New Podcast Is Up

You can download the latest IMN Podcast from this link right here, or you can get it from the Flash player on the main site.

With Expert Podcasting Practices For Dummies on the shelves right now, and since I already brought up podcasts, I thought I'd shed a little light on the dark, troubled way the IMN podcast comes together. In this post, I'll detail the tools we use and have used in the past, and I'll look at the actual process next Monday.

In the two years, we've tried a variety of methods in hopes of finding one that produced the best quality of audio in the shortest amount of time (co-host Steve Hayes and I have lives to get back to, after all). We've tried recording directly to a PC using Sonar Home Studio, recording directly to my Mac laptop using Garageband 4, recording to a hard-drive-based music workstation, and a flash memory recorder. We alternate at this point between recording to my laptop or the flash recorder, depending on which one is easier to grab at the time. Both have proven to be fairly stable solutions, barring user error (yes, that user would be me).

Post-production stuff like editing and file conversion is done on the Mac using Soundtrack Pro and a couple of freeware programs: Switch converts the AIFF file to a 128kbps mp3 file, and Musorg helps me edit the ID3 tag for each file. I used to use iTunes for both purposes, but I didn't care for the fact that I had to clear out the library each time I edited an episode. From there, I just SFTP the episode and the XML file for our RSS feed to the server, where it lies in wait for unsuspecting listeners.

In a perfect world, I'd have already upgraded to Logic Studio and use the new version of Soundtrack Pro 2 (my current version comes from the Final Cut Pro bundle), but that's dependent on the budget. And the budget is slowly shaking its head at new carpet and an upcoming trip to New Orleans, so I don't think I'll slide this by for awhile.

So that's the techie side. The planning and scripting part comes next week.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that we've used Shure, AKG and Blue Snowball mics. We've achieved great results with all three, although getting two Snowballs working at the same time required a little tweating in the Audio/MIDI section of the Mac OS - I had to create an aggregate device out of both mic and route the audio through there.