NV07: Getting good levels in your podcast

Hanging out in Room #1 for this session, Getting Good Levels in Your Podcast with Bruce Sharpe. He has connections to one of the first podcasts out there, IT Conversations, and he wrote Levelator. I’m curious to hear about the theories behind this concept. Mainly, it’s a topic in support of Levelator, which I am a big fan and user of already.

Quick side note, just got out of my second session of the day: New Rules for New Communities. Lots of good discussion, but so much in so little time to really digest here right now. Number one thing taken away: don’t put the geeks in charge of the community, put those with people skills.

20070223(016) Back to podcasting, four keys:
1 – Record it well: If you put crap in, you’ll get crap out. My biggest thing with this is to work with what your budget can handle, then learn as much as you can about what you have. Cheap can still create great quality.

2 – Clean Up the Audio: Spend some time after recording to edit your content. Filters, noise reduction and lots of other digital editing lingo. I say, watch out for a learning curve here. If you don’t know much about editing audio, then be prepared to spend time with what you can do. As you progress, you’ll learn new things. It might be painful, but give yourself time.

Tip from the crowd: Sound cards are important, especially on PC’s. Investigate and invest in quality equipment to get quality stuff. Dell’s seem to be the worst, ThinkPad’s are mid-range.

3 – Edit out the not good stuff: “I’ll be right back”, “Ummm…”, essentially the nonsense stuff. I’ll be quick to say that this depends on the scope of your podcast. If you want to keep it personal, then do what you want. Professional realm of things? Consider this for sure. At the same time, this takes time to do. If you’ve got a few hours to chop up 40 minutes of audio, go for it. If time is of the essence, then you’ll have to make do.

4 – Get the levels right: It’s important to have a standard. Clipping sucks, and you don’t want to have things be too quiet. This is a very close examination of audio on the level of 1’s and 0’s. A good system of normalization is what you want to shoot for. This, once again, takes practice and time to master. It’s a combination of every step that Bruce has laid out.

Question about Mac, mid-range audio/podcast software, and I just gave a shout out to Ubercaster. It is in beta, but it has progressively gotten better over the last few months. Still, not in major release yet. GarageBand is a very good application as well.

The money shot: Levelator.

I’ll speak first hand that this has been a lifesaving piece of software. Remember step four? I can let Levelator do all of that digital manipulation for me to boost the audio levels to an optimum range for podcast to podcast. The Crazy Canucks has been saved by it numerous times.

No batch processing with this software just yet, so you’ll have to do this one at a time in the meantime. Tod Maffin asks if that will be added in the paid version with a laugh, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Oh yeah, Levelator is free. Also, this only does WAV or AIFF files, no MP3 support.

I’m taking it that a lot of people here have not heard of this software that are in this room. Also seems to be a lot of newbies to the whole podcasting realm in the room. It’s pieces of software like this that will piss off old school audio folks who have spent the hours and hours of doing steps one through four to apply this to audio for radio broadcast. Such is the way that the world changes.

Time for lunch.

NV07: Wicked fast bandwidth in the mid-morning

One session in NV, and things are pretty good. The initial gathering of the MooseCamp session was much like BarCampVancouver. The fear is there just as much; there is no way I can get to everything that I want to see, hear, or do.

First session: Social Media Diaspora. Roland led this one, and it brought up a really great discussion about how we assume new and difference identities in the various circles that we become involved in. Essentially, I can break it down the easiest on a personal level. Even though I live and love Vancouver, there is only so much I can really say or do to consider myself a true Vancouverite. I can become involved with the community, but there is no way that I could ever speak for it, no matter how much I embrace it. Empathy rather than sympathy, and how that is viewed across the board.

Uploading pictures from my cellphone, the wireless here is wickedly fast. Spent time talking to David Drucker about Boston today. Even though I’ve never lived there, I like using the word “wicked” with everything.

Posting fast today, so I’ll try to add in some needed links later.

Wanna see the sessions for today’s MooseCamp? Go here.

Ramping up to Northern Voice

Been a little crazy in the past 24 hours. We had our apartment inspected today, checking to make sure we’re not completely wrecking the place and everything isn’t falling apart in our home. I can say without fail, we passed without problem, thank you very much. Still, kinda forgot it was this afternoon. After cleaning up for their arrival this afternoon, I’ve been in a mad dash to figure out all the details for Northern Voice 2007.

