Daily Podcast News

At the start of this project I knew zero about recording/editing or even what a podcast was. 4 months have pasted and I must admit I have podcasting sussed completely which is great and can always retell how at the start there were only 452 entries in google for podcasting. Podcast sites were rare to none. iPodder.org, Podfly and Podstar were the only chance apart from the yahoo podcast group to find information on Podcasting, four months on we have podcast stars (Dawn and Drew). It has appeared on BBC2, CNN and many major newspapers; unfortunately Ireland is slow to do a feature but it early days and Ireland is slow to catch on.

Back to the recording/editing status. I am currently working on Podcast 0506 with technical director Mike Kiely. Most of Friday was spent in college, more specifically between the AV lab and the Sound Studio. From 10am until just after 3pm we worked on getting all the sound files together so we could make adjustments and get them to sound in tandem.

Firstly we tested each track in SoundForge to see what they actually sounded like. On Tuesday I had all the tracks editing down (in SoundForge) as best I could, unfortunately as I found out the default for Soundforge is to save file as .MP3 so once I had them on disc I opened them on screen, Mike needed to convert the sample rate of each track so they sounded on the same level, we located this thanks to google. We entered the sound studio and opened Pro Tools on the Mac, now he needed to grab the tracks from my CD and convert them back to .wav; I had three CDs with me, the originals, the edited versions and the intro/outro segments. I hadn’t labelled the CDs properly so this held us up as I gave him the wrong CD to convert (Note to self: Use a black marker). During this time Mike found that the Ellen MacArthur piece was in Mono and all other clips were Stereo. So to overcome this difference he copied the file and pasted it into a left and right output.

Now once we had all .wav files on a USB storage card we could save them onto the Mac and get ready to get our show together. Mike gave me a demonstration on how to use the ProTools which in the end looked simple to use. I have never had any experience with Macs before so that was an experience in itself. ProTools has a nice layout to understand and follow, we laid out the segments on two different parts, one for the interviews and the one below was for the introductions and outros. We made a quick outline of where the content would appear along with the intros and iteming following to the next section.

Problems with the recordings:

Ellen MacAther: Sound quality was good except it was in mono which set us back a bit on productivity. Maeve Connolly: Segment was just 20 seconds long but involved an awful hissing noise due to the surroundings or a connection lose, this was completely blocked out by using the dehisser option under audiostudio. Feargal McKay: Two separate recordings sounded okay, one of them was louder than the other so we used the limiter to quieten it down. Eamon Kearns: This was a phone interview which actually was of great quality but we wanted to give a more realistic sound, so people actually knew it was recorded over mobile phone so we used the limiter.

I spent just over an hour by myself getting to know ProTools and figuring out where each action was which was a very valuable experience, I could easily move the files around and put them in the order which I preferred.

Our multimedia group gathered for another studio session to record items on the following:

What sight or sound do you associate with Christmas in Ireland? What kind of gift would be most appropriate as a “gadget for her”? Fast-forward ahead to the year 2020. What sight or sound related to multimedia today might be considered a digital artefact in that future year.

Recording took place in the sound studio with 8 Multimedia students, for best sound quality we used the Sony mini disc recorder with the Sony Microphone attached along side it. This enabled us to sit/stand around the room and all to be heard at the same voice level, which helped me produce better sound quality. When recording I made sure to slide the mini disk record button to the left and listen for the feedback, recording now took place with the help of Thelma Cotter who introduced each topic followed by our opinions.

Once recording had finished I hit stop and felt it vibrant in my hand. I got out a laptop and connected it to the mini disc and opened Soundforge. A mini problem occurred here, there were other files on the mini disc and I never looked to see what numbers were our recent recordings so I disconnected the device and played each item, jotting down the number as I went along. Finally I had the details I needed now I hit record in Sounforge waited a few seconds and pressed play on the mini disc and left extra time at the end for sound editing purposes.

I edited out the blank some and some jumbled words which appeared. Now I copy/pasted each one into on big file and added my introduction to the podcast using text to speech technology and also created my outro with contact/comments details. Listen here.

Using a mobile to Podcast from was a brand new experience for me. Although over two months ago I did record a quick show and sent it by MMS to my e-mail. The problem I encountered was that is was saved as a .amr file, one which I had never heard of. This made it useless to me and I quickly sent it to my trash folder.

The same experience happened today from using the Sony Ericsson S700i without the handbook, we thought the phone was capable of recording in MP3 and transferring it over to a laptop. The exact same problem happened, it would only record in .amr format. We knew this wouldn’t be of the best quality to use so we googled for applications to convert them to MP3, only 5 results arrived back: forums with people asking the exact same question. Along came Michael Kiely with just what we needed a handy zip file that converted what we had to .wav, which as we all knew could be easily converted to MP3 for podcast use. Bernie opened each file in Quicktime and saved them as MP3 files. After a brief tutorial of Soundforge I quickly got down to work and copied each MP3 file in and deleted the beeps form the start and end of each recording.

The process just took about 20 minutes from recording to podcasting. Listen to the end result.