The interview is a bit more complicated than your normal, personal, off the mill podcast especially if you will be conferencing over the internet or live even, face to face. First, study the set up and get down to planning a few setup’s trying to figure out what works best. For teleconferencing, you can record the questions and answers separately, editing them together with your editing software later. Background noise is a killer so search and silence all noisy stuff, equipment (if you love to use your computer, you’re sure to have more fans that the store bought PC casing so use something else and shut it off, the hum of the fans are louder that you think) More →

Being one of the many contenders for podcasts, Microsoft’s Zune should be a target for your podcasts as well as the all-present iPod. The Zune is a portable digital music player that has an added wireless feature with a whopping 80 GB or memory with a specific and continuously expanding market as the iPod. With the Zune selling as of latest figures, over a million units, the market is truly an enticing target for your podcasts should you want to expand your audience. There are some pre-requisites to setting up Zune to market your podcasts More →

Time for another ‘gear roundup post’. Or perhaps I should categorize this as a ‘getting started post’? Whatever you call it I thought it was time for another one of those. I’ve decided to split it up into two posts. This first one will as the name suggests deal with what you need to start out podcasting if you’re not looking to spend any larger amounts of money. The second part in this serious will deal with more ‘high-end podcasting’ if such a term exists.
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I found an article on podcasting with Linux this morning, and thought I’d share it with you. It’s old, but still worth a read. The core of the article deals with Audacity and recording interviews with Skype, which of course can be of interest to non-Linux users as well!

The article claims that you will need a second computer for recording both the voices from Skype. I definitely don’t see the need for this. I don’t know if Skype has the proper recording features now (as I said, the article is old), or if something like Audio Hijack isn’t available on Linux, in either way it could be solved with some creative routing with a proper audio interface.

Article from Linux.com

So you got your recording done, all is dandy, until you discover cracks, pops and hums all over the piece! What to do? Don’t fear, if there is in one advantage that digital has over analog, it’s in the cleanness field.
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Until Flux released something called a de-compressor, I would have said that the expander is the exact opposite of a compressor. You can pretty much tell it from the name, right? While the signal above the set threshold is toned down with a compressor, it’s the signal below the threshold that’s toned down with an expander. Thus creating an image of more dynamic audio.
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Today we’ll talk more about the de-esser, or more specifically, how you can make one if you haven’t got one. Many early de-essers used in broadcast were actually not de-essers, but homebrew stuff. And it’s not as hard as it sounds. You won’t have to touch a single screw. You will need a compressor and an EQ.

The trick is to “tune” the compressor to react to certain frequencies where sibilants occur. The easy way to find this is to take your EQ, boost one of the bands, drag it cross the frequency spectrum and listen to where the esses occur. Perhaps try around 5-6kHz.