Podcasting - Jake Ludington

Using Two Different Sample Rates in Audacity

"I have recorded some tracks in Audacity using the project sample rate of 44100Hz. I also imported a track from a portable device at 16000Hz. All tracks sound fine when played simultaneously. However, when I want to insert an audio into the 16000Hz file, it is distored. I have 2 questions: 1. Is there a way to integrate the two files into 1 track; and 2. Will I have a problem exporting mixed sample rates to CD?" Mixing sample rates in an audio project can cause all sorts of problems with your final output. There is an easy fix to your problem, which is to simply resample one of the audio files so that it matches the other files....

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DIY Portable Recording Studio

Portable Recording Booth As someone who travels regularly, I'm always looking for creative ways to get better sound from my audio recordings. Hotel rooms tend to echo and you don't always have control over the environmental noises. I went looking for a solution that would offer a more controlled sound and ran across professional voice actor, Harlan Hogan's, Porta-Booth, which is built from some fairly common components. You don't have to travel to find this solution useful, it's also a great way to tighten up your sound when recording at home without needing a whole room dedicated to recording. Making a few slight modifications, I put together a video showing how I built my own.

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How to Get Your Own YouTube RSS Feed

"Is there an RSS feed with my YouTube videos people can subscribe to?"

YouTube recently publicized a bunch of RSS feeds for subscribing to popular topics and categories, but they haven't made it obvious how someone might subscribe to your YouTube channel via RSS. Thanks to their well documented section for developers, this is a relatively easy. Each YouTube user has their own unique RSS feed in the format:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/jakeludington/uploads

Just replace my YouTube username, with your own YouTube username in the URL and you'll have an RSS feed of only videos you uploaded to YouTube. You can find more ways to access your YouTube information, like an RSS feed of your Favorites and Playlists, see the detailed YouTube API documentation.

A slightly different approach to this, including an enclosure with a SWF video file, is to use a URL like this where the file is in the format username.rss. This is a little more complicated because other people could tag their videos with your user name and show up in your RSS feed.Here's an example:

http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/jakeludington.rss

Subscribe to my YouTube RSS feed

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Kindle's Secret Podcasting Feature

Kindle Supports Podcasting Amazon didn't officially include podcasting support when they shipped the first Kindle devices, but that doesn't mean you can't listen to your favorite podcasts on the Kindle (or your favorite songs for that matter). There are actually two interesting ways to make this work:

1) You can play any MP3 audio file as background music on the Kindle. You transfer MP3 files to the Kindle using the USB connection, to either store audio on the device or on an SD card. Then from the Home screen do the following:

Scroll to the Menu and select Experimental

Select Play Music on the screen shown

This will continue to play until you click the Stop Music option in Experimental (or the Alt+P keyboard shortcut). You can jump to the next track using Alt+F.

2) The more useful way to listen to podcasts on your Kindle is by adding them to the Audible folder either on your device or on your SD card. This is actually designed specifically for listening to Audible Audiobooks, but also happens to work with MP3s. Once you have the MP3 files in the Audible folder, the Kindle treats them just like other audiobook files allowing you to jump back 30 seconds, skip ahead 30 seconds, play and pause audio.

While you can't subscribe to podcasts directly on the Kindle yet, these are two ways to use it as a podcast listening device.

See also: A giant list of Kindle compatible Audiobooks.

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mp3DirectCut

MP3 files recorded directly with a voice recorder often require some editing. Many MP3s downloaded from the Internet need editing to trim unwanted sections. Both of these scenarios result in better quality audio when the MP3 is not re-compressed after editing. Enter mp3DirectCut, which provides an interface for directly editing MP3 files without first converting to a PCM audio format. mp3DirectCut speeds up the MP3 editing process in a number of areas, providing direct access to cut, copy, and remove sections of an MP3 in a non-destructive editor without ever needing to recompress. This saves time, disk space and eliminates the generational hit of decompressing and recompressing your MP3 files during editing. Note: If you install mp3DirectCut on Windows Vista you will need to run the installer as administrator. [Windows 9x/2k/XP/Vista $0.00]

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How to Record Nature Sounds

Recording environmental sounds like singing birds, wild animal calls, water running through a streambed, or the chirp of baby birds is one of the more fascinating (and challenging) aspects of audio recording. Some of the same audio recording techniques apply when recording things like car noises, lawn mower engines and other man made sounds, but you don't always get a chance to do a second take with nature like you do with machines. For a list of required gear and some great sources of tips, read on...

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Recording Phone Calls with an iPod

You won't get great sounding recordings by recording telephone calls with an iPod, but it is possible. In an ideal telephone recording scenario, you want independent control over each person on the call, so that if the person you call is too quiet, you can turn their volume up or your volume down. You won't get independent volume control for both sides of the call when recording a telephone conversation on your iPod, but you will get a recording that you can later use as part of a podcast or transcribed interview. To record phone calls on your iPod, you need two things in addition to the iPod. You need a microphone add-on for the iPod and you need an adapter to pass the phone audio to the microphone....

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Wavosaur

Wavosaur is a lightweight audio editing application with VST support. All the basics are covered here, including support for multitrack audio files, trimming, adding effects, making loops, and normalization. Most processing settings are also available for batch conversions, making Wavosaur a handy tool for applying the same settings to a bunch of files. I like are the option to remove silence in a batch, which is a convenient way to speed up spoken word audio without altering pitch. A vocal removal preset also scrubs music files of vocals, so you can make your own karaoke tracks in a batch. The vocal removal doesn't always get chorus sections perfectly scrubbed, but it shouldn't hurt your ability to sing over the top of the file. The application runs as a completely standalone executable, meaning you could put it on a thumb drive and use Wavosaur anywhere. The user interface is generally more intuitive than the popular freeware app Audacity, but the two make nice companions rather than being replacements for each other. While Wavosaur doesn't bundle all the features of things like Sound Forge and Audition, it does most of the common audio tasks well at a price neither of those two apps can touch. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]

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Royalty Free Podcast Promo Soundpack

I'm always looking for more audio sound effects - especially free ones. Beatsuite.com has a collection of Royalty Free and free as in no cost audio samples designed specifically for podcasters. Terms of use are simply that you need to credit Beatsuite.com for providing them. As far as I can tell, the collection is available only on Apple's download site and the files are listed as requiring Mac OS X, but fear not, the WAV files in the download will work just as easily for Linux and Windows users too.

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Recording Voice Audio with a M-Audio Microtrack

Beverly writes, I need to record voice to CD, efficiently, and have the cd play in any normal CD player. I have an M-Audio Microtrack recorder with 1gb compact flash, but it seems that I have a high quality recording but it takes up a lot of space. In a work day I need to make 6 recordings. Does it make sense to consider a 30gb iPod to record voice to, and then burn to CD?

You don't mention how long your six recordings per day are, but if you want good quality sound for recording, don't use the iPod or any other portable media player. The Microtrack recorder is a good tool for what you are doing. If you want to use less space per file change your record settings. Under the Record Settings on the Menu make the following changes: Set Encoder to WAV. Set Sample Rate to 44.1. Set Bits to 16 (not 24). Using these settings, you will get about 90 minutes on a 1GB Compact Flash card and won't notice any quality difference. A much cheaper solution than buying an iPod would be to get several 1GB or 2GB compact flash cards and then swapping the card when it gets full. This also gives you the flexibility of using the Microtrack all day long. Keep in mind that an audio CD only holds as much as 74 minutes of audio, so a single 1GB card recording 90 minutes of voice audio is more audio than you can fit on a single audio CD.

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