I spent much of last summer working with a startup company, then known as Round Two. Round Two was an impressive cast list of key figures in the Firefox community who were starting a company around the browser. When I worked there, the plan was two build a set of extensions that tied into a web service that they could change people for. As time went on, the plan changed to creating a browser based on Firefox that "make(s) it easier to blog, publish your photos and share and discover things that are interesting to you." If you are interested in trying out Flock, you can
download a preview version.
Daryl had the task of starting the community around Flock (he recently handed this part to another member of Flock). He started a
blog for Flock, and launched a
podcast. I have a habit of seeing something and wanting to get involved, and the idea of doing my own podcast had crossed my mind, but I had nothing compelling to talk about. Being good friends with Daryl, I asked if he would let me produce the next podcast for Flock, thus giving me a topic. Daryl was glad to have the help, and
my Flock Podcast is now available for all to hear. (Other editions of
Flock Radio are available as well).
I had a few ideas of what I wanted, a few ideas of how to do it, and a few days to do it in. A goal for this podcast was to use all open source software to produce it, and I'm happy to say I hit the goal. I used
Audacity 1.3 Beta for the mixing, and
CDex 1.51 for the encoding. CDex is intended for ripping CDs to MP3s (and does a very good job of this), but is also able to convert WAV files to MP3, and vice versa. I decided on using the beta of Audacity for the ability to have multiple clips per track - I would have many, many clips by the time I was done and it was worth the extra issues of a beta to not have 40+ tracks to deal with.
I've done enough projects in my life to know that starting one without a plan is a good way in ensure you'll spend 10 times longer finishing it than you have to. So before even installing Audacity, I set to figure out the segments and the order. This was pretty easy: just copy NPR. For those who still listen to the
evil empire stations, it works like this: you need 3 topics - the main subject, a break subject, and a teaser subject. You string them together by an intro that sets up the topics, then play half of the main subject, break away to the break subject, return to the main subject, end on the teaser and then sign off. An example would be a main subject of reactions to the State of the Union, breaking away to a profile on a farmer and his problems, back to the speech, then close with a story of a cat sneaking into the whitehouse. See how the teaser works? You intro with "... and we'll have the _tale_ of a feline who fooled the Secret Service." You want to hear that, so you listen to the whole thing waiting for that segment. Genius. Now I know why I can never seem to turn off NPR once I've started, and find myself many times sitting in my truck, parked in the driveway, listening to NPR... just waiting to hear the teaser.
For this cast, my main topic was "should Flock be a browser, or a set of extensions". Daryl had collected comments by the community to use in the cast, which I listened to and decided which order to play them in and who should go before the break, and who after. Daryl gave me the break segment in the form of "what's going on at Flock," and I had a good teaser in Flock meetup groups. Not a cat story, those are perfect teasers for sure, but this was my first podcast.
I took each clip, and clean them up and adjusted the volume to be consistent. I then split up some of the longer clips and inserted a voice over of my own to keep the flow; again, learned from too much NPR in the mornings. Since this wasn't my podcast, I sent this voice only version to Daryl for content approval. As luck would have it, this was the same time he had a trip to CA, so it took a while before I had an okay. This gave me time to find the music.
If you are doing a podcast, you must admit one fact: no matter your subject, no matter who you are, no matter how smooth you sound - after 2 minutes and 30 seconds you are boring and need to "pinch" the listener. Two ways to do this is have someone else start speaking, or cut away to music. The music should be the same style though the cast, but any style can work. Catchy is always good, since you don't want to have music for more than 20 seconds (it is after all a talk program). At first, I thought I would record some of my own guitar playing, but I couldn't come up with something I felt was passing the catchy bar. So I set my (crushed) ego aside, and used a site Daryl recommended;
Magnatune.
Magnatune is one of the hip new indy labels fighting the system. You can listen to every artist's CD in full before downloading, and when you decide to buy you pay what you feel the CD is worth, from $5 on up. As if that wasn't enough, they make their artist's music available under the
creative commons license, meaning I don't need to pay special fees to use it in a podcast if I give credit to the artists. But wait, there's more! They make the music free to podcaster's for use in their podcast. Daryl had setup an account with them, so I went and found a perfect catchy band,
Mutandina, to use as my "pincher."
Using a beta version of Audacity proved to have a downside. If I saved the project and opened it later (as one tends to do), I would loose my envelope settings on the music (the fade in and fade out points). It turned out the settings were still there, I just couldn't see them. I found
help in the forums; a quick cut - paste - undo cycle would fix the problem.
All done, I had spent 8 hours to produce a 15 minute podcast. Sometime was spent learning Audacity, but not much since I am no stranger to mulitrack recording and working with audio (and
video). I would guess another podcast would take me 6 hours of production time, and more if I had to gather the content myself. I don't know if I'll be doing another podcast, and if I don't that's okay - I did this because I wanted to, not make a career move (but if you want to pay me to do your podcast, fire me an email, lol). I had fun, I gained the experience, and I hope those who listen to it will enjoy.
Posted By Mike On Saturday, February 11, 2006
Filed under podcast flock |
Comments (1)
Perry
-
Sunday, February 12, 2006
1:16:00 PM
Thanks for the summary of your efforts and your "podcasting philosophy." I'm an NPR addict too, so I guess that part of your approach appeals to me, though in my own podcasts I haven't abided by your "no more than 2 and a half minutes" of my babbling before cutting away to something else.
If you don't do any more Flock Radio, don't let that stop you from doing your own podcast. It's a shame to waste the time you spent learning how to do it by failing to continue. And you have a pleasant delivery that works out well for podcasting. I can appreciate, however, that one of the real challenges of doing a podcast is having something compelling to say. It is the thing that limits the podcasts that I do too.
I'm also pleased to locate your blog and will check in on you from time to time.
