I’ve been very busy with projects over the last few months, and I have not posted much new information. I have a number of new posts in the works on topics ranging from hosting providers to improved recording environments. Until then, I wanted to point out that I have updated my About Me page to include a partial list of clients, for those who are interested in knowing more about what I’ve been up to.

Select List of Nationally-Recognized Clients

I have had formal business relationships with these organizations (or their podcasting contractors):

Alliance for Climate Protection
California Academy of Sciences
Cone, Inc.
Dallas Wind Symphony
Forrester Research
Fort Worth Symphony
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Museum of Science, Boston
San Francisco Bay Joint Venture
Tulsa Symphony Orchestra

I have provided help to these organizations, but haven’t entered into a more formal consulting arrangement:

National Academy of Sciences
New Scientist Magazine
New England Aquarium
Ontario Science Centre
Oregon Museum of Science and Industry
Union of Concerned Scientists

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I’d like to officially announce my newest podcasting endeavor: The Puzzle Podcast.

I’m co-hosting this short weekly show of brainteasers with David Leschinsky, the owner of Eureka Puzzles, a popular puzzle and game store in Brookline, Massachusetts. The premise is simple: we pick a puzzle type for the week, explain how it works and do an example or two. We finish each episode with a harder one for the listeners to work on until next week’s show (when we’ll give the answer).

The motivation for starting this show was actually this episode of This American Life. After listening to that show, I was inspired to do some more puzzles, so I went to my computer to find some puzzle podcasts. I figured there would be dozens of them, so I was shocked to find exactly one: the NPR Sunday Puzzle with Will Shortz. Now, I do like this segment, but it focuses on one specific type of word puzzle — and it is really just part of a longer radio program.

So, with the strong feeling that there should be a good puzzle podcast that featured puzzles of all types, I decided to start one. I quickly registered PuzzlePodcast.com, contacted David (who I knew from this interview I did with him for Boston Behind the Scenes), and got recording.

I’ll write a more technical post about setting up the show soon, but for now I’d like to invite you over to PuzzlePodcast.com to try your hand at our puzzles. I’ve attached the first episode to this post, and there are two more already up on the main site. If you hurry over today, you’ll still have a chance to with this week’s prize before the next episode goes out tomorrow.

As David always says, Happy Puzzling!

 Puzzle Podcast #1 [4:06m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Last week, Apple introduced iLife ‘08, the latest version of their multimedia software bundle – and that means a new version of the impressive GarageBand audio software. Of course, impressive is a strong term, but I would definitely apply it to a piece of software that gives you powerful and easy-to-use recording, mixing, and editing tools as one fifth of an $80 package.

I picked up my copy at the local Apple Store the first day they were available, and I’ve used the new version for about 15 hours of recording and editing in the last week. This review will focus on the new features (both good and bad) I’ve seen in that time, and list a few things that I think were left out.

What’s (Officially) New in Garageband ‘08?

Apple’s GarageBand site describes these new features for the software:

• Magic GarageBand: Play with a hand-picked band on a virtual stage. GarageBand generates a new project based on genre and performance styles.
• Multi-take recording: Mark a region to repeat, record your part multiple times, and pick your best performance.
• Automation of tempo effects and instruments: Set multiple edit points in a track to automate EQ and effect changes like a pro.
• Arrangements: Define sections of your song – intro, verse, chorus – and copy, move, or delete at will.
• Visual EQ: Graphically adjust frequencies for each track by clicking and dragging individual EQ bands.

Four of these five listed improvements will be useful to many podcasters (while Magic GarageBand has a limited appeal for performers, it offers very little to podcasters), but there are many other enhancements under the hood.

Recording Improvements

Increased Audio Resolution

GarageBand 4 (the official version number of the new software) can now record at up to 24-bit resolution. This means that the software can differentiate between more levels of volume. That doesn’t mean that you can suddenly get louder without clipping, only that the loudness scale is more nuanced than before. Considering that the previous version of GarageBand could differentiate between 65,536 levels of volume (the same range a CD player can reproduce), the increase to 16,777,216 levels is mainly of interest to musicians.

If Apple had added more sampling rates (that’s the 22/44.1/48 kHz number you may have seen), it would be easier to import the audio from a digital video camera into GarageBand. Maybe that will come in the next version.

Record Multiple Takes

This will be an interesting feature for some podcasters: the ability to take as many tries at a section as you need, then pick the best one for your final project. This seems particularly useful for re-recording a section of an almost-finished show, as multiple takes on the first time through are as simple as leaving the recorder on and trying something again.

To use the multiple takes feature, click the cycle button in the playback controls section, then move or resize the yellow line that appears in a new track at the top of your project – it should cover the area where you are going to record your takes.

While this is a cool feature when you need it, I would like to recommend it with a warning: In my testing, if I set the yellow selection region so that it overlapped other audio, that audio would disappear from my recording when I finished recording the takes. If you are going to use this, either cut out the section you are going to replace, or just delete it entirely before you start the multiple take process.

Automatic Level Control

There is a new checkbox in the track info pane for Automatic Level Control. This feature is similar to the Auto Gain Control you see on some portable recorders, and it seems similarly unwise to use.

What Automatic Level Control attempts to do is adjust the recording input level down to keep loud sounds from clipping and boost it to keep quiet sounds audible. Unfortunately, this means that a few seconds of silence will result in the next sound recorded being much louder than it should be. I did a test of this, and it took a pause of just 5 seconds for the record level to get too loud for a decent recording. In other words, if you check this box, don’t ever pause to go over your notes or to take a drink of water.

