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.

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.

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.

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

I came across EasyListener from Yahoo:
http://next.yahoo.net/archives/32/easylistener

It's a free RSS reader/MP3 player that is incredibly easy to configure. It also set me thinking that what would be good would be, rather than just listing my own podcasts in the player, to offer a mix of other tech writing podcasts, or podcasts that tech writers might find interesting.

I investigated a few options, but by far the easiest way to do this, and configure it just how you want it, is to use Yahoo Pipes. The first half of this video shows how you do it:

http://revver.com/video/1245467/yahoo-pipes-and-how-to-merge-filter-and-sort-multiple-rss-feeds/

Here's the configuration I came up with:
 

As I'm writing this the resulting feed combines four feeds:

• Tech Writer Voices
• Grammar Girl
• A Way With Words
• The ITauthor Podcast

Yahoo Pipes takes the 15 most recent posts (except any where the enclosure is video rather than audio) and generates the following feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/techwriterpodcasts

Note: The above feed actually comes from Feedburner, but it's got the same content as the one from Yahoo. I just dropped the Yahoo feed into Feedburner because Feedburner gives me a nicer URL and generates some nice stats about how many people download and subscribe to the feed.

When I put this feed URL into the EasyPlayer code generator, I get this:

A nice easy way to help promote other podcasts that you enjoy listening to and want to share with other people.

UPDATE:

OK, so you may have noticed that the embedded EasyPlayer widget doesn't work. It seems to be picky about which feeds it'll play with. It's fine with the RSS feed for ITauthor, but it doesn't like the output from Pipes - even though both EasyPlayer and Pipes are Yahoo creations and the feed I produced from Pipes is valid RSS (I checked).

So here's the same feed in the old, slow-loading, and uglier SpringWidgets player:

UPDATE 2:

My default browser is Firefox and, in Firefox, you can see a SpringWidgets audio player above. Internet Explorer, however, all I can see is a big white space. So my enthusiasm for audio player widgets has just taken a severe dip. I've messed around with both of these widgets for too much of my weekend, so I'm going to give up now. I'll maybe try again in a few months and see if I can find one that's less buggy.

:-(

So I've been trying to use Audacity again. I tried it out a while back but gave up on it because it falls way short of Cubase in many ways, even though my copy of Cubase must be five or six years old now.

However, I had a week off and spent it in Glen Esk and had plenty of time, so I took my laptop and used Audacity to edit podcast 19 - and interview with my mum. The editing is okay after you get the hang of it, though I still find it awkward having to constantly chop and change tools to do things, and with an absence of right-click menus in places. Cubase is just a lot more intuitive and better designed to allow you to do the things you want to do, chopping and moving stuff around quickly.

But the main problem I had was just now when I finally got round to outputting the finished recording to MP3. It came out sounding really bad - particularly, for some reason, the intro/outro music. Even upping it to 128 Mbps didn't improve things. The spoken voice sounded okay but the music sounded really tinny and warbly.

I guessed it was something to do with Audacity's MP3 codec, so I tried outputting to WAV and it seems that I was correct because the 16-bit WAV output sounded fine, and a 32-bit WAV file sounded just like the original, but resulted in a 987 MB file.

I then downloaded FormatFactory (which I'd seen recommended on LifeHacker) and tried converting the 32-bit file. This failed, but the 16-bit PCM WAV file worked fine and the resulting MP3 file sounds about as good as the results I get from Cubase. It's annoying to have to introduce yet more steps into the process of producing a podcast.

However, although I can't recommend Audacity (despite all the plaudits it gets) I can recommend FormatFactory, which is dead easy to use and seems to do the job nicely.

Just a quick note to say I'll be attending the ISTC Conference in Nottingham next week. I'm not known to many (any?) of you, but I plan to get as many faces to blog names as possible while I'm there. So on that note, who else is attending? I hope to grab as many people as possible for impromptu, informal chats that may form the basis of a future podcast. If you'd be willing to donate 5 minutes of your time and insight to the ITAuthor podcast I'd love to hear from you.

When I return I'm sure I'll provide a round-up of the conference either in here or on the podcast itself. Alistair has been away at the UA Conference this week and may provide an update himself when he gets back.

