Ed Bilodeau

This weblog had moved: http://www.coolweblog.com/bilodeau/

# Notice (Oct 19/05): So ends my stay here on Blogger. This morning Google implemented an anti-spam 'feature' that forces me to answer a challenge phrase when I want to post to my own blog. No notice of the change, nothing. Worse is that it doesn't even work! I type the phrase, submit, "An error occured", post deleted. Damn you, Google. Chances are I will revive my blog somewhere else, sometime soon. I'll post the new coordinates here as soon as they become available. (BTW, I'm unable to post anything to my RSS stream, so I'd appreciate it if readers could spread the word and ask people to take a look at this notice)

Update (Oct 19/05, ~noon): After a frustrating few hours (and not just trying out alternatives to Blogger), I've decided that this is a good time to take a break from all this. A day? A week? Who knows. But I need to step away from it before I pass a heavy magnet over the whole mess.

Update 2: According to this post, the reason I'm seeing the CAPTCHA (challenge phrase) is that Blogger has classified my blog as spam. Thanks. User for five years and now I'm spam. I searched the Blogger site, but there is no mention of how to get the spam flag turned off. There is also no way of contacting anyone at Blogger. Wow. Spam they say I am, so spam I must be. Maybe it is time to take a break.

Thursday, October 28, 2004

# NYTimes: New Food for IPods: Audio by Subscription : Fluff article on ipodding, but I liked the photo of the DotNet Rocks gear set up. Here's a similar shot and more complete description of the gear behind IT Conversations. My guess is that Mr. Curry's gear is similarly sophisticated (though probably less so).

To do audio well, you need (a) specialized equipment, and (b) skill to get it all to work. Now, I've experimented with my own set up (laptop w/ built-in mic and some freeware software) and had no problem recording my own voice and tacking some intro and outro music clips. So for the individual to put this kind of thing together isn't difficult. (I'm guessing its even easier on a Mac.) But if you want to get fancy and include interviews, etc, etc, the barriers to entry are a bit higher.

Or not. It may just be that the examples I've looked at are folks with money looking for excuses to buy and tinker with a lot of new hardware. It will be interesting to see what kind of 'solutions' people put together to make audio recording and distribution as easy as text blogging.

Comments:

Carl Franklin here.

We went through considerable trial and error to get our production down. Money, yes, but more important is the ability to coax the best sound out of what you've got, and that takes some talent no matter what equipment you've got.

The telephone interview is definitely tricky, but doable. You need a "digital hybrid" device to record just the phone caller's signal and not the signal you're sending them. They start at around 400 bucks. Check out the Inline Patch from JK Audio (http://www.jkaudio.com/) The fancy ones do some digital signal processing to digitally remove signal being sent, but there is always some fuzz. For that reason we edit the phone track and silence it in places where the interviewee is not speaking. But, if we hapen to speak over them, it's barely noticable.

I'm preparing to post a page where we document the entire process, including recording mp3-quality audio over the internet -allowing our co-host to sound like he's in the studio when he's really on the opposite side of the country.

# posted by

Anonymous : 4:15 PM

Carl: I'm looking forward to seeing that article on your set-up. The more I think about it, the more I want to get into audio publishing on the web. Even after tinkering with it few a few hours convinced me that I'll need to be patient as I work on developing the necessary skills and knowledge. Keep up the great work on DotNetRocks!

# posted by

Quietloft : 7:39 PM