New 9,999 Measure Limit

Earlier versions of GarageBand limited projects to 999 (GB 1 & 2) or 1,999 (GB 3) measures, which at the default tempo meant that the longest podcasts you could produce with the software were 33 or 66 minutes. Of course, changing the tempo before you started recording could as much as triple the recording time, but it was still a limitation that frustrated many users.

In GarageBand 4, the limit has been increased to 9,999 measures, giving you 5 hours, 33 minutes and 16 seconds of recording time at the default 120 bpm tempo, or up to 16 hours, 39 minutes and 48 seconds of time if you reduce the tempo to the minimum 40 bpm. If that doesn’t work for you, your podcast is too long!

Editing Improvements

Automation

Apple’s list mentions that – in addition to volume automation – you can now control tempo, EQ, and effects with automation curves. What it leaves out is that these automation curves can now be locked to the track: if you move a region of sound, your adjustment curves (volume or otherwise) will move along with it. This one change puts an end to fixing all of your volume adjustments after you realize you missed an “um” and have to go back to edit it out. This is a major frustration I’ve had since I started podcasting with GarageBand two years ago, and it is finally fixed. Enable this feature by going to Control > Lock Automation Curves to Regions.

The advertised automation improvement is of interest as well: Though the new tempo adjustment is mostly something for musicians, the ability to add a bit of echo or EQ to one part of a track can be useful if you want to make a quick fix or enhancement without making a new track and copying the offending section over. For some, this may be a big help, but for me, it is mainly a time-saver for those few instances where you need to do something like that.

Delete and Move

This is a very simple but useful feature for podcasters. It deletes an audio region and moves the regions that follow it earlier on the timeline to take its place. This – combined with the ability to lock adjustments to the audio– will make it far easier to remove a piece of an already-edited podcast without a headache. Also, if you edit by cutting out sections, deleting them, and then moving the later regions toward the beginning of the timeline, this will remove a step from your editing process. Luckily, there is a simple keyboard shortcut for this operation (control-Delete) which gives you an easy choice: “Delete and Move,” or simply “Delete.”

Alignment Guides

GarageBand 4 now includes Alignment Guides (Control > Show Alignment Guides), a feature that has been borrowed from Keynote, Pages, and other Apple software. I have a love/hate relationship with Alignment Guides in other programs, and that seems to have carried over to their use in GarageBand as well.

With Alignment Guides enabled, it is far easier to align audio regions and automation tracks with one another. In fact, it not only makes it easier, it makes it almost unavoidable (this is where the love/hate part comes in). When activated, this feature not only conjures little lines to tell you when your regions are aligned, it also snaps the regions into alignment if they are only almost aligned. At the default zoom level, this means that you can’t make adjustments within about 1.5 seconds of an edit or volume automation adjustment without snapping to that nearby point.

This feature is great for making sure there are no gaps in a recording with background noise, but bad when you want to tweak something forward or backward a fraction of a second. Luckily, it is easy to switch on and off when needed.

Arrange Track

The Arrangements feature (Track > Show Arrange Track) isn’t just for musicians to keep the verses and the chorus straight, it can be useful for podcasting as well – but not as useful as I’d hoped.

Arrange allows you to select and move whole sections of a GarageBand Project as blocks – including all of the tracks, automations, and audio regions. Unfortunately, you can’t treat these “Arrange Regions” like you would the audio regions in a project. If you move a region to the left two seconds and let go, it won’t move the contents of that region two seconds earlier in the file. Instead, the Arrange Region will trade places with the previous region in the project – even if that places it 10 minutes earlier in the recording.

I can see the Arrange Track being useful as a way to keep track of the sections of a long podcast, or to rearrange large segments of your show, but it doesn’t behave the way everything else in GarageBand does so I probably won’t use it much.

Type-In Time on the LCD

Another simple one, but a nice addition: if you want to go to a particular spot in your project, you can now double-click on the time display LCD and enter the target time (or measure) to bring the play head – and your view – to that spot in the project.

More Refined Auto-Ducking

I do all of my ducking manually (ducking is reducing the volume of background tracks when foreground tracks come in), but I have heard that the Auto-Ducking feature in GarageBand is popular with some people. Part of the reason I didn’t use it was its lack of options – something that has just been solved in GarageBand 4. The newly-adjustable ducking tool seems to work pretty well when set right, but I still prefer doing it manually.

Visual EQ

GarageBand’s equalizer settings have been greatly improved in this latest version, with a new visual EQ editor that includes an overlayed spectrum analyzer. This makes it easy to adjust equalization by picking one of the presets, then fine-tuning the sound by dragging the blue line that represents the adjustments being applied.

This was one of the tools that I didn’t know I needed until I had it – it has proved itself useful many times in the first week I’ve had it.

Exporting Improvements

Normalization

Garageband has a new checkbox in the Advanced section of the application preferences called Export Projects at Full Loudness. This adjusts the loudest sound in the recording to be at 100% volume, insuring that your listeners won’t have to boost the volume too much on their end to listen to your show.

New Share Options

The Share > Send Song to iTunes menu item now lets you set the metadata (album, artist, etc.) and playlist you would like to use when exporting your song to iTunes. This can save you a step or two when exporting audio that doesn’t fit your default “My Info” settings in the GarageBand Preferences. The other big improvement is the ability to select what format and bitrate your projects are exported in. That’s right, you can now create AIFF, MP3, and AAC files right in GarageBand. In addition, all of these option are available whether you’ve selected “Create New Podcast Episode” or “Create New Music Project” when you first open your file – no more AAC-only podcasts!

In addition to the Send Song to iTunes option, there is a new Share > Export Song to Disk choice as well. This option gives you the same compression and bitrate settings as the iTunes export, then asks you what folder you’d like your finished file deposited in. This is a great feature that allows you to bypass iTunes entirely – as long as you don’t use it to add artwork or shownotes to the file.

