Podcasters Emporium

Herne, I was on my way to bed but really wanted to answer your comment so I have fired up the laptop :)Sound Cards: In my opinion a few years ago we reach a point where the actual quality that a sound card is able to produce pretty much got to a point where it was not necessary to make it any better. Yes there are ones that do but for the average computer geek and podcaster there is no advantage. The mega expensive ones are really for recording studios.What has changed is things like surround sound (read number of output channels) and things like those few bells and whistles, THX output and stuff like that – these features are aimed squarely at gamers. I bought an Audigy Sound Blaster card and I think I paid 80 bucks for it. Honestly I can see an advantage of buying more expensive sound cards – there is better things for the podcasters to spend their money on that will make bigger gains.In my opinion you can get as good a sound as we get using the onboard sound that comes with most PC’s as standard these days.As far as post production goes I don’t want to go into huge detail because that really is more shows that I have fingers for! BUT what I can tell you is that I used Audacity to both .wav edit and mix 10 podcasts. I then purchased SoundForge for .wav editing and post production (things like compression and normalisation – both of which should be done before mixing!). Once edited I then mix the shows I produce with Acid Music Studio, an excellent and very affordable multi-track editor and a massive time saver. Yes it is a lot quicker and more capable than Audacity for multi-tracks. Both products are from Sony and are really the half-way house between Free and something like Audition. But we WILL be covering this in future episodes!My bandwidth is 8MB down and 384(?) up something like that at any rate – the up might be out by 2 or something :P But while the down is very important so is the UP remember that Skype is a 2 way street. Where the rot sets in is that most of us have a faster speed down than up. When you are doing nothing this is fine for Skype. But because of how this type of connection works it robs from the up when you are forcing down… probably easier to try this yourself – Upload a file somewhere with FTP and then try and surf the net – slow as a wet week right and nothing like the 8MB you are used to… Same thing happens when your using Skype – load a web page and your down is affected a bit – but usually not that much because you have a lot to spare – you have in theory – split it in half – Skype copes fine with that. Now the same can not be said for your voice going UP stream – Your upload speed is a lot slower – split or half that and your going to hear the effects sooner than you will with your download or what your listening to from the other party.You can recreate this effect by using FTP while in a Skype call and getting the other party to record their end of what you sound like. Awful generally btw!Not sure if that makes it clear but I think if you read that a few times and then try the practical you will get the idea.Take home is that BOTH up and down are important for Skype – but your upload speed is effected the most because there is usually less of it to spare.You speeds are fine for Skype recording BTW. More than mine is!Hope that answers your questions adequately and goes some way to indicating to you and listeners why Skype is a hard beast to tame. Not impossible but your getting the reasons behind why we are putting it off for a bit and tackling these fundamentals early so that you guys are more competent with your gear and able to counteract the difficulties that Skype is going to throw at you. I don’t want to make it sound impossible but there are a lot of factors to consider!Hope that helps Herne. I would also say that you have done a great job with your comments and you audio that you have sent me for use with the AGP. Thanks! Both James and myself are looking forward to you sending us some here!!

Thanks for taking a few minutes out of your sleep-time to answer my questions, Dave! That really helps and I’m sure that it answered a couple of other people’s questions.Re: my audio comments–You wouldn’t believe how long it seems to take to make a 5-minute audio comment! But then I don’t usually do the whole comment straight through and I often go back and tweak bits of it. Audacity is nice because it allows me to cut-and-paste between tracks to get what I want and it’s pretty user friendly for the non-audio geek like me.I’ll have to work on some sort of audio comment for Podcasters Emporium, I just need to think of something useful to say!

Great comments so far. I think Dave has done a great job of dealing with Herne’s questions, so I’ll focus on Scrathy’s message:Great questions. Dave and I both do compression in the software side, I am not familiar with the benefit of having this incorporated into the mixer. Personally I like the ability to control compression until all the editing is done. Dave do you take this approach too?I am going to discuss two microphones now from Rode. THE PODCASTER, and the PROCASTER.The PODCASTER is a USB microphone and has no gain, or level. It does however have a headphone output volume control, but this is not the same as gain or level. With the PODCASTER microphone you will need to control your record levels in your recording software.You may also want to consider this new XLR microphone from RODE called a RODE PROCASTER. This microphone seems to be based on the popular broadcast-quality PODCASTER except it’s a XLR connection which will go into your mixer. The PROCASTER is somewhat less expensive than the RODE NT1-A and I will likely upgrade (downgrade in terms of cost) to this model shortly, because it is less ‘fiddly’ than the RODE NT1-A in terms of the way you have to use it. Listen to Episode 11 to hear what I mean.Here’s an Australian EBay link:http://cgi.ebay.com.au/Rode-ProCaster-Broadcast-Quality-Dynamic-Microphone_W0QQitemZ260334882243QQcmdZViewItemQQptZAU_Pro_AudioDave may have some more thoughts in terms of on-board compression on mixers, but as I haven’t used it I really don’t have an opinion on this.I hope this information helps!James

All good guys, what a freaking goldmine of knowledge! Maybe when you interview people ask them for there top 5 tips.Seems your doing so much giving, here is a tip I’ve picked up (you might like them, I’m certainly no expert).Do your ID3 tags to your MP3 file in iTunes. This makes sense as 98% of people listening will be doing it through a iTunes interface of some sort so this ensures compatibility. So drag and drop the file into iTunes when you’ve made it a MP3, right click, select “Get Info” and edit. All those podcasts on your ipod that don’t have coverart showing haven’t been editing their tags in itunes.

Interesting show as always!Am I right in thinking that James does the mixing for this show? If so it kind of backs up the assertion that there isn’t much increase in output quality between a cheaper and a more expensive one, as the AGP that Dave does sounds just as good.Speaking of which I’ll be interested in hearing more about how you do the Skype stuff. The Podcasters’ Emporium, the AGP, and 2Schooners are by far the best Skype recorded shows I listen to. I won’t name names but I stopped listening to one show even though it had good content as the skype recording and mixing was so abysmal – multiple different levels, and loads of background noise made it unlistenable to.You’ll be pleased to know that you sound much better on my brand new sand-free iPhone headphones! :)

Hi guys,Great show as usual. I’m really enjoying what you are doing here and I can see this as a prime reference for starting- and established podcasters.Since you’ve mentioned mixers and the setup podcasters can use, I’ve written an article on how I use that 1002FX together with Skype in a way that allows me to record directly into Audition while using a Skype “plugin” as backup (remember the conversation we had some time ago Dave?) and avoiding the feedback loop common with this setup. You can find it at http://www.photonetcast.com/2009/podcasting-equipment-and-recording-behind-the-scenes-of-photonetcast.htmlAnyway, the mixer has made a ton of difference in quality and I completely agree when you say that besides the mike, is something that should be considered a good investment by all podcasters. Just my 2 cents.I’ll be here waiting for more great content.

If I was listening to the show?! Are you kidding me? Of course I’m listening… It’s a gold mine… nugget after nugget.And thanks also for the comment over there.As for the promo, I’ll definitely take you up on that one. Will follow shortly :)

I found this show especially helpful when buying a mixer. i talked about it on my blog http://marionvermazen.blogs.com/marions_blog/2009/05/improving-my-podcast-quality-installment-1-buying-a-mixer.html