Yesterday I made a recording and posted it up to AudioBoo as a couple of recordings. I forgot about the 5-minute maximum so I had to chop and edit my 12-minute ramble into two and then post up the second of it.

Today I posted an ITauthor podcast onto this site. And the comparative ease and difficulty of the two process became immediately apparent.

Although I have some niggles with AudioBoo (there are some very obvious improvements they could make), it certainly does make publishing a podcast very, very easy. This is especially true if:

a) you have an iPhone
b) you're happy to record your podcast episodes directly into your phone and post them without any editing

Editing is the bane of podcasting - so I actually see a lack of editing as a good thing. However, the bad thing is that you can't slip over 5 minutes. If you try to post a recording that's longer than 5 minutes then it just stops dead after 4.59.

I don't have an iPhone, so my experience was a degraded one of recording onto a little digital recording, uploading to my computer, uploading a photo from my Blackberry, then uploading recording and photo to AudioBoo via the upload web page. But even still, it was way, way quicker than how I currently produce my ITauthor podcast. Here's the ridiculously complicated process I trawl through for that:

1. Record the podcast.
2. Upload it to my PC.
3. Edit it in Audacity.
4. Export it as a .wav file (I've tried exporting to MP3 but the sound quality is rubbish).
5. Convert the .wav file to MP3 using Format Factory.
6. Add tags and photo to the MP3 using ID3-TagIT 3.
7. Upload the MP3 to my Dreamhost server using WinSCP.
8. Open a previous ITauthor podcast blog post in Live Writer.
9. Copy it and use this to create a new blog post.
10. Post this to my WordPress blog as a draft.
11. Go to the web page for editing the blog post and add the MP3 using the Blubrry PowerPress plugin.
12. Publish the blog post.

This is a long and tedious enough process to discourage me from podcasting regularly.

There's got to be a better way. And if all you want is a mini, 5-minute podcast then AudioBoo probably is that better way.

One of these days browsers will be able to play audio files natively. You'll just be able to write an audio element in the HTML, point it at either an audio file, or a list of audio files, or an RSS feed containing audio files, and it'll display a smart looking audio player in the Web page.

This got a little bit nearer with HTML5, but Firefox 3.6 doesn't support MP3 files (which most people still use for audio files on the Web), just Ogg Vorbis. IE9, on the other hand, supports MP3 but not Ogg.

There is a jQuery plugin called jPlayer which goes part of the way to providing a cross-browser solution, but it's a very techie solution and not easy to configure.

So, until all of this gets sorted out finally, most of us just follow the path of least resistance and use a Flash-based audio player and accept that, because Steve Jobs is on a crusade to kill off Flash, no one browsing your pages on an iPhone or an iPad is going to see the player.

As I write this, in June 2010, the podcast pages I produce to accompany my podcasts use a Flash player that comes as part of the Blubrry PowerPress plugin for WordPress. And at the top of the sidebar on each page I use the Easylistener player. Here's a screenshot, just to remember it by, as it's only a matter of time before I have to remove it:

I periodically scour the internet for small, nice-looking audio players that can be pointed at an RSS feed, and Easylistener is the only one I've found that I really like.

William White describes the origins of Easylistener:

Easylistener was developed in the Yahoo! Media Innovation Group by William White and Joseph Magnani. It was inspired by the work of Fabricio Zuardi, Lucas Gonze and many other amazing and talented engineers working for Yahoo! Music in San Diego and Santa Monica, who were developing the Yahoo! Media Player.

Easylistener feeds off XSPF, a venerable XML format for playlists. The little chunk of code that places the player on your Web page includes a reference to a Web site that will take the URL of a Web page and will go and read that page, extract details of any audio files it finds and build them into XSPF that it then feeds back to the Easylistener Flash application.

The trouble is all of this was developed by Yahoo! and they provided the "playthispage" service that produced the XSPF for the player. But Yahoo! lost interest in (or never really noticed) Easylistener, so it was left to rot. Back in July of last year I blogged that the URL for the "playthispage" service no longer worked, which resulted in no content appearing in the player. After a while they seemed to have moved it to another server and I got the player working again. However, it recently stopped again, and this time I was sure it was dead for good.