Conclusion

GarageBand ‘08 (or GarageBand 4, whichever name you want to call it) includes many time-saving and headache-saving improvements over the previous version. It also includes some new features that – if used properly – will improve the overall sound and quality of your podcast. For a heavy GarageBand user, I see these improvements as nearly worth the $80 pricetag for the iLife suite. Of course, iLife includes iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and iWeb in addition to GarageBand, so the purchase should be a no-brainer for the Mac-based podcaster.

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A while ago, I wrote a post where I said that using Skype for interviews was a bad idea. I still stand by the premise of that piece – that Skype-to-Skype connections should not be used in most situations – but a few things have happened in the last few months to change my mind about the blanket statement “Skype is bad for recording interviews.”

The first thing was pretty simple. The telephone hybrid interface I had been using stopped working. This box took the sound from my studio mic (through a mixer) and fed it into the phone line so my interview subject could hear me. At the same time, it fed just the caller’s audio into a different channel of the mixer – allowing it to be recorded independently from my voice. These devices are usually very good at what the do (they are what professional radio producers use to put phone calls on the air), but I was suddenly without mine, and I needed to decide if it was worth it to get another one.

At about the same time, Skype announced a new option for their SkypeOut service: Skype Unlimited. For $30 a year, you can get unlimited calling to anyone in the US and Canada. That’s unlimited calling to real phones – in other words, an inexpensive digital connection between your computer and your interviewees’ in-home recording systems (AKA their telephones).

These two developments prodded me to look into Skype as a way to record phone calls, and I was impressed with what I found: with some inexpensive third-party software, I get better sound quality using SkypeOut than I did with expensive dedicated hardware.

Recording Software

Since I use a Macintosh system for my recording and editing, I downloaded a trial copy of Ecamm Network’s Call Recorder ($15, includes lifetime upgrades) to test out. Call recorder adds a small recording window (complete with level meters) to Skype, and is very easy to use. It adds a “Recording” tab to your Skype preferences, giving you full control over recording quality and compression (including an uncompressed option).

In my opinion, Call Recorder’s killer feature is the ability to have each side of the phone call output as an independent AIFF file. If you edit your interviews (or even apply any processing to them after the fact), this is a tremendously useful feature – it’s one of the main reasons people pay hundreds of dollars for a telephone hybrid. Because the whole phone call happens inside your computer, there is complete separation between the two sides of the call, allowing you to edit the interview as two separate recordings that can be spliced together into one smooth final product.

I don’t use Windows very much, but I did find a piece of software that seems to duplicate Call Recorder’s functionality for that platform: it’s called CallBurner ($50, trial version available), and what I have seen written about it so far seems good.

What’s the Catch?

There isn’t much of a catch, as long as you have a moderately fast, reliable internet connection. However, this could be harder to achieve than you think. When I started this experiment, I tried calling over a cable internet connection and (quite surprisingly) the results were terrible! After some research and experimentation on my part, I figured out that the connection was fast, but it was only fast in little spurts. Even though the average throughput was high, the speed dropped almost all of the way to zero many times a second. [I’ve gotten a number of question about this, so I want to emphasize that this was just my specific experience. Most people have no problems whatsoever using Skype with a cable connection.]

When I tried another test on a T3 connection, the results were much better. Don’t let that “T3″ speed scare you, though – switching to DSL at home fixed my connection problems even though the speed is lower overall.

So You Want to Do a Phone Interview…

Now that we have this inexpensive tool for recording phone calls, it is far easier for individuals to capture famous or faraway voices for their podcasts or other audio projects. If you want to take advantage of this new access, here are a few tips:

• Don’t use a cheap mic on your end.
  Use a good USB mic, or plug your mixer into the computer to get your sound as good as possible.
• Always call a “traditional” landline unless cellular or VOIP is the only option.
  Cell phones are inherently flaky, and while VOIP calls are pretty reliable, there is the potential for some digital weirdness there – it’s better to divide the chance of this by two by only doing the VOIP thing on your side where it is necessary for the recording.
• Don’t let the guest use a speakerphone or cheap headset.
  You can tell when someone is using one in a normal phone conversation, so your listeners will be able to tell as well.
• Ask your interviewee to close the door, turn off their cell phone, and give you their undivided attention.
  You’ll be able to hear rustling papers, typing, and office noise in the recording – just like in a regular phone call.
• Treat it like an interview, not a phone call.
  The phone is your recording system, not an excuse to have a casual chat (unless that’s what you are looking to record). If you need help with interviewing, read my Interview Basics post to get you started.

If you want a sample of what a Skype-to-phone recording sounds like, listen to the segment below.

 SkypeOut Interview Sample [12:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Christopher Penn from the Financial Aid Podcast has just released a tool to easily generate an iPhone-compatible page for your podcast. It is called the Financial Aid Podcast Podcaster iPhone Kit, and it is a free download.

from Chris’s site:

This simple little web page parses your podcast’s XML feed and slaps it into a nice page designed to render well in Safari, which is the browser on which the iPhone operates. It also grabs your feed’s image and displays it as the icons.

I installed it in only a couple of minutes, giving me this iPhone-compatible version of Boston Behind the Scenes.

You can get the file here: [http://www.financialaidpodcast.com/iphone.zip], make a few simple modifications, then upload it to your webserver.

Read on for more specific instructions.

Read the rest of this entry »

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A common dilemma: you have a podcast, but nobody is listening.

