Recently in Podcasting Tech Category

This is to the tech crowd, the geeks e.g the people that should know better.

Nearly everything I’m seeing from the Pax08 concert has such poor sound / video that it’s a complete waste of time and energy yet this crap is getting 4 and 5 stars. Here’s where it bugs me. The crappy sound and video in a sane world would be “mediated” by the crowd and given an appropriate rating but it seems that it’s totally broken in the cases of geek centric clips. Self recognition doesn’t = ****/***** stars dumb ******/*******

You are today’s equivalent of the idiots in sports stadiums with their GN14 flashes trying to reach out all the way to center field. Either drop the money on a reasonable recorder or just leave it in your pocket.

Finally, at long last, after a difficult and complicated pregnancy  Quick Recorder was brought into the world and is a pretty way of creating the basic building block of podcast.  More on the work blog but for now I have some housekeeping.
Dobhie the cute.  New video  is up at Podcast.john-paxton.com and has him wandering around a park on a happier day. Today is not happy he's got a double ear infection, more time of work for  Erin :(  I just couldn't leave today which is  horrible feeling:(    

Maybe I'm just looking for it but representations of torture seem to be increasing within the entertainment sphere as a  handy little plot device, not happy about it.

Today's meal at Earl's wasn't exactly torture but  on three occasions now I have had a dish in transition. Their curry has gone from vindaloo to , are you sure this isn't just isn't a sauce from the store?  Today's attempt was on par with Pataks sauces, I like those but maybe  restaurants should aim a little higher.  I really used to like this place but  it's sad to see a slide so completely into the mediocre.  Previously the people I've been with have on the whole experienced one  meal failure per  4-6 people.  Scottsdale triangle. ...

A rant is coming soon.  Seemingly Janet  the governer is into speed cameras for reasons that ring hollow on anything other than revenue  generation. In short  whenever somone refers to law enforcer  rather than peace officer I thin you really get which side of the state their bread's buttered on. 

Podcasters seem to be making the resellers of  telephone hybrids very happy indeed. I've spent several weeks trying to get a regular price on an item that until  a year ago was rather likely to shoot straight through the auction with 0 bids.    Basically a hybrid lets my talk on my mic and the person I am connected with hears the entire show, IE I send them all the sound going on at once, but  all I return from them is their voice . It's also known as "mix minus"  ie the output of the mixer  minus their voice, if their  voice was present it would  become part of the total mix  and delay enough to annoy the caller.  I think I must be ill I didn't buy a firewire mixer when I had the chance.. waiting to see what the sales on Friday bring.

At long last I have the inkling of an upcoming show but it's a practice that is rarely found in AZ and a lot of phone interviews are going to be necessary.

I'm losing enthusiasm for the mobile web  and until the carriers grow the fuck up we're going to be stuck with "stupid web tricks"  tied to  content  owned by the networks partners rather than developing anything universal.

 

In, the  I told you so section:

People can't readily distinguish between an image taken at 13mp 8mp or 5 .. If you read the article in isolation that's what you would likely come away with.  Ah but we all get to pile in and ask about the test, the assumptions and the results are being vigorously debated in a manner that politics rarely is.. Kinda shows you just how little import the latter has :)

M-AUDIO - Studiophile BX5a - 70 Watt Bi-Amplified Studio Reference Monitors I'm far from pleased. About 7 months into their life one of the monitors stopped working , no clicks, no burps no sound just an LED laughing at me.  K there's a warranty.. I have to send it back my cost, they send return it at my cost and this isn't  a light unit.   Should have called it a warranpay :(

Came home to a box from BSW. The Zoom H4 had arrived. I have read the manual once all that follows is an initial impression only. I saw the demo one at the Podcast Expo and had BSW send me one ( in exchange for cash and $20 off coupon ) Definetely a company I will be doing more business with. Good: Pretty good stereo on the inbuilt mics when the compression is turned off. When it's got the pop shield on and about 4 inches away it's pretty damn good I'll be carrying it to meetings over the coming weeks ( not at work so don't worry) to see if I can use it as a back up to boards The mounting bracket it comes with fits on a standard mike stand ( necessary .. it pics up handling noise like a motherforker. Runs on AA cells, no panic when the inbuilt battery dies Access to monitor for record to recording falls naturally in the handheld grip for me. price. $299 for a recorder, audio interface and an "effects" unit Phantom power , drove my mikes no problem , preamps don't seem too bad. Bad: All the effects are noisy and you hear most of the phase type effects with no input , others you hear a heterodyne like whine ( no that's not me) Build quality around the memory card / battery flap. Comes with 128mb card, I know the $299 is a damn good price to offer this at in relation to the competition but come on, add the cost of a reasonable size of recording time into the price and drop the effects 12 mins at CD quality , er thanks. Clickwheel, not responsive, doesn't seem to seat on center clicks all the time no immediate access to gain controls other than gross hi/mid/lo the access to gain, User interface is a pain, the 4 track section is certainly interesting though swapping effects in and out and configuring them per track, just ick. Maybe if the device can be remotely controlled by a pc this would rock. Undecided. Not sure if it's noisy in general or if it's the headphone amp in particular going to transfer it to pc and have a listen over the monitors , turning on the compresser is it's excuse to ramp Turning on the compresser ramps up the noise level, doesn't seem configurable in two track mode ( this may be ignorance on my behalf and I'm going to look at it More , and possibly sound samples as I play with it.

