Full Circle Associates

(Updated Feb 21 with links and minimal formatting)

Tod Maffin – Podcasting

I am picking up mid stream as I was fighting with Blogger to try and edit a post and did NOT get a cup of tea. As a result I’m eating chocolate without tea. Tolerable, but not ideal.

Podcatching clients – just like an RSS feed, you subscribe to a feed of a podcaster. It is a blog with audio content. Most people will set their servers to send once an hour. Guy in Alaska will shut your podcatching thing down if you are asking to feeds too often. If there is a new posting, it downloads the audio files, dumps it into your libray (itunes, windows media) then add it to your listening device (MP3). We get to publish this content and at the end it ends up in your MP3 player. CBC has one experimental podcast, testing to see how it works. What it comes down to is you can subscribe to radio content and play it on your MP3 player.

Lets first talk about the files. Web pages are saved as HTML. Audio files, uncompressed files. .wav on the PC, AIFF for Mac. This is great, perfect audio with enormous files, uncompressed. Like a bitmap file in the image world. JPG is the smaller version. MP3 are the smaller versions. Why small files? You are paying for bandwidth to store and stream. If you are streaming 3 gig files, you go over your limit. Most files are compressed far to high.

Kbps: Bit Rate
Two things you have to be aware of when encoding audio. The bit rate. The more details, the riddcer the story. More bits, better the audio quality. The other is kHz, the sample rate. Common recordings are done at 44,100. Computers only understand bits and bytes. You hear this on cell phones. Someone says hi there. If you sample 2/sec you might get I e. (He makes some nice cool sounds which I don’t know how to type). The computer extrapolates the sound in between. The more samples per second, the better it sounds. Most CDs at 44,1000. We can’t detect that. Professional radio uses 48,000 which gives us some problem. We have to upsample 44,1000. Recording studines use 96,000. 8Kz is what phone does on a good day. When radio shows go to a remote, the sound quality drops because they are on a compression system that compresses the audio at 15k sounding a bit muddy.

If your podcast is done on the phone you only need 8,000 because that is as good as it will get.

Examples of what this audio sounds like… (Sound time! You will have to listen to the podcast. I need to find a link). I will put these on my blogs. The in house audio does not allow a full discernment of the differences.

Content:

• Have something to day
  
• Clear show topic/focus (at the beginning all were about podcasting. We are done with that. Let’s move on to fishing and vegan food). You will build up a brand in people’s mind. Have a show about something. There will be an audience. That’s one of the great things.
  
• Tell a story in it. Adam Curry’s “the daily source code” – it is about podcasting but he started podcasting. He told us this story, moving from the Netherlands to England. Trying to get bandwidth. People kept screwing up. He would talk about it in the course of the show. You had to tune in to find out what happens next. Radio is the most visual medium out there because there are no limits to what you see in your head. ON radio you just need good effects and a storyteller and you can make anything happens. The narrative is really important. Give us a read on to come back and listening. That develops you as a personality. There are far too many DJs out there. (DJ riff) You don’t know anything about these peoples. Perhaps something lodged in their anus that makes them talk funny. People who let you into their lives/personality. Dwayne and Drew show - a couple talking back and forth, unscripted, unproduced, live. IT is compelling because they are telling about their actual lives.
  
• Speak to One person – there is no “everybody” – there is one person. This is also the magic of radio. Think of when you listen to radio. You are by yourself. We do studies about what people are doing when they listen. They are either doing housework or chores or in the car doing errands. Solitary activity. Coast to Coast AM – conspiracy show in the US – a compelling show because the guy has it. He speaks to one person. The guy on his morning job. Have that in your mindset. In public speaking they say “imagine everyone in their underwear. Don’t that’s stupid. Imagine them on their walk.
  
• Be brief. Most people are in their car. You have a finite amount of time. If you produce a 45 minute podcast it had better be really good and targeted because it is the only show. So if it is not brief, it has to be perfect. So be brief, be regular and frequent. 8-10 minutes.
  