For more information, or to configure one for yourself, go to SpringWidgets.

So I've resubmitted the RSS feed and hopefully it will show up again soon. Looking for the podcast yesterday just reminded me how bad the iTunes is at helping you discover new podcasts. Basically it's okay for the most popular podcasts in each category, because these get listed, but there's no way of finding anything else unless you happen to know what you're looking for and can search for it by name - which makes you wonder how any other podcasts can shift the incumbent most popular ones when nobody can find anything else.

I'm a huge admirer of the iPod user interface, but the interfaces for the iTunes application and the iTunes Music Stores are really very poor. The store looks nice, but it's not nice to use. The iTunes application doesn't even look nice.

Anyway, for my own reference, I came across a couple of useful tips:

1. If you have iTunes installed, clicking the following link pulls up the ITauthor podcast page in iTunes:

http://www.itunes.com/podcast?id=289204946

2. To ping iTunes to tell it to update from the published feed, click:

https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/pingPodcast?id=289204946

• My podcast recording setup
• Notes on how I make a podcast

there were quite a few stages I hadn't mentioned. These were:

1. Once I've saved the MP3 file and used ID3-TagIT to edit the metadata on the file, I open the file in Windows Media Player.
2. Right click the name of the track in Windows Media Player and choose Properties.
3. Make a note of the length of the track and the file name.
4. Make a note of the size of the file.
5. Start Windows Live Writer.
6. Open a previous podcast post.
7. View the HTML and copy it all.
8. Open a new post.
   Note: don't try to save the existing podcast with a new name. This doesn't work like it would in Word etc. You won't get a new file, Live Writer renames the existing post, so you can lose the old post if you try to do this.
9. View the HTML and paste what you copied.
10. Back in Web view, edit the post and then publish it as a draft.
11. Use FileZilla to FTP the MP3 file to the web/wp-content/uploads/podcasts directory.
12. In Live Writer, click Dashboard, top right.
13. Log in to ITauthor.
14. Go to the Manage Posts list and click Edit for the new podcast post.
15. In the Podcasting section, click Add Media File.
16. For Location, enter the name of the file (e.g. ITauthor-podcast13-20Aug2008.mp3).
17. For the title enter: Listen to the podcast
18. Enter the file size manually - e.g. 16.2 MB.
    Note: the Auto Detect buttons don't work.
19. Enter the duration manually - e.g. 35:13.
20. Leave all the other fields.
21. Click Show to edit the post-specific settings for iTunes.
22. Set a Custom Subtitle. For example:
    Alistair Christie and Graham Campbell discuss what it's like to be the only technical writer at a software company.
    Note: Despite what the Help text says, you get about 144 characters to play with, after which it's truncated with an ellipsis.
23. Set a Custom Summary.
    Note: This can be a text-only version of your post. If you don't set a custom one, ITunes users will see a description that is generated from the text of your post. This is okay, but it can be a bit ugly, so it's better to write one yourself. See the example summary below.
24. Set Keywords and Author tags to Use Global.
25. Leave Explicit and Block as No.
26. Make sure the categories for the post are: Podcasts (not Podcasting) and View all.
27. Publish.
28. On the Podpress tab of WordPress, go to Feed/iTunes Settings and click Ping iTunes Update.
29. Check the new podcast is visible on my Feedburner page:
    http://feeds.feedburner.com/itauthor
    If it isn't, try pinging http://www.itauthor.com at:
    http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/ping
    If that doesn't work, log in at Feedburner, edit the feed details and check that the URL is correct.

Example iTunes:Summary tag for a podcast

I talk to Graham Campbell about being the only technical writer at a software company. Graham describes his experience of being a year into tech writing and having his Documentation Manager (me) disappear off to do another job, leaving him in a team of one, and then the possibly worse situation where, after a year, the same guy comes back again!

We also also discuss our writing tips and software recommendations. This time round the apps we like are:

Paint.NET

http://www.getpaint.net/

Texter

http://lifehacker.com/software/texter/lifehacker-code-texter-windows-238306.php

For full podcast notes and more information, go to:
www.itauthor.com/category/podcasts

If you enjoyed the podcast, or have anything say about it, please post a comment. - Go to www.itauthor.com/category/podcasts.
- Find the podcast.
- Click on the main heading to view it as a single page.
- Scroll down to the bottom of the page until you get to the comment form.

