This piece started out as a simple review of one piece of software, but as I began writing, I realised it’s one of those times where a bit of storytelling is in order.
Some listeners will know that I once had a podcast of my own. Technically, I still do, but it’s a pretty rare release these days. I started right around the same time Allison did but instead of tech, my podcast was about music.
Continue reading “Allister’s Journey from Castblaster to MiX16 Pro”
I’ve mentioned many times before that one of my favorite podcasts is the Daily Tech News Show hosted by Tom Merritt. He broadcasts from his home in Southern California, and when he moved down Steve and I became friends with him. We seem to have very similar setups for running our podcasts, using Macs, and we both use Verizon FiOS Internet service.
Unfortunately, on April 1st, Verizon sold its FiOS business in California, Texas and Florida to a company called Frontier Communications. I say unfortunately because the transition has been anything but smooth. There have been billing problems, inability to access premium channels (like HBO right before Game of Thrones kicked off), the tech support appeared to have been moved off shore over night (which turns out not to be quite true) and worst of all people have been having complete outages.
Continue reading “How Steve and I Saved Monday for DTNS”
Chuck Joiner of the MacVoices podcast joins us to talk about how the simple reminder of the little loops on the Apple Watch Activity app got him to stand up once and hour, do a little exercise and start to feel better. We then move into conversation about how he records his video interviews for shows like CES. He’s a one man band with a cool rig you’ll want to hear about.
Links to some of the gear he talked about:
You can find Chuck at http://macvoices.com and on all the social media platforms as ChuckJoiner.
Honda Bob is doing GREAT after his bone marrow transplant (who’s Honda Bob? I’ll explain that) and he gives us his review of the Apple Battery case for the iPhone 6 and 6s. I review the Olympus 60mm f/2.8 Macro Lens for the micro four thirds camera I own (spoiler, it’s awesome!) and I review the Shure MVi Digital Audio Interface and the companion MOTIV App for iOS. Finally I’ll broach the idea of whether we should have a Facebook group. I feel like resistance is futile.
Recording a podcast isn’t really similar to recording music but for years I’ve used GarageBand to do the podcast. For example, GarageBand defaults to having the metronome on, keeping track of beats per minute, and even having reverb on voice tracks. MANY years ago Will, a good friend of the show, created a little script for me that turned all that stuff off that I was using up until I stopped using GarageBand. In another irritating example, GarageBand introduced Flex Time editing which allows the audio editor to change the pitch of a vocalist’s recording in case they were off key. I never ever wanted that, but I would accidentally trigger it during editing and it would take forever to analyze the track to apply the effect and then let me undo the effect.
Garageband 6.0.5 was my tool of choice for all this time, but it was deprecated a few years ago and replaced by GarageBand 10 which is so complicated and filled with non-podcasting things that I’ve never been able to get it to work for me. Much like the way I dropped The Levelator in favor of Auphonic before it stopped working, I decided it was time for me to make a change away from GarageBand before Apple stopped it from working in a future rev of the OS. I like to be in control of the timing rather than suddenly being surprised.
As I started on this quest, I thought about what is important to me in a recording application:
Continue reading “Replacing GarageBand with Amadeus Pro for Podcasting”
