it doesn't appear to be too big a problem. A more portable option would be something like the Shure Sm58.
Bose Quiet Comfort Headphones. I already had these. You don't need noise reduction for this application. I do think that closed air (i.e. covers the ears) do better at preventing feedback and are more comfortable.
An Apple Powerbook (1 Ghz with 1G of memory).

All in all, I spent about $150 on equipment I didn't have. You could get by with a cheaper mic that plugs directly into the computer, but I tried that and you can definitely tell the difference. I figured it was worth the $150 to sound a little better since I sound bad enough as it is. :-)

Software

The software set up that I used was Dave Slusher's recipe for OS X podcasting at Evil Genius Chronicles. Dave's recipe is good. I had a few comments:

Soundflowerbed seems to be very touchy. You use it to get the audio from the Soundflower channel you've set up as a sound bus out to the headphones. I had to start and stop it multiple times to actually get it to route sound and it crashed at times.
There was a delay from the mic to the headphones that made speaking difficult since you don't hear yourself until a little while after you speak. Consequently, I turned off the headphone feedback when I was speaking. This was OK for soliloquy, but wouldn't work for an interview on the phone.
Audacity works well, but has a steep learning curve. For someone who's never edited sound before, it was an interesting experience. I'm not above paying money for something if its easier to use. Suggestions?

The one thing I used that's not on Dave's recipe was my hacked version of ListGarden. I used that to create an RSS feed with the enclosure. I could have just put it in my regular RSS feed using Radio, but I decided to create a separate feed for podcasts and ListGarden makes that really easy.

Technique

Here was my technique. Feel free to critique if you've got suggestions that will help be do this better.

Load the full Gillmor Gang into Audacity. Listen to it and make comments to myself on a label track.
Go back and re-listen to interesting bits based on my comments. Record the response to them right there on a separate track.
For each clip (I had 4 or 5), duplicate the original Gillmor Gang track and then cut out the right piece.
Order the tracks vertically in the order I want to put them in the finished piece. Audacity makes reordering tracks difficult unless I missed something.
Move them in time so that they follow each other. This is easier to do my compressing time a lot, getting them mostly right, and then expanding time to fine tune the placement.
Delete unwanted tracks, edit the ID3 info, and export as an MP3.

As I mentioned yesterday, recording this took me about four hours. Dave Slusher took me to task in response to me saying "Recording is hard because when something goes wrong, pretty much the only choice is to start again. You can't easily go back and change one sentence or remove a mispronunciation (at least I can't).":

What the? I do this every time I ever record one. In fact, in tonight's episode I removed about 4 minutes of coughs, stammers and false starts into topics that I decided to abandon. That's over 10% of the final result. This suggests that the real core is in the last part, the "at least I can't" bit. I'm curious to find out what Phil's setup is. Is he using a tool that doesn't have a waveform editor? If so, he could easily use Audacity for free anytime and would have that capability. Or, is this just a case of failing to RTFM? Folks, you can in fact edit the audio, remove mispronunciations or even insert new sentences in place of burbled or erroneous ones. I do it all the time...
From Evil Genius Chronicles - No Honor Amongst Systems
Referenced Fri Dec 03 2004 10:28:27 GMT-0700

I'm sure Dave's right, but its just felt like I was swimming in molasses and faced with the prospect of inserting some material in the middle of another clip and removing and repairing several verbal bobbles, it just seemed easier to rerecord it to me. Certainly, as I gain experience with Audacity, that wouldn't be the case, but I don't think you can argue that its as easy as cleaning up text. Text has some very nice properties.

That said, audio has other properties. Doug talks about IT Conversation's ability to give you back bookmarks on audio clips so that you can reference them in a blog. That's nice for somethings, but I wanted to say what I was thinking, not just write them. That's the beauty of podcasting.

[Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]

Provinces I have visited

Sat, 10 Jul 2004 21:32:40 GMT

create your own personalized map of Canada or write about it on the open travel guide

States I have visited

Sat, 10 Jul 2004 21:30:35 GMT

create your own personalized map of the USA or write about it on the open travel guide

Countries I have visited

Sat, 10 Jul 2004 21:27:25 GMT

create your own visited country map

Sun, 20 Jun 2004 18:00:34 GMT

Costs of Warming on the Rise. Scientists say climate change is upon us, and the longer we wait to do something, the more expensive it will be. Also: New York air is getting worse.... Coral reefs gain protection. By Stephen Leahy. [Wired News]