So - at least for the time being - ITauthor.com is going into hibernation. Thanks for reading/listening, if you have been.

Bye for now.

Alistair

http://www.itauthor.com/2007/05/20/notes-on-how-i-make-a-podcast/

But I thought, for my own benefit (I never remember stuff like this), I should make a note of my current setup and settings for making the recording for a podcast.

So, to start off, I don't record straight onto my computer. The reason for this is that I just can't get a clean recording that way. What I get is a recording with a lot of hiss and noise. Instead I record onto a portable digital recorder, then I move the audio file onto my PC and edit it in Cubase.

Here's the setup:

I bought a cheap condenser mic off Ebay (it arrived posted from Hong Kong). It's not a great microphone and it picks up a lot more of the ambient room sound than I'd like, but it's good enough. If I got more serious about doing podcasts a better mic would be the first thing I'd look at.

The mic plugs into the XLR input of the mixer. The mic came with a quarter inch jack plug, but I bought an XLR cable and I noticed a big difference.

The mixer is an unnecessary luxury, but it boosts the volume and puts more bass into the signal which gives a good effect. I originally bought it when I was struggling to get good results from recording straight to the PC. It didn't help with that, and now I have the M-AUDIO recorder I can record straight to that with the little stereo mic provided with it and get a good sound. The only thing with the little stereo mic (not shown) is that it's omni-directional, so it picks up even more room sound than the big mic and makes me sound like I'm recording in a cupboard. But it's great for recording outdoors (podcast #8 was recorded straight onto the M-AUDIO with the little stereo mic).

The mixer settings are as follows:

• Mic in: XLR left input
• trim: 25%
• EQ high: 25%
• EQ mid: 25%
• EQ low: 62.5%
• low cut button: up (off)
• FX: 0
• pan: 50%
• level:
• main mix: just under 0 dB
• output: CD/tape out

The settings on the M-AUDIO are:

• input: 1/8th" input jack
• Input Monitor: on
• 27dB TRS boost: on
• Encoder: WAV
• Sample rate: 44.1
• Bits: 24
• Channels: mono
• L/M/H: L

So that gives me a .wav file on the M-AUDIO. I then turn off the M-AUDIO, connect it to my PC with a USB cable and go and find the .wav file in Windows Explorer. I open a new project in Cubase - choosing Stereo Mastering for audio CD - and drag the file from Windows Explorer onto the timeline in Cubase.

I then process the recording as follows:

Process > Normalize:

-3.00 dB

Plugins > Dynamics > Multiband Compressor:

Use preset: FM Radio

Plugins > Dynamics > DeEsser:

• Male Heavy
• S-Reduction: 5
• Auto Threshold
• Male

Plugins > Dynamics > Dynamics:

• Compressor: off
• Routing: 1-3-2
• Audiogate: On
• Threshold: -39
• Attack: 9.9
• Hold: 26
• Release: Auto
• Limiter: Off

Finally, if necessary:

Process > Gain

to bring the levels up nice and high, without cutting the peaks.

I then add in tracks for the intro and outro of the podcast.

Finally, I export the whole thing as an MP3 file, as described in the previous post.

For an example of a recording made with this setup, have a listen to ITauthor Podcast #11.

To do this:

1. Go to https://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/login and log in to your FeedBurner account.
2. Click Troubleshootize.
3. At the very bottom of the page, click Resync Now.

RSS links:

 RSS page

Note: FeedBurner's HTML rendering of the RSS (to make it look nice when a human visits it in a browser) only works if viewed from a clicked-on link on a website (like the link here), but not if you type the URL into the browser's address bar (or even if you click a link in an email message). Otherwise podcast readers would get the HTML rather than the RSS.

iTunes links:

Standard:

Alternative:

http://www.itauthor.com/feed?feed=podcast

which is the new URL I've assigned to my feed at FeedBurner. You can subscribe to the above if you want to, but the better feed is the FeedBurner version:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/itauthor