Before I get into what to do about that, here’s something to make you feel better:

As of April 30th, 2007, Feedburner is tracking the feeds of 106,270 podcasts. A few months ago, the company said that they were tracking about 6,200,000 people subscribed to those podcasts. If you put those two numbers together, you’ll see that the average podcast has about 60 subscribers. Since this is the average, and there are podcasts with tens or hundreds of thousands of subscribers pulling that number way up, your little podcast may be doing better than you thought!

Of course, most people are aiming for more than 60 subscribers with their podcast, so I’ve compiled a list of ways to accomplish that:

1. Make Your Show Better

   Before you attempt to increase your listenership, your show has to be good. A rule you should always follow is “Every episode must be one you would want to listen to.” You can drive people to your site, but if the show they find isn’t compelling, they will listen once and never return. These tips will only work if your work is good enough to hold an audience.

2. Build a Blog for Your Show

   You do have a website for your podcast, right? If not, get one NOW. If you do have a site and it isn’t running on a blogging system like Blogger, WordPress, or TypePad, I would seriously recommend switching to a blogging platform for the site. This is because the search engines know what to do with blogs, and therefore index the content pretty reliably. Some also index anything that looks like a blog more often than other sites, giving you a leg up if you publish often. In addition, some of the later tips work better if you are using a blogging system for your site.

3. Run an Easy-to-Use Site

   Don’t let the first thing your visitors see be clutter. The top of the site should have a prominent title that gives people a good idea of what they are going to find there. At least one episode of your podcast (or post from your blog) should be immediately obvious when arriving at the page. You should also have large “subscribe” buttons for iTunes and your RSS feed — and they should be right near the top of the page so people don’t have to search for them. If your target audience is not that tech savvy (e.g. yours may be the first podcast they encounter), set up an email subscription system and feature it prominently on the site.

4. List Your Podcast in Podcasting and Blogging Directories

   Everyone should be listed with iTunes, Yahoo! Podcasts, Digg Podcasts, Technorati, and Podzinger. There are many other directories (you can find a good list here), but these are the ones I consider “Must Haves.” Why? Well, iTunes and Yahoo are the two most popular directories, Digg is a newcomer with the potential to bring in a huge number of listeners, and Technorati and Podzinger are two of the best ways for people to find your individual episodes through searching.

5. Tag Everything

   Another advantage of using a blogging platform is tagging. Tags are metadata — words and phrases that relate to the podcast or blog post they are associated with. Tags are especially important for podcasting, as the text associated with an episode may not include search terms that are relevant to the audio. I just had an example of this yesterday with the latest episode of Boston Behind the Scenes: the subject of the show has a strong connection to both the Boston Public Library and the MFA, but I didn’t specifically mention that in the blog post for the episode. By tagging the post “Boston Public Library,” I allow people to find the post with a search without cluttering up the page with extra text.

6. Contribute to Other Sites

   Let’s say you do a podcast about cars. There are tons of blogs, news sites, and discussion boards about cars. In fact, if you are enough of a car person to do a podcast about cars, you probably frequent many of those sites already. So, next time you go to one of your favorite car blogs, post a comment.

   Don’t just spam for you podcast, but write something useful. The magic is in the “URL” box on the comment form. Put your podcast site in that box, and you suddenly have a link from a major car site to your show. This will bring you a few more hits and will look good to Google/Technorati/etc. That second part is very important — it dictates where you show up in search results.

   Of course, you shouldn’t just stop at comments. Submit an article (with your link) to a prominent site. It can be about anything at all, but will be more successful if it is at least somewhat related to your podcast. If they accept it, you will get a bunch of traffic from that page, and you will look even better to Google. I did this with my Boston Behind the Scenes episode on the Boston Marathon: this story on Slashdot about an astronaut running the marathon brought in hundreds of visitors — some of whom are now subscribers.

7. Include Pictures in Your Posts

   This may sound more like a way to keep people at your site than to bring them there, but it can do double duty. The reason is that you need a source for your pictures. Of course, the world’s source for pictures over the last few years has been Flickr, and that’s where you should go as well. Always ask permission before using a picture (or at least notify the photographer via email if you found it in a Creative Commons search), and post a comment on the photo. Include a link back to your site in the comment, and you’ve made another connection!

   If you take your own pictures, post them on Flickr and link their descriptions back to your site. If the pictures you take (or select from other photographers) are interesting enough to generate a lot of views, you’ll have another source of hits to go with your boosted search engine ranking.

8. Make Connections When Referencing Other Sites

   If you mention anything from another site, be sure to include a link in your show notes. If the site you are citing supports trackbacks, use that to get another link to your site in the wild. If there is no way to comment or add a trackback, send an email to the site’s owner letting them know how you used their content. They will appreciate the notice, and may mention your site as a result.

9. Use Social Media Sites

   I wrote “social media” because I wanted to emphasize that I’m not just talking about MySpace here. If your audience is on MySpace, you should set up an account and post your episodes using their blogging tool. If your audience is more of a Gather crowd, post your episodes there (with links back to your site!). Set up a del.icio.us account and post your episodes there (with generous tagging). Post all of your episodes on PopCurrent and Digg (not just in the podcast category), then put buttons on your site to encourage your visitors to vote for your entries. Of course, if there are other such sites that your listeners frequent (craigslist? YouTube?), you should be there — with links.

The overall messages of this list should be clear: Be visible, be searchable, and get linked everywhere you can. And most of all, create something that is worth finding and linking to!

(Thanks to Performancing for the nugget of a couple of the ideas, and to femme fatal for asking the question that lead to this list.)

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There are many online resources available that can tell you all about the nuances of microphones, and I’m not going to try to reproduce them here. Instead, I want to give you a quick primer on a few different types of microphones and what they can be used for.

