The Blogher conference hands-on demo of podcasting has split into small groups within a large room.
- Nicole Simon from Bloxpert. She invites us to come to the table with the little gadgets so you can admire them and say "oh I want one of those."
- Susan Kitchens from 2020hindsight. We'll be working in Audacity! Afterwards you can RTFM.
- Anita Campbell - at middle table talking about how to promote your podcasts
I go to Susan's table and get a booklet: "Hands-on Beginner Podcasting in Under an Hour". Susan is wearing a fabulous blue straw hat which she bought specially from New Orleans to support their economy. I met Susan last year at BlogHer at the storytelling BOF.
We have under an hour to do a hands-on demo!
Susan created a place for us all to upload audio on one of her sites, familyoralhistory.us. We record and then compress the audio file into mp3 format. We huddle around.
First download Audacity. You will need a recording strategy. An iPod with imic is one choice for an external gadget. Susan records herself saying, "Had this been real information, you would have really been entertained." You then bring it into your computer. Or, internal recording: you can record directly onto your computer. Susan picks up someone's mac laptop with built-in microphone. You can plug in with USB. Skype headset, works well with hats (she puts on the headset).
Question: for quality, is external or internal better?
Susan: It depends. I'm just showing you some of the options. External, you can pay 35 bucks and get a lot of bang for the buck and have it with you all the time. You can also spend serious money. So it depends.
Use your meters in Audacity to tell if you're connected. Audacity is a free, open-source, cross-platform audio editor. Mac, Windows, Linux, and the instructions are pretty much the same, cross-platform. That and the free part is why I like it! There's another program called LAME Lib, which you have to install separately. Let's make sure we're listening to the right source. Mess with the preferences in Audacity: your I/O, input/output; mp3 export; find library. (More preference-twiddling, explained in the "Beginning Podcasting" handout.
Question about something susan did on the screen?
Susan: It's like Exposé. It's "Mouseposé". I just paid for it or it was going to expire today.
About sound levels. "Record Sound Levels" indicator next to the m icrophone; click it; select "monitor input". Why negative numbers? Um, god knows. You want to be in the middle to high range.
Susan interviews Elizabeth Perry about how she began blogging and learned to draw. "576 days later, I'm still posting a blog every day."
Click the yellow button and save the file. Now you have a file in Audacity's format. Export it to MP3. However, I'm going to do one small edit.
[Liz's thoughts: I note it looks like the same kind of editing interface as Sound Studio, which I've been using to record at poetry readings. At first, a little "blip" sound used to appear in my recordings every 10 seconds. I edited them out by hand a couple of times until I figured out it was from my wireless detector, which sends out a signal every 10 seconds to look for signal source. Or something. Whatever it was, turning Airport off on my iBook made the 10-second beep go away.]
Genre menu. Unfortunately... this is my theory about why it's called LAME Lib - because it's not in alphabetical order. Now it's exporting.
Susan's explaining proper tagging with the "rel=enclosure" tag as the magic that makes NetNewsWire know it's something that needs to be downloaded.
I can't see the details of what Susan is doing in Audacity because I'm typing this blog entry, but I trust that her booklet will walk me through the process. We're all starting now to download programs and figure out where our built-in microphones are, so I'll be doing that. Wish me luck - I'm a newbie. Someone just yelped "Yay! It worked!" That's what I like to hear!