john bollwitt blog

I some times get flack for listening to my own podcasts. It’s never serious when this happens, but when someone asks you what you are listening to on your iPod, it can be slightly embarrassing to say that it’s your very own podcast episode that you made just yesterday. Usually a joke about loving yourself or being narcissistic ensues.

There’s more to the point.

First off, it’s quality control. You need to check out to see if what you are producing is any good, and that’s more of a quantitative task to begin with. How are your production skills working out in terms of your opening theme or anything else that you pre-produce? Bumpers, liners, stingers, transitions, etc. How do they sound? Are they much louder or quieter than other portions of your podcast?

Photo credit: duanestorey on Flickr

It’s quantitative because it’s all about decibels[wiki], the way that sound is measured in terms of volume. Still, you don’t have to be an expert about the science behind it. You can tell a lot by listening with ear buds. If you have to crank the volume all the way up or down in certain parts to control the way you can comfortably and coherently listen to something, then perhaps you have some things to work on or adjust for next time.

If you want to be a stickler and go back to fix things you have already done, it’s entirely up to you. I say move forward and work on the next episode to fix things. Maybe that’s just the radio guy in me because once something is over the air, there’s no going back.

At the same time, just scan your podcast for problems. From time to time, data gets corrupted, and when that happens to audio files, weird things happen when you play them back. There are numerous reasons how it can happen, but the point is that you never can tell when that might be. Blips, screeches, or digital artifacts are just a way of life, and you probably won’t know it’s there until you play it back.

Lastly, you are your own, worst critic. Listen to yourself. Do you like what you hear? Chances are, you probably won’t as you first start out. The only way you will get better is to develop a style that is comfortable to what you want it to be. It’s not as much as “loving yourself” as much as being able to stand how you sound.

You are not Anderson Cooper[wiki], Ira Glass[wiki], Adam Curry, or Tod Maffin, and you never will be. But there are things that you might admire about the way someone else does something, and you can work on incorporating that into your style while you work out the things you don’t like with how you, personally, sound.

This is a technique I used to share with people during my college radio days. It will bring out the uh, um, and oh problem that plagues so many in the world when they get behind a mic or podium. Even those crutch phrases will get to the point where you tell yourself, “Ugh… I say that way too much.” Well, if that drives you nuts, now you know what you need to change.

Truly there is no wrong or right way to make a podcast, but when it comes to people asking me how they get better, I always tell them to just get started. Don’t expect miracles out of the gate. Expect to work on how you sound. It could take ten episodes to two hundred episodes. You don’t know until you start.

The main reason that I am making this post is for my sister-in-law’s mother, but I figure that it’s worth mentioning in a full out post. Since I’m back in the technical support realm of things in the world of broadcasting, I’ve gone back to my tricks of the trade when working in the Windows XP world, and this certainly works for those running Windows 2000 and ME.

No matter what websites you are or are not surfing while on a PC running Windows, spyware[wiki] lurks around every corner. You don’t have to download anything for it to find its way onto your machine, although that is one of numerous ways that it can get onto your machine. It can come from cookies, holes in the programming of your browser, or a variety of other ways that hackers are constantly trying to exploit.

When it starts getting painful to operate your computer and rebooting it just doesn’t fix the problem, try running the following two programs in conjunction with each other. They will scan and, hopefully, remove these malicious pieces of software from your computer. The best part is that they are completely free.

• Spybot Search and Destroy
  If you are doing this for the first time, start with this program. Download and follow the directions. Don’t forget to download the latest virus definitions and immunize your computer against future problems when Spybot asks for it. A full scan with this program can take a while, and you might have to reboot your machine and cycle through with this program a few times before it can successfully eliminate any issues you might have.
• Ad-Aware
  This is what I typically run second after already running a Spybot scan. When you first download Ad-Aware, don’t get confused between having to pay for the pro version of the software compared to the free version. Just cancel out of the window when it asks you to pay for the program. Once again, follow the directions and download the most up to date definitions so it knows what to look for and possibly remove from your computer. When you go to scan your computer, do the full scan, as this will look deep into your computer’s hard drive for anything that shouldn’t be there.

Once again, if this is your first time ever doing this on your computer, repeat this process a second time. I recommend this out of experience because it can save you from having to completely reinstall Windows onto your computer. However, if you still have problems, the issue might be too deep for this to be your solution.