Omnidirectional Microphones

These do pretty much what they say they do: record sound from all directions. They will pick up more from the front than the back, but they give you a good dose of all of the sound in the area.

Omnidirectional mics are great for getting the feel for a place. They will record ambient sounds without emphasizing any of them too much (besides the fact that physics dictates that nearby sounds will be way louder than far away sounds). In an interview, an omni mic will give a sense that you are in a location, but can pick up background sounds in a distracting way if you aren’t careful. Put one close enough to the subject and you’ll get a good mix of foreground and background sound — provided that the setting isn’t too loud.

Cardioid Microphones

These are more directional than omni mics and are sometimes called unidirectional microphones. They come in different “amounts of directionality,” from slightly directional to very directional. They also pick up very well from the back of the mic — where the handle of a handheld mic usually is. This means that some cardioid mics are very susceptible to handling noise and vibration.

Using a cardioid mic gives you that “radio sound” you are used to from DJs and talk radio hosts. This is because of something called the Proximity Effect that enhances the bass in a voice when the microphone is very close to the speaker’s mouth (close as in a few inches away). The main reason for using a cardioid mic in a podcast is to reduce the background environmental noise. A directional mic will not eliminate background noise, but it will make it less distracting.

Hypercardiod Microphones

These can also be called shotgun microphones, depending upon their characteristics and shape. Hypercardiod microphones pick up sound from a very specific area in front of the mic, and can share handling-noise issues with their less-directional cardiod siblings.

These mics are not magical, so don’t expect to use one to record a speaker 20 feet away and get amazing sound. For interviews and other spoken-word recordings, you should treat these microphones just like the others. They will allow you to record in situations that would be hard with other mics, and they can give you a studio-like sound in the field, but they don’t work miracles.

Stereo vs. Mono

The difference here should be pretty obvious: In stereo, the left and right speakers produce different sounds, and in mono they produce the same sound. When it comes to microphones, you need two to record stereo and one to record mono. Of course, there are many microphones that include two recording elements in one casing, so stereo doesn’t always mean two wires running to two devices.

Unless you are podcasting music, stereo isn’t a necessity for most shows. In fact, getting really close to a stereo mic can cause some very weird issues with your sound. However, an exception to the “stereo is unnecessary” rule can be seen in my Hat Mics post, where I use a pair of stereo mics to record two separate tracks into one file.

Specialty Mics

There are many types of microphones designed for very specific tasks. I won’t go into the details of all of them but here are a couple of types that could be of interest to podcasters:

XY Stereo Microphones: For recording a more directional, authentic-sounding stereo sound. These are some of the only stereo mics that can easily be used for voice recording like a mono mic without sounding strange. (See the built-in mics of the Zoom H4 for an example of an XY setup.)

In- Ear Binaural Microphones: Because they sit in your ears, mics like these from Sound Professionals give a 3D feel by recording exactly what you hear. The catch is that they only give that 3D feel through headphones, otherwise they are just stereo mics. You can hear a recording I made with this type of microphone below.

 BBTS5HaymarketExtra [4:32m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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I’m a professional podcaster with over a hundred episodes of multiple podcasts under my belt. I am a podcast consultant who has helped tweak or launch high-profile podcasts. In both of these capacities, I’ve gotten rave reviews of my shows’ sound quality from untrained listeners and professional radio producers alike. To do all of that, I must have some pretty snazzy gear, right?

Nope!

For Boston Behind the Scenes (my personal podcast), I use a $90 iRiver iFP-799 and a $15 Giant Squid Audio Lab Mini Gold-Plated Omni Mic shown in the picture. I record my intro and outro with a USB microphone and edit my show with the GarageBand software that came free with my computer.

For the award-winning Current Science & Technology Podcast (my professional show), I use two microphones scrounged out of the Museum of Science’s closets and plugged into an inexpensive mixer/interface from Alesis. When I go into the field, I use another iRiver that I bought on eBay for $45.

Why don’t I have a fancy digital recorder like the M-Audio Microtrack 24/96 or the Marantz PMD671? Because what I have is the best setup for what I do. I’ve tried the Microtrack — I was very unhappy with the interface, the loooong startup time, and the non-replaceable battery. The Marantz (and the far less expensive Zoom H4) has XLR inputs with phantom power, but lacks a 1/8″ mic jack for use with my trusty “hat mics.” In any case, these recorders are beyond what the average podcaster needs.

So, what does the average podcaster need? A simple, reliable, and decent-sounding setup that doesn’t break the bank. My iRiver and one-inch mic provide exactly that. Because the two together weigh only a few ounces, I can carry them everywhere and always be ready to record. And because the recorder will run all day on one AA battery, I never have to wonder if I’ll have the power I need for a session — a 40-hour backup system is available at the convenience store across the street for $2.49. Oh, and contrary to the argument I’ve heard that “You’ll be seen as a fool showing up to an interview with a tiny iRiver,” everyone I’ve ever interviewed has seen it as more advanced and impressive because of its size.

Inexpensive gear may not have all the bells and whistles of its more pricey cousins, but it can produce high-quality work. I don’t need XLR inputs for most of my recordings, and level meters are secondary to monitoring with headphones. These things would be conveniences, but I would lose the instant startup time, one-button recording, and long battery life I’m used to — all while spending $300-$1000. Anyway, the sound quality of an interview depends far more on proper microphone placement and background noise than on fancy compressors or 96 kHz sampling — especially when the output is a 64 kbps MP3!

One last important point: low price can have another advantage — peace of mind. I recently advised an explorer interested in recording audio at the North Pole (on a $500 budget) to pick up a few iRivers from eBay rather than buying an expensive recorder. This was due to the harsh conditions he’d be using them in. If he dropped a Microtrack in a snowdrift or froze its non-replaceable battery, he wouldn’t have any way to make recordings. In some cases, four or five $75 devices are a much better idea than one $400 one.

