This week I discussed various improvements to podfeet.com (can you spot them?), did a review of the open source audio tool Audacity, another review on the shareware RSS Feed creation tool Feeder.com, intermission was a movie review of David Duchovny’s movie “House of D”, and provided an extensive review of Todd Cochrane’s book “Podcasting Do-it-Yourself Guide”.
Listen to the Podcast – Time: 23 min 26 secondsToday is November 23rd, 2005 and this is show #13.
Continuing improvements to podfeet.com
- header is now clickable to home
- formatting on the boxes on the right – Photoshop
- subscribe buttons on “how to subscribe to NC”
- iTunes
- Odeo – chipmunk
- Yahoo! – need yahoo login
Audacity Review – freeware – Open
source
- http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
- audio recording tool I use for recording NosillaCast
- Cross platform – Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and
other operating systems - record in proprietary format, export to MP3 or Ogg Vorbis or WAV
- takes a fair amount of time to compress, maybe 10 minutes for a
20 minute podcast
- triangle for record, circle for stop record, two bars for
pause, square for stop, FFW/FFR
- can float or dock this control bar (I leave alone)
- like Lascivious Biddies http://www.biddycast.com music I
spliced in last week
- 10 second background noise test, then use as removal tool
- Amplify if some parts quiet (like spliced in bits)
- Fade in/Fade out – used on Lascivious Biddies
- handy for precise editing
- nice graphical view of the sound
grow into.
Feeder Review – $29.95 US
- http://www.reinventedsoftware.com/
- creates RSS Feed which is what makes the NosillaCast magically
come into iTunes and the other podcatching clients - creates the ID3 tags that tells players about the podcast – who
created it, when it was posted, how long it is, even shownotes can be
imbedded in the tags - creates mutant iTunes tags – duplications
- stores all the separate enclosures (podcasts)
- publishes to my website
- don’t have to know xml coding at all – but I did it by hand for a
while first just so I’d understand. couldn’t figure out iTunes
tags so I went with Adam Christianson’s advice from the MacCast and
bought Feeder - lets me manage more than one feed – I use one for doing demos at
work on podcasting without wrecking my real feed - scary if you click remove on a feed, it’s gone forever!
Movie Review – House
of D
- Written & directed & acted by David Duchovny
- story of a 13 year old boy in New York played by Anton Yelchin,
mom played by Teá Leoni (Duchovny’s wife), best friend is Robin
Williams who plays a retarded janitor. Duchovny plays the boy
when he’s grown. - one of those films that’s really sweet and happy and interesting
for the beginning third, but you know it’s going to go bad.
Luckily it doesn’t go all that bad, or at least they didn’t pull MY
heartstrings that much. then of course it’s all happy at the
end. I like movies like that! - Anton Yelchin is an amazing young actor, he’s funny and
interesting, and I hope we see him in a lot of movies in the future. - Duchovny is ok as an actor, but his direction on this is
great. Teá is mildly interesting, didn’t do that much for
me in this movie. Robin Williams is interesting, but I didn’t
really buy him as a retarded man (they use that word throughout the
movie, it’s supposed to be 1973.) - Over all interesting and enjoyable, kept my attention, made me
happy at the end, rent it and enjoy!
Movie Review – Out of Season
- please don’t rent this movie, even Dennis Hopper being in it
didn’t save it. 100% waste of time.
Wonder how I got so good at podcasting? read a great book that taught
me a lot.
Podcasting
Do-It-Yourself-Guide $20 US/$26 CAN/£13 UK
by Todd Cochrane, creator of the podcast Geek News
Central at http://geeknewscentral.com
- Todd was one of the very first podcasters (he celebrated his one
year anniversary last week) - Podcasting so new – must have been hard to crank out a whole book
on top of podcasting on top of a wife and two small children AND
working! - recommend the book highly
- very easy to read and follow, not too terribly techie
- well organized and methodical
- directions are clear and allow easy experimentation
- too tempting to get started before finishing, e.g. told about
how to pick a good ISP long after I’d picked one – luckily vizaweb met
his requirements - understands everyone has a budget – gives solutions for
low/medium/high spend
is, how to subscribe) all the way through publishing your own podcast
show and even some tips on how to make money at it (I haven’t read that
last chapter yet…)
podcatcher software for Windows/Mac/Linux
- I like how throughout the book he is operating system agnostic
- takes through the directories (like iPodder) and how to get the
files onto your MP3 player
- I’d lost energy, no focus/format
- helped to organize thoughts
- talks a lot about sound cards, but since I did on the
Powerbook, wasn’t an issue - microphone and headsets
- really important – I got lucky. I have a full description
on “My Favorite Gadets” page of my microphone headset – USB unit came
with IBM’s Via Voice – voice recognition s/w I got when I broke my
hand. sound is pretty darn good (but I guess you’ll be the judge
of that, how do I sound?) - recording software – he’s the one who turned me onto Audacity
- he went into a lot on mixers and stuff like that – I didn’t get
too much out of that part - I found his section on the recording process itself very helpfuL
- how to configure Audacity to get good volume and reasonable
file size - reducing noise in the recording
- Naming conventions – I have completely mimicked his conventions
– makes it alphabetical, reads well on a small MP3-player screen
- excellent advice (even though I’d already picked my web host) –
I recommend reading this section early rather than later, too tempting
to get started! again he gives advice on different sized
audiences so the reader can find an appropriate host for budget and
audience.
- Next to Audacity, greatest advice was to use a blogger tool, in
my case WordPress and you know how excited i’ve been about that.
makes it really easy
- Already told you about Feeder – he recommended it after Adam
Christianson and then Leo LaPorte recommended! - invaluable tool for a professional and easy to create podcast
all completely practical
that’s it for the NosillaCast for today, thanks for listening and stay
subscribed! As always, feedback is welcome at [email protected]