• Mix up the sound a little bit. Boring drone on. Radio is difficult because there are no easy on-ramps. Headlines in the paper are on-ramps. Moments that let you return back in if your mind has gone elsewhere. This is what most podcasters don’t do right now. You can put stings (bits of music) in, every sitcoms have them. Those are your on-ramps. It could be verbally. Pause, take a breath and say “here’s a new topic.” They will turn right in. They are audio headers. Sweepers (he made sounds), can buy CDs full of them. There is a site that creates sweepers for each other. I missed the site.
  
• Mike’s Manic Minute scripts 90 seconds of comment, then puts it into an audio program that eliminates every possible data error and it flies though. It is great that way

Microphones

• – meant to be near people’s mouths. In my job I produce a lot of radio freelancers and the mike is too far away and the tape is unusable. Listen to what is in this room even when not talking. It is not quite. Ringtone, ambient noise. Microphone up close 2 inches at an angle. If you are straight ahead, you end up getting pops. Sorry, audio guy, holy … Your P’s will pop and it sounds like crap. If you keep it at an angle, I was producing this woman yesterday, she was in Vancouver, her audience in Winnipeg. The analogy I used it was, you know when you are at the dentist.. she started to shake more. Forget dentist. Just let people know this devise as a pop-screen. (The black thing on the mike). However, here is one of the big myths in audio. This is not a popscreen, it is a wind screen. I can still pop. The round thing is the pop screen. (He makes all kinds of noise). Come up and look at it afterwards. This is so easy to make. Embroidery hoop and a pair of nylons. Stretch and snap. Cheap. In every arsenal.
  
• Patterns – use pretty anything you want that is good quality. Omio, cario pattern, shotgun, parabolic microphones. If you can get one slightly directional, great. Omnidirectional works fine.
  
• What about headsets? USB microphones sometimes have latency issues. It is sending it through the computer. Through jacks it goes right to the mother board. Get a real mic into a mic jack. Problem in lots of laptops there is no line in… a bit more difficult. One way around that is to buy a mixing board. Each is a channel for the microphone. One master control for the level and the rest adjust. Can set equalization. Adjust levels is really helpful. 200 bucks for the mixer. Eurorack. Eric Beringer.

More tips

• Avoid verbal listening – Nodding heads on TV, in radio if you have uh huh, yeah, it’s really distracting. Especially as Canadians (making sounds). Don’t do it. It feels natural in conversation. Recorded it is difficult to listen to and tough to remove.
  
• Double enders – you want to have really good quality you are trying to interview. Don’t want to do it on phone because it sounds like crap. But can’t get to Eric, so we do a double ender. I record my end of the conversation into my computer or mini disk. I’m on the phone with Eric. He’s recording his end on his mini disk or recorder. We are hearing the phone, but recording. He sends his half and you put them together in an audio mixer. TV does this all the time. You see someone being interviewed from some northern Inuit town. They recorded the audio on the tap and spliced it to the studio side.
  
• I’m not a huge VONAGE fan. VOIP has poor (not his word) quality. Total recorder HIGHCRITERIA.com on PC. Audiohigjack pro. Whatever it hears on the soundcard it records. Not a huge fan of it but it works. Wiretap on mac? (comment from audience) An application called Line IN can do that.
  
• How do you get past the need for a digital hybrid on the audio line…? Really geeky. Will answer that offline. Have a lot to say about that.
  
• If you are going to edit audio, like outside. The stuff underneath the talking. If you don’t have audio of what was underneath you you will hear cuts. Whenever you change location you collect 30 seconds of room tone (Not ringtone as I typed earlier). If you need to cut, this show, This American Life in the US, we heavily edit the spacing of how people spoke for dramatic value. We use music in between. You can do this in radio to make the story come alive. You can’t put those pauses without the roomtone to fill in the blanks.
  