I believe that when starting out, you should get equipment that is good enough to do the job, but not so expensive or complex that it gets in the way. If you start to feel limited by the equipment — and are sure you can’t leapfrog those feelings with improved technique — maybe then it is time to get some new gear. When you do, you can still use the old gear as a backup.

For podcasting, what do you think the best gear/technique mix is?

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Yesterday, Apple announced that 100 million iPods have been sold since the release of the original 5GB iPod on November 10th, 2001.

That’s an average of 50,607 per day (or a bit better than one every two seconds).

For comparison, Sony sold about 150 million Walkman cassette players between 1979 and 1995 (when they started to die off in favor of the Discman CD Player). That’s 50% more Walkman players in 16 ½ years than the iPods sold the less than 5 ½ years they have been on the market.

In the original press release announcing the iPod in 2001, Steve Jobs was quoted as saying:

“With iPod, Apple has invented a whole new category of digital music player that lets you put your entire music collection in your pocket and listen to it wherever you go. With iPod, listening to music will never be the same again.”

It sure looks like he was right.

Congratulations, Apple!

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I heard a number of people talking about Atlas this weekend at BarCamp, so I did some investigation yesterday and thought of an interesting application of this free tool for podcasters.

For those of you who don’t know (as I didn’t), Atlas is a tool created by Faneuil Media that makes it easy to add your own information to a Google map. It’s in open alpha testing right now, but it seems to work alright for simple stuff and is quite easy to use.

I immediately thought of mapping all of the shows I have done for Boston Behind the Scenes for use on that site. The process was pretty simple (including adding links and show notes to the map points), and I’ve put the result up as an experiment. I’d appreciate it if a few of you would go look at it and tell me if it adds anything to the site.

I like it because it gives a visitor an immediate feel for the fact that I go all over the city talking to people. This might not apply to everyone’s show (e.g. you always talk about the same locations), but if it does, I’d encourage checking it out.

Other promising features include the ability to have your listeners add their own points to the map, either through an administrator-moderated process or in a more free-for-all wiki fashion.

Google maps have been showing up in more and more places lately, and now the tools exist to integrate them into your projects without learning the nitty-gritty details of the Google system.

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Always talk to your subject before you start the interview

If you only have a few minutes before you start the interview, talk for those few minutes. If not, talk while you are setting up the recording gear. This will give you a feel for the interaction to come, and will make someone who is nervous about being interviewed feel more comfortable before the microphone comes out. If you have more than a minute or two, talk to your subject about what they expect from the interview, and tell them what you expect. Tell them who the audience is. Don’t talk too much about the interview topic itself or you might end up with a lot of confusing answers that start with “Like I told you before…”

If you are interviewing someone for their story or opinion, ask them what they would like to have covered before you start. Remember, you don’t have to use everything you record, and they may present you with an angle you hadn’t thought of before.

Be prepared

This isn’t always completely doable, but you should always be prepared to the best of your ability. Know your interviewee and how they fit into what you are trying to do. Know the kinds of things you are going to discuss. Always make sure your recorder and headphones are working properly before you start. The “talk to your subject time” can help you test your equipment and feel some of these things out.

When you are doing your first interviews, approach it as kind of like being a lawyer: don’t ask questions you don’t really know the answers to. Of course this is a rule to throw out as you get better, but it is a good way to start out with confidence.

If you prepare questions beforehand, don’t read them verbatim from the page!

I rarely have prepared questions, as I prefer to just have a conversation that follows the theme I keep in my head. Doing it this way makes transitions from one topic to the next more natural, and keeps you from sounding like a robot when reading the questions.

If you must write out your questions (this is actually a good idea when you are starting out), don’t read them from the page. It is better to write out notes or sentence fragments instead of full-blown questions — it forces you to make up the actual wording of the questions on the fly and makes the conversation more natural-sounding.

Make it a conversation

This goes along with the previous tip, but is worth expanding upon a bit. If you were talking to a friend, you would react, interrupt with questions, and stray from the topic a bit. Do the same things in an interview. If something amazing or funny is said, go ahead and react to it. The listeners will follow your lead and be drawn further into the interview.

Of course, there can always be too much of a good thing, so make sure that your interviewee is doing the vast majority of the talking. All I’m saying here is that you don’t have to be an interviewing machine; you should be yourself, but in a background-kind-of-way. Your personality should be evident in the interview, but it should not be dominant. You are interviewing your subject, not yourself.

Avoid yes-or-no questions

One-word answers don’t make for very interesting listening. Instead, ask open-ended questions: “Why did you … ?” is better than “Did you do that because … ?”

If you do slip up and ask a yes or no question, don’t accept a one-word answer. A good trick for this is to just remain silent after the answer is given rather than jumping right back into the interview. A little uncomfortable silence can go a long way — your subject may just keep talking to make the situation less awkward and you’ll have what you need. Of course if this doesn’t work, don’t be afraid to ask your question again or ask your subject to explain further.

Get what you need. Interrupt if you have to.

On the other hand, if your subject is droning on about something you think is unnecessary, jump in with another question. If they say something you think the audience will be confused by, act confused yourself and ask for clarification. If you are really unhappy with the way an answer is going, try to find a way to come back to the topic. If that doesn’t work, come up with a reason that you have to start that part over (say you heard something strange in your headphones, or that the recorder’s battery is dying if you have to). As a last resort, explain to the person — as diplomatically as possible — that you aren’t getting what you need and would like to do the section again, offering suggestions to make this second take the better one.