Rebecca and I will hit the free food and free beer tonight at the Big Northern Voice Dinner kickoff event type thing. Should be a good time, but when you have all these things on your schedule for a couple weeks, you don’t think about times and locations. Well, not until this afternoon at least, not to mention the last hour or so.

My homemade map to Northern Voice at UBCI’m on my own tomorrow for MooseCamp, so tracking down my route by bus is one thing. Then there is that part where you have to walk from the bus, to the actual location of the event. Being that I’ve only been out to UBC two, maybe three times, I’ve got everything narrowed down. At least I think so. If you don’t believe me, check out the map I made for myself.

Rebecca will head out on Saturday for Northern Voice, but then we’ll have to adjust for the weekend schedule of public transit. And talking to Dave last night during The Crazy Canucks recording, I got the green light to heckle him.

Just looking forward to seeing some familiar people, meet some new ones, and feed my brain, not to mention sharing some thoughts about new media fun stuff. And as a quick side note, we have RSVP‘d for the podcast meetup on Sunday. Yes, let the geekend begin.

Locked and loaded for NorthernVoice 2007

After some careful planning and budgeting, Rebecca and I have both signed ourselves up for NorthernVoice 2007. It should be a whirlwind of a weekend since the following Sunday is our one year anniversary. If that seems to be a geeky way to spend the first part of the weekend after being married for a year, then you’re probably right, and we like it that way.


Northern Voice is a two-day, non-profit personal blogging conference that’s being held at the UBC main campus on February 23-24, 2007.

This is the 3rd annual incarnation of this event, see the 2006 and 2005 websites for previous information.

Blogging, podcasting, social media, new media, web 2.0, and so on. Yes, there will be lots of ideas about all those things being tossed around, not to mention plenty of laptops on laps action.

We had a snafu in our planning, not realizing that Friday held quite the goings-on with the whole Moose Camp deal. In our heads, we thought that was taking place in the evening on Friday, so we opted to have Rebecca take the following Monday off in anticipation of our celebratory weekend. Looks like I’ll be checking things out for that Friday on my own, but she’ll make her way down for any activities later on that night. We’ll both be sneaking around on Saturday.

Looking forward to meeting more new people in the sphere of all things new media, plus catch a few neat sessions(view the schedule). Even Dave is leading a session on podcasting, so I’ve got to go heckle him check that out.

I’ll probably check in here during the event, and the recording gear always travels with me. It’s just a matter of not getting too into soaking up information to remember to grab some audio cuts. Have to see how things go. For me this is really good timing because the wonderful (I’m throwing that in there in case anyone at CIC is watching) Canadian government recently approved my PR application. I’ll be able to work in a matter of weeks now. 🙂

Why do you blog?

This is something I’ve been considering posting about for a long time, but just after filling out this survey, I’ll hold off on posting about it for a little while. However, if you’re a blogger, Darren Barefoot has setup this site to gather some information about folks like us.

Why do you blog? Why do I blog? Why does anybody? As the medium enters its pubescence, it’s a question that I wonder about all the time. I’ve talked about it with a lot of different bloggers, and everyone offers a different reason.

In February, I’m giving a talk called “Why We Blog” at Northern Voice here in Vancouver. In preparation, I’m launching this ad hoc survey to gather more opinions and voices from the blogosphere.

The survey is 16 questions, and hopefully won’t take you more than 10 minutes. I really appreciate the time you might take to complete it. As a token of that appreciation, I’m giving away a few prizes [whydoyoublog]

I know that I think about this topic a lot on a personal level. I can’t be the only one that drifts off to sleep at night while thinking, “why do I do this?” Still, whenever some one asks me this question, I have a hard time giving a solid answer. Once you start, it’s just hard to stop. And I’m just talking about blogging. Podcasting is a whole other topic, but not too far off the mark.

Rebecca and I are trying to get things in order to attend Northern Voice. Hopefully it will fit in the budget. There are some interesting sessions about podcasting that I wouldn’t mind dropping in on, and Travis is hosting a session on citizen journalism that would be cool to check out. We’ll just have to see if it’s in the cards.