I emailed William White, who had commented on my original blog post, and I asked if he could help. He got back to me to say he'd set up a PHP script that provided the same XSPF generation service. As a result, for the time being, the player is working again.

To get it working again I added:

playthispage_url =http://musiclibre.org/playthispage/?url=

to the flashVars attribute within the embed element.

So my embed element now looks like this (note: the flashVars value should be one long string, I've broken it into lines here just for good looks):

<p style="margin-left:-10px; margin-top:0">         <embed src='http://l.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/mig/playlistbadge/25.swf?referer='          width='170'            height='200'            wmode='transparent'            flashVars='playlist_url=http://www.itauthor.com/category/podcasts/feed&             playthispage_url=http://musiclibre.org/playthispage/?url=&             rounded_corner=1&skin_color_1=0,-100,-29,18&skin_color_2=0,-100,-27,20'          type='application/x-shockwave-flash'            pluginspage='http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer'        />                                                                              </p>  

However, if you  want to use Easylistener to your own Web pages, the easy way to get it is to go to:

http://www.musiclibre.org/easylistener/

There's a nice little Web application there for setting the page that gets scraped for content and choosing the way you want the player to look. You then just copy the embed code and change "http://webjay.org/flash/xspf_player" to either "http://musiclibre.org/xspf_player" or "http://musiclibre.org/dark_player".

For example, here's one I just went and grabbed.

And if you don't see anything (or the player is empty), it means it's broken again.

Such a shame Yahoo! didn't continue supporting this because it's still way better than anything else out there that tries to do the same thing.

I've been on holiday for a couple of weeks: not doing anything much, just using up annual leave. One of the things I have done is fix up an audio recording setup in the little room that is now my home office. Here's how it looks:

The latest edition to my recording is a smart new microphone on an anglepoise arm:

It's a Rode Procaster and the main difference between it and other microphones I've used is that it's a dynamic microphone. Previously I've used condenser mics that need phantom power, but I've always had problems with hiss. The Procaster gives a great sound and wasn't break-the-bank expensive. I think it's very good value for money.

You can hear it in use on ITauthor Podcast #33.

      
The other bits of kit are things I've put together over a number of years:

M-Audio FastTrack Pro

This is really just a very nice external sound card. I need one of these because the sound card on my Dell Vostro is really, really, really awful. Even just for listening to audio normally it's bad: terrible hiss and interference from the spinning of the hard disk.

I have two of these so that I can route Windows sounds into Skype, so that the person on the other end can hear sound files I play.* This is a luxury: you don't need this. And if you're lucky enough to have a good sound card you don't need either of these (but I love these things anyway - you great great sound out of them).

*I just copied Joel Spolsky's Skype setup podcasting setup: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/PodcastEquipment.html
       

Behringer XENYX 1002FX Mixer

I bought this years ago and it's probably the bit I'd replace because it's not digital, so I lose a bit of sound quality by sending an analogue signal through this. But it's useful to have physical knobs to turn to get the levels right, and it allows me to do the Joel Spolsky method of Skype recording.
        

M-Audio Microtrack 24/96

This is something else I've had for a few years now. It's a very simple little recorder but it does the job and is handy for recording away from home because it's small and very lightweight.
       

AKG HSC 271 Headset

I wasted money on this. This is a great set of headphones: very comfortable to wear and a nice, warm, bassy sound, but I never managed to get good sound out of the microphone. As I mentioned above, this is a condenser mic and, through my setup, it always gave me hiss. It also has a thin, tinny, metalic sound that was really disappointing because this was an expensive headset.

I haven’t got round to doing a podcast for a while. I’ve been using up the remainder of my holidays recently, having lots of long weekends, which should have given me plenty of time to do one, but instead I’ve been doing … well, hang on a minute, what have I been doing?

I just recently discovered the Communications from DMN podcast. I particularly enjoyed the interview with Anne Gentle of JustWriteClick fame. Anne is a very engaging and enthusiastic speaker and I’d recommend giving this a listen:

http://dmn.podbean.com/2008/09/29/talking-shop-with-anne-gentle/

As a result of realising this podcast exists, I’ve now added it to my Technical Writers’ Podcast Mashup RSS feed:

  http://feeds2.feedburner.com/techwriterpodcasts