Don’t be too smart

Unless the interview is billed as a discussion between peers (e.g. you are a security expert talking to another security expert and the audience is just listening in), the interview is about the interviewee, not the interviewer. Keep your questions short without making them abrupt. Don’t answer your own question while asking it. Don’t use complicated technical language to show you know the topic unless your audience will also understand that language. If you think your audience might need clarification of a statement, ask for that clarification even if you understood it perfectly.

Basically, put yourself in the listeners’ shoes while you interview. If your mom (or your children, or your astrophysicist uncle, depending upon who your target audience is) would understand what is being said, keep going. If not, clarify or do it over.

The end of the interview isn’t the end of the interview

When you are done, thank the person for their time and ask them how they thought it went. They may want to redo a part you also thought was weak, or tell a story you didn’t ask about. That second part is very important — always ask if there is anything else they’d like to cover. I’ve discovered important points (and even whole wonderful stories) that I knew nothing about just by asking if it felt like we’d left anything out.

Oh, and leave the recorder on while you talk afterwards! Even if you don’t get a good recording of something valuable, you’ll have a way to accurately re-tell the story yourself if you need to. (If you listen to the end of my Bob the Evangelist episode of Boston Behind the Scenes in the player below, you’ll hear me do just that.)

If all else fails

If you find yourself thrown into an interview situation without some time to prepare, don’t panic! If it fits the situation (and in many cases it does) you can always ask:

“What did you think this was going to be like before you started, and then what was it really like?”

You’re guaranteed to get a story of some kind.

Lastly, PRACTICE and LISTEN

You get better at anything through practice and the observation of those who do it well. Therefore, you need to interview people to learn how to interview people. So pick up you recorder and go out there. Interview friends and family and strangers. Always record your interviews, even if they “don’t count” — you might just get a great recording of Grandma you can share with the kids someday.

And when you are on your way to those interviews, listen to interviewers you like. Don’t copy their style, but certainly learn from it. If you listen to the best, you have something to aspire to — and you’ll be inspired when it is time to take out the recorder.

Interview Sample: Bob The Evangelist

 BBTS: Bob the Evangelist [16:23m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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I’ve been asked a number of times about this, and the answer is quite simple — though frustratingly hard to find.

The way to do it is through an application with the confusing name of Audio MIDI Setup (found in your Mac’s Applications ? Utilities folder). This program can be used to combine any audio inputs on your computer into one “Super Input” (called an Aggregate Device be Apple) that can be used in any program.

The cool thing about this is that you can assign these inputs to be different channels of the Aggregate Device, so you still get the same control in Garageband that you would with a full set of inputs on a device like a firewire mixer. You can also use this Aggregate Device in iChat or Skype for multi-way chat — just select it as the audio input in the program’s preferences.

Here are the specific directions from the Audio MIDI Setup help file:

To combine audio devices:

1. Open Audio Midi Setup in the Applications/Utilities folder.
2. Choose Audio > Open Aggregate Device Editor.
3. In the editor window, click the Add (+) button to create an aggregate device. You can select the device and rename it.
4. In the Aggregate Device Structure list, click the Use checkbox of each device you want to include in the aggregate device. The list shows the currently connected audio devices and the number of input and output channels for each.
5. To set the clock of one device as the master clock for all the combined devices, click the Clock radio button beside the device name.
6. After selecting the devices you want combined, click Done.

There are some more options to play around with in the program, but that should get you headed in the right direction.

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You want to do interviews on your podcast, but that presents a bit of a problem: finding people who are willing to be interviewed.

Asking for interviews is a lot easier than it sounds. Most people are happy to get the attention, and will sit down with you for quite a while when asked. A technique that has worked well for me for people who are closer to “everyday” than “celebrity” is to just show up and ask to talk to them — it is far harder to say no in person than it is on the phone or via email. Just make sure you are confident and tell them exactly what you want from them at the beginning of the process.

I usually say that I’m interested in interviewing them for an “internet radio show” that is heard all around the world. This avoids the “What’s a podcast?” discussion and lends credibility right away. For my personal podcast, I’ll say something like “Hi, I’m here from BostonBehindtheScenes.com to request an interview.” If you put it like that, they may feel like they should know who you are and will assume that you are someone they want to talk to.

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Plenty of podcasters go out and buy fancy microphones, only to use them improperly. This can be discouraging, especailly when they hear good recordings made with the same equipment and wonder what they are doing wrong.

I’ve been told a number of times that the sound quality of my podcasts rivals that of NPR. Yet, for almost all of of my interviews, I use microphones that cost far less than $100, and for Boston Behind the Scenes, I usually use a mic that cost me $15!

What’s the secret? Not fancy post-processing or editing, but simple microphone placement. This isn’t hard, but it ususally needs to be taught.

The simple lesson is this: put the mic to the side of the speaker’s mouth, and as close as possible without picking up unwanted noise. The distance varies from setup to setup, but a good rule of thumb is that a foot is almost always too far away.

Here’s a little demonstration video (I’m not a video guy, so go easy on me!):

Watch Now:

 Microphone Placement Demo [2:59m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Editing can be a sticky subject for some podcasters. There are those who say editing destroys the authenticity of a show, and there are those who say editing is a necessary component of almost any successful recording of any kind. I definitely fall in the latter camp, and I’d like to tell you why.

In my opinion, the biggest reason to edit audio is that it is audio, and is therefore about listening. When someone is listening to your podcast, all they have to hold their attention is the sound. They can’t see your expressions or gestures, and they can’t interact with you in real time. You may be an enthralling an dynamic speaker, but your listeners are only getting a small fraction of your actual performance coming through their headphones. As someone whose job is to be an enthralling and dynamic speaker and who has also produced well over one hundred audio pieces, I can say that I certainly need all the help I can get! This is similar to what I said when discussing podcasting lectures: too much is lost in translation for most people to pull off a good recording without help.

