HawaiiUP – Testing, Testing

Podcasting

A trial run of podcasting using crappy equipment (a $10 mic from Radio Shack plugged into the stock sound card in my two-year-old Dell) and free software (Audacity for Windows). Added the ‘album art’ to the MP3 file through iTunes. And WordPress 1.5 helpfully handled the upload and feed wrapping.

This five-minute experiment was cobbled together late one Wednesday night after my family went to bed. I expect future shows will feature a lot of whispering.

First thoughts? I need to practice speaking (I dabbled in radio before, honest). And clearly, white noise is going to be a problem. A better mic would help, but PC noise is hard to hide. Also, featuring music would be great, but licensing is a big issue. This podcast just uses music by people I know, more to test crossfading than anything else, but if I do this, I guess I’ll have to get to know some of the podcast-friendly music libraries out there. Finally, I don’ t think a five-minute podcast should make a 4MB file. I need to get up to speed on bitrates and compression.

Subscribe Download 3.9MB MP3

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2 Responses to HawaiiUP – Testing, Testing

  1. Pingback: Learning The Lessons of Nixon » Here’s to crappy equipment!

  2. Yes, you can make your file smaller with Audacity — In Audacity, you go to File>Preferences> and then click the File Formats tab.

    Down the bottom it says MP3 Export setup, and if you crank down the bitrate in the pull down menu it will produce smaller files.

    If you’re getting 1 minute to 1 megabyte, you’re probably recording at 128kb, or CD quality audio. A lot of people use 64, and sometimes I can even get away with 32.

    the ipodder-dev Yahoo! group is a great source for all sorts of help, I get my questions answered there all the time.

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