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Podcasting Blog
Audacity Updated
5/09/2008
The very popular among podcasters audio recording application, Audacity has received an update. Podcasting News has a full rundown of the changes, including many bug fixes. It is nice to see some interface fixes, too, as I’ve felt Audacity has always suffered on the UI side.
Got a Podcaster Birthday Coming Up?
2/14/2008
Don’t forget that I’ve put together the finest collection of gifts for your favorite podcasting friend, family member, neighbor, or stranger! This isn’t just a list for holiday gifts, but great to find something to buy for a birthday gift or something for yourself, too. Filled with books, hardware and more, the store is broken out into … Continue reading »
Greg Cangialosi on B2B Podcasting
2/13/2008
While on business and conference-going on the west coast, my co-author of The Business Podcasting Book Greg Cangialosi was interviewed today for the City Biz List about B2B podcasting. After a short introduction Greg gets right to the point about why podcasting matters to business:
Simply put, podcasting presents yet another opportunity for an … Continue reading »
Hardware Recommendations
- Kustom KM4 Mic with Cable
- Behringer XM8500 Microphone
- Shure SM58 Mic
- MXL MXL V63MBP Computer Desktop Recording Kit
Masthead
Contact
Ryan Irelan, Editor - listen@podcastfreeamerica.com
Inside Look: Kris Smith of Croncast
Interviews with podcasters and new media producers about the stuff they do to make their podcasts great.
I’m introducing a new feature article here at Podcast Free America. It’s titled Inside Look, a ongoing series of interviews with podcasters and new media producers about the stuff they do to make their podcasts great.
The first installment of this series is an interview with Kris Smith of the Croncast podcast. Kris is a new media entrepreneur and specializes in implementing RSS technology in interesting and useful ways for clients. He has spoken at events like Podcast Academy and the Podcast Expo. Kris does the Croncast podcast with his wife Betsy. Together, they’ve created hundreds of very funny and entertaining podcast espiodes.
Podcast Free America: First, I want to ask you to briefly talk about what Croncast is, how long you’ve been doing it and why on earth you and your wife decided to expose your lives to the public?!
Kris Smith: Croncast is a podcast that I started on November 8th, 2004 as a daily show. I co-host the show with my wife. Since beginning of the show we have produced over 450 episodes that average 30 minutes in length. The show release dates changed after a few months but for the last 3 years we have mainained a show release schedule of 3 times a week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
We didn’t really intend to expose our lives so much. The show originally started as a way for me to learn the technology and then apply it to my job. But it turned out to be too much fun to put down after a few months. It felt like a calling. Something great was happening and I could get in on the ground floor. Plus, I could get my very funny wife involved. The show content stems mostly from her humor and me setting her up for the punch-lines. Unfortunately, her humor and my setups rely heavily on our day to day lives.
PFA: When you started out was the technology of podcasting a major hurdle for you? Did you already have audio experience?
KS: On the audio production side the technology came very easy. It was how I made my living as a multimedia designer. The tech side was a little more difficult because I needed to learn about RSS. And at the time there were not tools available to assist in the process or even train you in how to create a feed for your show.
PFA: What did your first podcast rig look like?
KS: My first rig was ridiculous. Every podcaster should start with a rig like I had.
Two free labtech microphones with socks covering them working double duty as wind screens and pop filters going straight into a computer. Where I was lucky was that being an audio nerd I had two soundcards and could split the channels when recording. So I could sort of multitrack to clean up audio.
I recorded—and still do—with SoundForge. I do all my post work in it. Then I track and master each show in Vegas. That part of the rig has been consistent since I started. Even the same mastering plug-ins.
PFA: RSS seems to be a big stumbling block for a lot of people—when both learning and talking about podcasting. What was your first impression and how did you go about learning what it is, how to use it, etc?
KS: I think it is a stumbling block. Mainly because the acronym RSS, meaning Really Simple Syndication is a misnomer.
RSS is a hard technology to describe to people. It is based on other technologies that are even more difficult to explain. And podcasters early on and still today are generally pretty nerdy and when they try to describe on their own sites or for their employer sites it comes out all wrong. Simple will be when people say, “this is how you download my shows, press here.”
I learned about RSS by looking at the specifications for it and scouring the Internet for examples of RSS both good and bad. I ended up becoming an expert in RSS out of my own frustration with the way it was being used and the many ways in which it wasn’t being used.
PFA: Before we get into how you use RSS for Croncast, can you talk about the podcasting rig you have now? What’s your equipment setup? Where do you record? Maybe a little bit about your process.
KS: My current rig is a paired down setup that gives me the biggest bang with the least amount of gear. I’ll start with the input process from microphone all the way to finished product.
- 2 Marshall MXL 2003 microphones
- I own 6 of them. Long way from the Labtech mics! I recommend these mics to everyone that asks. And after recently cheating on them with a Neumann U87ai I like them even more. With a price tag of $149 at most dealers you can’t go wrong. We’ve used them now for two years. The sound is clear, they knock a lot of ambient noise down and their pick up pattern is second to none with a great low end and limited high end. The mic comes with a bass cut and a -10dB pad switch that can help when finding the right sound for your voice and recording space. These are phantom power microphones so I need a preamp.