• Any tips for studio mics? There are some good. Take it offline. You don’t need to spend. You are compressing to MP3 files, not high end CD. This is a cheap 50 dollar Sony mic. You get what you pay for. Senheiser, slightly directional. You can get away with almost anything. The mics on Mac laptops are far superior to PC mics. Worry about the sound around you. One of the great podcasts. Live from the Formosa Tea House. The problem is ambient sound, clattering dishes. Get as close to the mic as possible. Pick a quiet corner of the room. Carpeting, upholstery. Bedroom closet (see picture on http://hoverradio.com – The bedroom closet is studio b. The clothing all around absorbs the sound. Carpeting, sofas.

Legal issues about the phone

• It is legal in Canada to record the conversation without the person you are recording knowing it.. The law is that one person has knowledge. However, you are not necessarily permitted to broadcast. My advice is to ask someone’s permission. If you find a scandal and you have the scoop, go with it in the public interest.
  
• This is not true in the states.
  
• Verbal release is fine.

Capture tools:

• audacity, multi track mixer, relatively stable, Samplitude, professional level, 800 bucks. It has the different colors of frequency ranges, tonal interview. I can visually tell. Mixing is simple. YOU can see where the music comes in, faded it down, You can do multiple levels of mixing. Demo of roomtone used. Otherwise you would have heard the edit. Roomtone is important.
  
• Posting – use blog technology, any blog can do it. ID tagging is really important. Look it up on Google. The title, album, so people can skip through and find it, show notes of what you talk at at what moment.
  
• Feed burner… you can point feedburner.com to your RSS feed. It takes the feed and looks to mp3 feed and converts it to an enclosure (if you blog software does not support attachments). Can get stats on your blog, etc. The downside of someone else hosting your RSS feed is they may go under or go to feed. Have to ask people to change their feeds.
  
• Server space- Creative commons will let you post for free. It is not easy, they review the audio, but if you don’t want to host, if they approve it and you release it, they will pull the data off. Creative Commons is an informal non profit collective to freely license materials. Flikr.
  
• Promotion and feedback – regular schedule, show notes, blog with RSS. You could ask people to go to your website and manually load. Podcastalley.com put it in your sig line, talk about it, hand out buttons.
  
• Ask for feedback in the podcast. Comments in blogs. Incorporate that. You can sign in at k7.net which records comments, free, Washington state service. That is what most people are using right now. It is a great service.

Music and the Law: Myths.

• Public radio is slow to adopt because of licensing issues. Music they have to license. We pay for internet streaming rights, but don’t have an agreement for internet download. Here are the myths. It’s perfectly legal to play if
  
• I only play 15 seconds – not true
  
• I talk over the intro of the song – not true
  
• If I bought and own the CD – not legal, you are leasing private performance rights. The dentists office are paying a fee to publicly play the music. You get married, you playing MP3, the venue charges you 60 bucks to do that. I have my own opinions about that but am not going to say while the mic is running.
  
• The artist agrees (you still need the label’s permission and sometimes their union’s) – not true. We find this with actors who don’t have the right to offer their voice. The union has the right.

About Fair Comment - mythology. A term in law that you have the right to comment on something. You can use bits of something to comment on it. If you do a story on Michael Jackson’s recording of Billy Jean. You can play a bit of it. It is a gray area. You have to be commenting on the topic. All these things you hear of Homer Simpson going HO hoh ho – illegal.

You can play music if you buy a license for it. If an artist is truly independent (label, union).
You can go to ASCAP and buy a license, $360/year if you have no revenues.
Not allow to have show notes that list the titles of the song. Not allowed to publish in advance so people can record it. Your listeners can’t choose the song. But some people are not in ASCAP. Some are in BMI. SOCAN. You have to buy rights, log and send quarterly reports. Coverville.com, it’s a great site on podcasting, he loves cover music and tribute bands. He bought the rights.

Finally
Curry.com Daily Source Code
Doug’s Appplescript podcast – really well put together, short, nice pacing
Coverville
Cbc.ca/nerd



Northern Voice
Tod Maffin