In my time working in the I.T. realm of things, I can say that these problems typically come from those using Internet Explorer. There are points where you can’t get away from the browser, but if you want an extra line of defense from this happening, get Firefox and make that your default browser. It works extremely well, is less vulnerable to things like spyware, thrives in an open source community, has a strong user base, is very versatile, and is the browser that I use on both Mac and PC platforms. The learning curve isn’t that bad, but there are a variety of add-ons you can put into Firefox to enhance your use.

Just to give you a first hand account of how these tools have been effective for me, I ran into an issue with a machine where the user complained that it had become so sluggish that they couldn’t do anything with it, including shutting it down. Running Spybot, it found two issues and removed them. Never running Ad-Aware on the machine before, the full scan found 1,200 various files that were not supposed to be there. Repeated the process without finding anything a second time and turned the computer back over to the user. There haven’t been any issues since, but repeating the scans in the future will help keep the machine healthy. Well, at least until the next problem, such as spilling coffee in the keyboard, occurs.

I’m sure there might be other things out there that work well, so I invite readers to add them into the comments. And hopefully Carol will be able to fix the issues she was having with her PC.

I’ve been a long time reader of PodcastingTricks.com, and the site is very resourceful for those looking for ways to get into podcasting. At the same time, there are folks, such as myself, who like to stay up to date with other things going on in the medium. Trust me, you are never a true professional, no matter how much you’ve seen and done. If you are not constantly learning and trying new things, especially in podcasting, then you are bound to have a rude awakening at some point.

Everyone has tips for doing things, and podcasting has about a million of them. PodcastingTricks.com just posted “Seven Steps to Successful Podcasting” that, for the most part, are very useful to anyone new to all of this. You can check it out for yourself, but the part I want to highlight is step number seven.

7) The only piece of gear advice in this post - get a great microphone. I know some of you were hoping this was an article describing the seven pieces of gear you need to buy in order to be successful at podcasting. If only that it were just a question of gear. Unfortunately, just as buying the same golf clubs used by Tiger Woods won’t help you shoot under par, using the same gear as Howard Stern won’t make you a star. But there is one piece of gear that can make or break a podcast, and that’s the mic. There’s no undo button for the microphone. It’s the most important part in your audio chain. If the sound coming into your computer is bad from the start, you’re swimming upstream the rest of the show. That’s why this is the place to spend the lion’s share of your budget. Buy the best mic you can afford first. Then everything else can follow over time. If you’re miserly here, you’ll regret it later. [podcastingtricks]

To all newbie podcasters, tread lightly on this point. I have heard so many people in podcasting say that if you are going to do this, then go buy the most expensive mic that you can. Based on my experience of buying equipment for radio stations, price does not account for quality products. Let me say that again. Expensive does not mean that you are buying a great microphone.

There is a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo that can make your head spin when you get into the gritty details of how a microphone is engineered. Omni-directional versus uni-directional, and so on. If you are uncomfortable with all of that and don’t know where to start, think about it on a consumer level.

Where ever you buy something from, find out their return policy. Can you buy it, try it out, and then get a refund if you don’t like it? Worst comes to worst, you can always try to sell it on eBay or Craigslist. However, getting your money back might make you feel a little less like you’re going all in on an unsure hand.

There are a lot of things that you can do to aid in your disadvantage of not having great equipment. If you are big on post-production, meaning editing your audio after recording it, learn the software that is available to you. Applying filters and effects can change the quality of your audio dramatically. You might not be able to get it broadcast booth quality, but in podcasting, does that really matter? Just get it to where it sounds good to you.

Mixers can also do a lot for a mic. Adjusting the gain and messing with the EQ’s can make the cheapest microphones sound just as good as, if not better than, the most expensive stuff. Additionally, mixers can also do a lot for your space, reducing background noise and room echoes. Think about that before you start stapling egg crate foam to your walls.

The point is, be careful, do your homework, and see what other people are doing. Chances are, if you email a podcaster about their setup, they’re going to get back to you. At the same time, get started on your own project, with a bare bones setup, and just get used to it. No one is perfect out of the gate.

When it comes to equipment, you want to make sure that this is something you want to stick with over the long term. Think about that before anything else. If you lose focus and stop doing this after your third episode, you’ll have a $600 mic sitting around and a story you’ll share from time to time of, “Yeah, I had a podcast once.”