Thomas Ferris Nicolaisen's rants: Recent Episodes

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In the third rant, I've invited my friend and colleague Daniel Westheide (@kaffeecoder) to talk with me about how we listen to podcasts.

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Show outlineOur backgrounds, history as podcast-listenersThomas started last spring, Android, listened a lot more after getting car stereo with bluetooth.

Daniel is the Apple/iOS guy. Started shortly after podcasts were made available at the iTunes Store; casual listener.
What devices do we have?Daniel has the latest iPhone and iPad. Thomas has an older Samsung Galaxy S which still works great for podcasting, plus the Nexus 7/10 Android tablets.Great Podcatchers (podcast listening apps)Several for Android, all of them are great, but they have minor feature differences* BeyondPod * DoggCatcher * PocketCasts * PodKicker

If you just want a free one there's OneCast. Google has removed their free Listen app from Play, but you can still find the apk lying around for manually installing.On the iOS/Apple side, Downcast is the go-to app. Apple's own Podcast app is supposedly the worst app ever.What features do we dig? * Google Reader integration * Cross device sync (especially in-episode progress tracking) * Careful with mobile data use * Playback speed-up What about the desktop? Other places we listen? There is Stitcher Radio which is cross-platform and has a desktop app. Stitcher is a bit like Pandora, also a podcast directory, and radio. Also for cars and stuff in the US. Thomas tested it a bit today. Be careful with mobile data rates though! We also mention TuneIn (I forgot to mention in the cast that its Android app has some really annoying and repetitive audio ads).Which podcasts do we listen to?Daniel's favorites: * The Scala Types * The Scalawags * The Changelog (not very active at the moment), * Jennisodes Podcast * Plan B Talk (German, actually a radio show available as a podcast) Thomas' favorites: * The Java Posse * FLOSS Weekly * Hanselminutes and This Developer's Life * Herding Code * Nerdhub Netzcast * Radiolab * This American Life * Freakonomics Radio Podcatching best practicesDon’t subscribe to too much or too little. Find the balance where you always have something to listen to, but not more than you can consume.Anything you would like to promote?Daniel: The Neophyte's Guide to Scala blog series. Also note that Coursera's Functional Programming course will run again in a couple of weeks!Thomas: gitminutes.com coming soon!

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My second rant is about how I podcast, and what I've learned about the trade so far (after recording two episodes).
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Link to mp3Show outline (with links)I talk a lot about how I went back and forth between a condenser mike and a dynamic one. If I had just read Ray Ortega's (The Podcaster's Studio) post here I would not have wasted so much time on it.

The two microphones I tried out (Amazon affiliate links):
* Samson Meteor Mic USB Studio Mikrofon * Samson Q2U USB/XLR dynamische Mikrofon inklusive HP20 Headphones

A bit about sitting vs standing up and mike technique, but you're better off learning about this from some one else:

• 5 tips to sound great with ANY microphone from The Audacity to Podcast
• Microphone Techniques for Voice from the Audacity wiki

Some discussion on audio formats and Fraunhofer vs LAME encoding of MP3s. For more info see:

• How to make LAME MP3s with Audacity - an older post from The Audacity to Podcast - where Daniel shows how to use the LAME encoder from within Audacity.
• Audacity and iTunes—Making Not-LAME MP3s - a later post from Daniel where he reverses his stand in favor of Fraunhofer MP3 encoding

I then go on to talk about podcasting infrastructure/hosting, particularly my affection for the Google services. I talk about Feedburner's worrying lack of activity, which is better discussed in this post by Cliff Ravenscraft.

We then move on to media hosting. There's..

• Do your own (risky if you get slashdotted and pay per GB)
• Dropbox with goo.gl in front of it (doesn't track podcatcher stats properly)
• The traditional LibSyn and Blubrry
• SoundCloud's podcasting beta program (I've tossed up my previous rant on Soundcloud here).

I didn't talk too much about how statistics and analytics, although I think it's a really interesting area. I'm kinda guessing that the difficulty of tracking podcast listening is one of the reasons Google is not pouring too much energy into it. Soundcloud definitely has some better possibilities to track streaming (and hence monetize).I'll be trying out LibSyn for hosting this podcast, but have applied to Soundcloud for doing GitMinutes.com there.
Things I forgot to talk aboutOf course, I forgot to mention that I have decided to stick to the LAME encoder as I'm on Linux. I don't really care if some exotic players can't grok the format.

Oh, I forgot to cover is the de-facto standard free (and open-source) audio recording/editing tool in use among podcasters: It's called Audacity, and is available on all platforms.

I should also mention Auphonic - audio-post-processing as a free (for now) online service. If you want to outsource the whole process of learning Audacity, and just get nicely leveled audio tracks with the right compression, it's perfect. Record, upload to Auphonic, and they deliver a well done result.
If you want to learn more about Auphonic in podcast form, here is the FLOSS Weekly interview with the Auphonic founder. Their blog is also full of interesting and useful information, like this one about audio formats, or this one about loudness levels.
I tried out processing this episode with Auphonic instead of my local Audacity mixing, and because I got some warped silences from my Audacity compressor, I ended up using the Auphonic version in this very episode! I also forgot to truncate silences before uploading, so there are some longer awkward pauses in between. Let me know how it sounds.

Resources:
* Daniel J. Lewis' Audacity to Podcast * Cliff Ravencraft's Podcast Answer man * Ray Ortega's Podcaster's Studio * Podcasters' community on Google+ * Google Plus Podcasting community. * podcastFAQ

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Just a ten minute first rant on what this is about. Some thoughts on why it's a good idea getting into podcasting now.
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Here are my notes on picking podcatching software for Android. I ended up choosing BeyondPod cause of the better Google Reader integration.

Here is a link to gitminutes.com.