It's on the way:) My hitchhiker's guide in the form of the Zoom H4 so now I can follow up on my threat to record people with interesting things to say ( after testing it on myself...) Oh yes. For podcast tech please give the people at Podsquod a try . Met them demonstrating an Aphex audio strip  at the show ,  it's like a gaudier . Symetrix 528e with some proprietry  processing that's often emulated but even in the loud show  environment I was pretty impressed but sounds pretty nice ( certainly looks it)

I now have to admit that I can't get a sound out of  the last two mics that I bought ( both about x2 the price of the "supposedly" average dynamic types I am using.  Today started out badly car keys were nowhere to be found, stopped Erin so I could get a lift to work .. only to find my keys in her car. So another day of being looked at like Tasha yar, why thank you I have been working out :P ,  yeah right in the episode where she was suddenly alive again, where  it looks like I should be there but an ineffable feeling  that something's fundamentally  odd.  At last a good eatery in the Scottsdale Triangle..  "Croques"   on the SW corner of T'bird and Scottsdale road makes sandwiches that can withstand a 10 min journey and still taste excellent.. Online ordering too and pleasant staff  ( yes it is in Scottsdale but I can understand why you may think that a typo.

I belong to an underserved minority when it comes to audio and video gear. The middle ground between consumer level ( much as I hate the term any camera where you can't select the aperture or a sound recorder that believes it knows what level of gain you want are  * L O's   e.g  Camera like object,  Recorder like object. Their purpose is  to be moved from shelf to birthday party to cupboard under the stairs. The same division is also true of portable digital recorders. One of the issues that bugs me with podcasts is the majority of shows that are poorly produced variants of the current media. I'm trying to find a middle ground that takes NPR's inherent smugness yet still ahderes to  conventions  of constructing a narrative with  attention to how sound is used both as a character in telling the story while obviously being the medium in which it's carried.   Transom.org is a pretty good resource for people looking  for good advice on creating public radio type programming though please think more BBC than Npr My mobile recorder , a Sony  DAT , essentially a jumped up video recorder dedicated to sound, Cd quality and temperamental, heavy  and eats batteries. It's pretty dead as a consumer format, hell it was still born with an incredibly poor DRM scheme which often prevented you from using your own material on other decks.. Yes the RIAA have always been a  little  nuts.   Still buying twenty year old pro gear sounds better than consumer level now gear in many cases ( it's not as true with video ) Many podcasters use Irivers , a flash memory based  mp3 player recorder  due to their mic input, relative cheapness and  that there's not a huge choice available. Sure most players now have a record feature but it's invariably  one control, on/ off and sound like,well if you've listened to many mobile podcasts you know that they sound like ass.  No I'm not being crude  it's sounds like the mike has been shoved  up an ass. In short an afterthought feature using  a bucks worth of components. . You get to 350 -500 and you can have a Marantz , M Audio or edirol recorder.I've not used them all but there's  not a huge difference between them and will all do a "good enough" job.  Sure they don't all have xlr connectors, long memory, controls that are easily accessible but it's $400 for a reason.  I thought Tascam did a good job at just under the grand with this guy which covers just about anything I'd need  ( though it doesn't come with a placate wife card) This is not a prop it's Sony's PCM d1  digital recorder. 4g 24Bit/  96Khz recording with some rather nice "life" saving features.  It better have a defibrillator feature because the price tag.. $2000  may have you clutching your chest. Love the design, looks partially like an old Sony Pro7 ( scanner/ reciever)  of the lifesaver is the way in which it records the main sound  and a "shadow track" at 20db down.  So if your main track peaks , starts clipping, then the recorder will take the -20 db down track and normalise the main one  for a happy distortion free life.  Least that's how I read it  Now can I please find a way to get one of these to review

We're down, been ill for a a few days, nothing serious enough to stop going to work but damn it's slowing my brain down. I'm going to call it the stopped clock syndrome, I'm giving right answers but their relevance to the question asked is often questionable: My work blog, or least more related to work items is up and running at blog.john-paxton.com ( Crap, now you know my name) Ok a round-up.. New sound processor arrived, psu was the wrong one.. Merry Xmas Amazon Order: Still waiting for it. Oh great, if this is truly in the wild it's going to make for a very interesting time In short if people can have illegal material surrepticiously placed on their system that would require a fair amount of technical proficiency to detect and neutralize it's going to make it hard to prove innocence should the state chose to take a dim view of alledged movies, music or porn on your system. The defense of n00b is hardly going to fly, then again this proof of concept is enough reasonable doubt , or should be, for any sane jury in absence of other evidence.

I'm having an libertarian epistemological crisis as well suffering from an egregious case of sesquipedalianism. Why is it that advocating for people to be treated as adults leads many to treat you as a spoiled child? Nothing groundbreaking follows, in fact the ground has been so broken that there's barely a place to stand without sinking down into the morass of anonymity into which all the trite blog posts descend. So .. Over the next few weeks . I'm going to start investigating creating a pod-cast that unlike most of the output in the libertarian sphere is not 200 years long, doesn't included large gaps, buzz or frankly turn off further listening ...and I'm interested in it... For casual listeners there's no way in hell they will listen to sixty minutes of minutiae on the monetary supply.. So if after a week or two I have enough ideas to take on 6 x 10 minute shows and the people to fill em with look for it in Q1 ;) To help me in this , probably portable endeavor I bought a new friend.