- DBX1066 limiter/compressor
- This was a replacement for Universal Audio 6176’s that I loved but needed something I could travel with. The DBX does some upfront compression (makes volume louder) and limiting (stops ‘peaking’ or ‘clipping’ of audio samples). This is really nice to have so that you don’t have to do all those repairs in post.
- PreSonus Firepod
- FireWire recording interface with 8 preamplifiers (8 XLR/line inputs with phantom power). I originally bought this to replace an M-Audio MobilePre that was flaking out and causing intermittent popping in tracks. The reason that I chose the Firepod was primarily the 8 XLR inputs with phantom power to multitrack instead of force output to a single stereo track—a huge plus when recording more than 4 voices for a show. Also, if the DBX wasn’t part of the signal chain anymore I could live with the sound.
- Sony VGN-AR230g Laptop
- Sony Sound Forge 8 audio editor
- This is the software that I record the shows into. I have been using Sound Forge for the last 7 years. When I got my first computer in 1999 at age 25 I learned how to use it by working with Steinberg’s WaveLab (another great audio editor) but late in that year switched to Sound Forge. WaveLab had a lot of great features but they never compared the bundle of plug-ins that came with or for Sound Forge. WaveLab relied on the VST model and Sound Forge on Direct-X which meant that there were also more plug-ins to choose from. The killer plug-in was the Noise Reduction tool that prior to version 7 (maybe 6) wasn’t bundled with the license. It is the best noise reduction tool on the market. I’ve heard most of the rest first hand, even the ones used in million dollar studios and would still choose the one in Sound Forge. I don’t use Noise Reduction on our show but when doing post on audio recorded out of the studio I use it about 90% of the time.
- Waves L2 Ultramaximizer mastering compressor
- Yep, I already ran the audio signal through an amazing compressor in the DBX but the L2 puts the finishing touches on the wav file before I close out Sound Forge. This plug-in is the secret in my sauce. I have used it for about four years and find it’s sound brighter, more open and louder than any other including Ozone 2 or 3 (which is an attempt to recreate the sound at a lower cost).
- Sony Vegas 6 multitrack
- Vegas is a multitrack video editor. Video? Did Kris just say, video? I sure did. When this product was first developed by Sonic Foundry it started out as a multitrack audio mastering suite that was supposed to be an upgrade from their Acid line of software. That didn’t quite work out and they released a second version for video. With two competing versions on the market they made the wise decision to morph them together into Vegas Video. Sonic Foundry was bought by Sony and the rest is history. I use Vegas basically the same way that I use Dreamweaver for coding pages—as a template. All I have to do for Croncast is plug in each new recording on the timeline and poof there is a fully mastered show.
- Xing MP3 encoder (included in Vegas) encoded to Joint Stereo, 96 Kbps at 44.1 KHz
- All shows are encoded to Joint Stereo, 96 Kbps at 44.1. This is the lowest quality that I will encode my own work to or for that of a client. This range is somewhat higher than many podcasters will recommend for a speech driven show but I find that anything less sound hollow and purely focuses on midrange sounds. Blah. At a bit rate lower than 96 Kbps most audio encoders, like this one, won’t allow for a sample rate of 44.1 KHz. I used to encode the shows to a lower value two years ago when we first started but then iTunes came to town and studios started cranking out CD quality audio files. Once that bar was raised I figured it was okay for me to join that party.
- MP3 Tag Tools to edit ID3 tags
- It is open source and the best ID3 tag editor that I have found. It will allow you to make changes to version 1 and 2 tags that will cover most of the popular media players like WinAmp, Windows Media Player and iTunes. It’ll even let you add up to 18 images per file in the album art that can be displayed in iTunes.
PFA: Where do you record your podcast?
KS: Where I record is much less exciting than the gear. I have my corner of the lower level of the house that is a dedicated office. About 2 years ago I purchased an Aurelex sound dampening kit
PFA: Before we wrap this up, I want to ask you about all of the various RSS offerings on your site. You mentioned earlier that you’ve become a self-taught RSS expert. One notices on your site that there are so many different options for subscribing to feeds.
You have feeds for the shows, the blog only, blog comments and then also for tags (categories), plus more.
KS: Yeah, there are a lot of offerings. And for good reason.
People need to think about RSS differently for it to become a great tool. I started that process on with our feeds but ran into some limitations that then led to greater breakthroughs.
RSS works like this: You can fill it with whatever blog posts or podcasts that you want in any order you see fit. Here’s what I mean. It’s like waffle cone. You can put any ice cream scoops in it that you want and in any order. Put chocolate on top or on the bottom, your choice.
But another thing that motivated me was how was I going to deal with an ever growing library of podcasts and make them easily downloadable? Easy, create some waffle cones and break up the shows into groups based on date.
I also started to work on other concepts when I had maxed out these types of feeds. These types of feeds are based around delivering shows to people from a large library episodically. They were designed to give a user an easy way to access a large library of content on their own time. Say, delivering previous shows from years ago only on week days and none on the weekend.
This, of course, grew into creating a new way to generate feeds that puts all the control in user hands. An ability that I am proud to say is finally making its way out into the public and should pick up some steam this year. We call them ‘moderated’ feeds. But through the use of a form on a website a reader or listener can pick keywords, day of week, time of day, amount of items and order of when they recieve content.
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