I still need to move over my old podcasts from when I was using LoudBlog. These still live here:

http://www.itauthor.com/notes/podcasts/

With my first ever podcast, from 1 December 2005 here:

http://www.itauthor.com/notes/podcasts/index.php?id=4

Answer: It's very easy. The PHP that produces the main feed also produces category feeds, you just need to know the right arguments to use in the URL. For example, the RSS for the ITauthor blog is:

http://www.itauthor.com/feed

To specify an RSS2 feed of just the Podcasts category, I use the URL:

http://www.itauthor.com/feed?feed=rss2&cat=26

The only remotely tricky bit is knowing what number to use for the category you want. To get this number, go to your admin pages of your WordPress blog, click Manage and then Categories. The number you need to use is the ID column for the category you want an RSS feed for.

Podcast feed

I use this feature for my podcasts. I use the PodPress plugin for WordPress to add podcasts to my blog. I give these the category Podcasts. I use FeedBurner to publish the RSS feed for my podcasts, but I don't want to pass FeedBurner the RSS feed for my main site, or people will end up getting all sorts of non-podcast stuff in their podcast client. So the URL I give FeedBurner is the one for the Podcasts category.

1. Make the recordings as 44.1 kHz wav files.
2. Import these into a Cubase SX3 project for editing/mixing.
3. Choose File > Export > Audio mixdown.
4. Save as an MP3 with:
   file name: ITauthor-podcast08-19May2007.mp3 (or similar)
   attributes: 96 kBit/s; 44.100 kHz; Stereo
   quality: highest
   outputs: stereo out (stereo)
   channels: stereo
   sample rate: 44.100 kHz
5. Don't bother setting the ID3 tags when prompted, we'll do that next.
6. Open up ID3-TagIT.
7. Right-click my previous podcast, copy the tags.
8. Right-click the new MP3 file and paste the tags.
9. Double-click the file and edit the tags as required for the new show.
   To edit the comment, click it so that it's displayed in the edit box. After editing it remember to click Add Comment or else your changes will be lost.
   Don't try to put HTML or formatting into your comments. The comments are displayed as plain text in ITunes' Get Info dialog box, and all line spaces are stripped out.
10. File > Save.
11. Use FileZilla to copy the MP3 to the uploads/podcasts directory of my web server.
12. Create a blog entry, selecting Podcasts as the category.

Next thing I need to do is find out how I change all the directory listing for the ITauthor podcast (including ITunes), which currently point to a location on my web server that no longer exists.

Unfortunately, I was not able to record anything with 3.0 - I just didn't get any recordings. So I uninstalled 3.0 and tried to revert to 2.5. However, after installation, every time I tried to record I got an error message saying "unable to create sound container".

I uninstalled, rebooted and reinstalled Pamela 2.5. The installation seemed to go okay except for a "Pamela Virtual Cable" message: "Cannot create service for kernel-mode driver (0/1073 - The specified service already exists.)". This was followed by an "mmdrvmgr" message: "Driver failed processing message 0x9 (code 0x0)".

It turns out, if you try reinstalling Pamela you need to install a .inf file (remove-PVAC-service.inf) which you can download in a zip file called "remove-PVAC-service.zip" from here:

www.pamela-systems.com/help/faq/index.php?sid=18519&lang=en&action=artikel&cat=3&id=7&artlang=en

After you've downloaded and unzipped the file, uninstall Pamela, then right-click remove-PVAC-service.inf and choose Install. You must then restart your computer and install Pamela 2.5. This time things should work.

My only slight problem now is that the recorded files don't play from within Pamela, but I can live with that. It's a shame 3.0 doesn't work because it does have a few nice little improvements - but it's no use if it won't actually record anything. However, it's still in beta so I guess I was just on the wrong end of a beta bug that they'll fix before the official release.

Unfortunately, my problems with Pamela and Hot Recorder surfaced just about an hour before I was due to record my first interview for the ITauthor podcast and I hadn't fixed the problem by the time I was due to start the interview. I was supposed to be interviewing Tom Johnson, of Tech Writer Voices. Luckily he was very good about it and agreed to do the interview some other time.

Lesson 1 of getting other people on your podcast:
if they've been good enough to agree to give up their time for free to be on your show, the least you can do is make sure you've got everything prepared.

Doh!!!