Sun, 20 Jun 2004 17:41:58 GMT

Controversial Accenture deal moves ahead. An effort to block a homeland security contract awarded to the company, whose parent is based in Bermuda, stumbles in the House. [CNET News.com]

Sun, 18 Apr 2004 21:54:42 GMT

Bertrand Russell. "The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." [Quotes of the Day]

Sat, 13 Dec 2003 17:37:49 GMT

Magnetic Field Is Fading, but No Dire Effects Are Foreseen. Geophysicists increasingly wonder whether the magnetic field has begun one of its occasional reversals that, over time, might lead to compasses pointing south instead of north. By Kenneth Chang. [New York Times: Science]

Sat, 13 Dec 2003 17:29:56 GMT

A lazyweb request after reading this: Someone should register the domain "phoneswap.org", and build a quick website (no - not a business) that does two things: 1) acts as a clearinghouse where you can post the phone/technology (and carrier if it's locked) that you have, and the carrier/technology that you're switching to, and 2) has a community-supported "how to" on helpful hints for swapping contacts - perhaps even technology-assisted. If you just want to get rid of an unused phone or other device or pda, you could be offered the option instead to formally accumulate whuffie. [Ray Ozzie's Weblog]

Fri, 28 Nov 2003 15:59:33 GMT

First Impression. "Compliments have more power when they're delivered directly."

-Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey , Harvard Graduate School of Education

[Fast Company]

Sun, 23 Nov 2003 12:01:57 GMT

George S. Patton. "Don't tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results." [Quotes of the Day]

Nokia

Sat, 27 Sep 2003 16:26:32 GMT

Nokia Leaps into the Future.

Nokia Stuns Everyone

"Well, much to our surprise and delight, that Nokia phone we reported on yesterday turned out to be real. But it's not called the 7800, it's the 7600. And further stunning everyone, Nokia's also coming out with about a million other new products today. Besides the 7600 Imaging Phone (which is a WCDMA/GSM phone with a 65,000 color display, Bluetooth, and a built-in digital camera), Nokia also unveiled a new line of "Imagewear" products for displaying and viewing digital photos, including two medallions with tiny LCD screens, two digital picture frames, and a digital photo kaleidoscope.

Read - Nokia 7600 Imaging Phone
Read - Nokia Medallion I
Read - Nokia Medallion II
Read - Nokia Image Frame SU-4
Read - Nokia Image Frame SU-7
Read - Nokia Kaleidoscope I" [Gizmodo]

Some very cool stuff here that, unfortunately, I don't have time to delve into deeply tonight. Alan Reiter handles some of it for me, though.

[The Shifted Librarian]

Sat, 14 Jun 2003 21:56:53 GMT

Mozilla search plugins.

Mozilla search plugins

Don Box notices a cool IE feature. The view-source: protocol is supported. I tried it and it worked. Even cooler, I wasn't in IE at the time, I was in Firebird. I guess we should call it a browser feature :-) ... [Jon's Radio]

Test Post from NetNewsWire

Sat, 14 Jun 2003 21:19:50 GMT

It would be better to use Word for Linda?

Sat, 14 Jun 2003 20:46:39 GMT

Meteor Impact Is Linked to an Extinction of Fish. Just as dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago when a meteor struck the earth, many fish of an earlier era about 380 million years ago may have been similarly killed off. By Kenneth Chang. [New York Times: Science]

Mon, 19 May 2003 00:48:09 GMT

Google and the Visible Web. Dave Winer reinforces Doc Searls' important point about the "Googlewashing" debate: He says, "If you want to be in Google,... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Sun, 04 May 2003 13:56:32 GMT

New Software Gauges the Size of Imminent Earthquakes [New York Times: Technology]

Dailey quote

Sat, 03 May 2003 19:36:48 GMT

Robert Heinlein. "The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive." [Quotes of the Day]

Sun, 20 Apr 2003 23:01:28 GMT

upside down maps. A fresh perspective on world maps. Francis Irving writes about his fascination with upside down maps, "It needn't be a Eurocentric world." Why haven't more upside down maps made their way into our daily life? [MetaFilter] [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

Sun, 20 Apr 2003 22:49:53 GMT

Andy Grove on the confident leader. Intel's chairman discusses decision making, intuition and corporate governance in a conversation at Harvard Business School. [CNET News.com]

Sat, 29 Mar 2003 23:18:28 GMT

Carl Zwanzig. "Duct tape is like the force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together...." [Quotes of the Day]