Of course, I don’t advocate using editing to completely change what was said. What I do think should be done is more of a “clean-up” job. If someone rambles on for too long, try to remove part of the comment without changing the meaning too much. Removing some ums, uhhs, and stumbles can go a long way to making someone sound interesting. As many of my guests tell me, editing “makes them sound smart.”

If you edit a segment respectfully and skillfully, you can improve the listening experience without changing the speaker’s meaning or manner of speech. To demonstrate this, please listen to the two samples at the end of this post. Your task when listening isn’t to figure out what I edited out or why, but to compare the clarity and feel of the first clip to the second.

If this were you talking, which would you rather have the world hear?

 Sample of Unedited Speech [0:37m]: Download
 Sample of Edited Speech: Download

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This is a trick I learned from NPR’s Tony Kahn.

Microphones scare people and are hard to use properly. Anyone who has ever tried to get someone to talk into one knows this first hand.

The “Hat Mic” is a novel solution to both of these problems. To construct one, take a small, high quality microphone (anything from a Giant Squid Audio Lab Podcasting Omni Stereo Microphone to a Neumann miniature microphone) and clip it to the brim of a baseball cap. Small binder clips work well with my Giant Squids.

That’s it.

Why would you want to clip a microphone to a hat? For a number of reasons:

1. While almost nobody knows how to use a microphone, everyone know how to wear a hat.
2. The microphone will stay in position as the person moves their head. This is both easier and more natural, meaning that you’ll get a more consistent, genuine-sounding recording.
3. The microphone will be out of the way of most unwanted sounds (”popping P” and “hissing S”). You may have a bit of a problem with F sounds if you don’t get the placement quite right.
4. The brim of the hat forms a bit of a mini sound booth, blocking some outside sounds and enhancing the voice a bit.

All of this, wrapped up in one funny hat!

Listen here for how it sounds:

 Hat Mic Sample [0:24m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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I haven’t downloaded it or tried it yet, but Adobe yesterday released a free public beta of their new Soundbooth audio application. According to this Macworld article, “Soundbooth will target the same professional market as Apple’s SoundTrack Pro.”

“I think they are probably going after the same market, ” Hart Shafer, senior product manager for Adobe Audio products, told Macworld. “However, I think one of the key differences is that SoundTrack Pro is built for audio people — we think that we have a more focused product for the creative professional market.”

As a Mac user, I’m concerned that Adobe is stepping away from support for the PowerPC chip. Most new Mac software is “Universal” — it will run on both Intel- and PowerPC-based Macs. The multimedia software company said back in February (PDF) that “Adobe has plans to support both Intel and PowerPC microprocessors in the next versions of its creative applications for the Mac OS.” However, it looks like new products may be Intel-only. In their Soundbooth FAQ, Adobe answers the question “Will there be a PowerPC version?” this way:

No. Apple is quickly moving its focus towards Intel Macs, and no longer sells Power PC systems in many places. By focusing on Apple’s future, we have been able to bring this powerful application to the Mac platform much more rapidly, and with a stronger feature set.

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Here’s a sample and review/explanation recorded with the Azden SGM-2X Shotgun microphone in a noisy environment. You can see the bike handgrip I added in the picture. It cuts down on noise due to holding the mic, and it makes it more comfortable, too!

 Azden SGM-2X Sample File [3:33m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Many businesses, conference organizers, and educational institutions see podcasting as a way to distribute recordings of their lectures and classes online. This has its uses and its problems, and I’d like to take a look at a few of them.

Before I lay out my views on the subject, I want you to take a minute and think about what it is like to sit in an auditorium listening to a lecture. Do you have a good feeling about it? For many people, the answer to that question is no.

Now, think about listening to the same lecture without the “live” component of the experience. This live component is very important, so think about it carefully. A “pros and cons” question arises right here: a good lectures is made far better by being there, but an average lecture could benefit from a pause or fast-forward button.

I have been to many lectures, most of them mediocre ones, and there is only one that I would have enjoyed as much in a recording as I did in person (it is luckily available as a download).

The main point is one that I’m sure I’ll make many times on the site: not every recording makes a good podcast. If a lecture has been recorded, by all means post it online! It is important to open up access to these resources and expand their reach beyond the “one room, one time” audience (this is the premise of the popular site IT Conversations). Ideally, this recording will be edited slightly to clean up mentions of PowerPoint glitches and pauses for sips of water – just this small amount of work will improve the listening experience tremendously.

However, if you truly want to engage your audience, I would advocate podcasting an interview or edited “audio profile” of the speaker to give your listeners a good feel for the content. If you have also posted the complete lecture, invite them to download it from your site if they want more information on the topic. This way, you entertain and invigorate your audience with well-produced content, then drive the most interested group of them to your site for the full story.

It takes extra work to do this, but that work could make the difference between a podcast with a few casual listeners and one with a large number of loyal fans. Not only are you producing a podcast series that people will actually want to subscribe to, but you are also serving the smaller number of people who do want to hear recorded lectures by making them available as well.

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Once you start podcasting, you may start to think “I wish I could show my listeners things as well as tell them about them.” Of course, if you go too far down that road, you arrive at the video podcast, but let’s assume you want to stay with audio but somehow enhance it.

Lucky for you, there is a way to do just that. It is called — not surprisingly — an enhanced podcast. I don’t want to get into the details of how to put together an enhanced podcast, as there are plenty of places that will tell you how to do that. What I want to do is address why you’d want to do it, and more importantly, if you’d like to. Read the rest of this entry »