This technicalities entry is more like a blog post really.

Since the last show I’ve managed to participate in some of the podcasts that I really enjoy listening to:

Quirky Nomads

Sage has started the “Accent Wars” a contest about who has the coolest accent. I entered and made it to the finals (coming soon).

Griddlecakes Radio

Ron used me as the voice of an attorney in his skit, “The I-Word” (plus me and my family do the opening “welcome” bit).

Not much else to report on the “behind the scenes” front. Do email me if you’ve read his page. I really wonder if anyone does!

cheers,

Kevin

Talkie Bits Observations

My Bride has pointed out something I find very interesting. When she heard my interview with Kelli & Jason on Podcast411, she notes how relaxed and dynamic and “myself” I sounded. But even now in my Intro/Outro I’m a little plastic sounding. That’s because when I’m recording there’s no one else there. It’s a one-sided conversation. I really need to be connected to another person and get that feedback. I guess I need to work on “acting” and imagine and pretend he or she is sitting right in front of me. I don’t want to sound fake, but I’d like to come across better.

Toys

I broke down and gave in to some of the peer pressure in podcasting by buying some more stuff. But I’ve held off from getting a mixer still.

I’ve been wanting a better microphone, but still cheap and which will work with my PC. I got a lavalier (clip-on) mic from Maplins. This one is the first battery powered one I’ve owned, but sadly it doesn’t even compare to the £10 desk PC mic I got at Tesco as an “impulese buy”. I guess I’ll ebay the fancy one and break the better one and mount it on a headset or make it a lavalier mic itself.

I also splurged for a portable recorder. After looking into £100+ digital dictaphone devices, I decided to risk less by getting a Creative Nano. It sure is tiny! Last night I tested and confirmed that it does not do what I need. I had to get an adapter first as it’s line-in is too small to fit my mics or cables. A £150 iRiver H320 would definitely work, but again, I like to try to do this stuff “on the cheap”.

Podcast411

This must be International Collaboration Month. I’ve recorded an interview for Rob @ Podcast411 (it was with Kelli & Jason from the Nobodies) and man, that was a blast. It’s planned to go up on his feed next month, two or three thousand listeners, that’s ten times what I’ve ever had for this show! As my kids say, “Wicked!”

Quirky Nomads & Sage

The other collaboration has been Sage kindly agreeing to take up my offer by interviewing her Mom for my show. It was weird having someone else do the editing. I would really love to hear what you think of the finished product. Being a little protective of the vision of this podcast, I was initially dissapointed thinking that the interview came across as negative and maybe even bitter. That’s fine as it’s only my interpretation of the story and what I’m hearing isn’t what’s being said. Even if it is true then what’s wrong if it’s honest? Nothing, but my vision of Celebrating the Uncelebrated has so far meant steering away from negativity as a whole. I hope I’m not censoring people’s stories to make them all sugar-coated, but I do want people to be inspired and encouraged.

Oh well, that’s the price of opening up the show to more editors.

Chill Out, Kevin

Again, what did you think? I’m sure I take this all too seriously. You’d probably chuckle if you knew how I wrestle about whether to include a song, whether to edit out a bit of an interview, whether a comedy bit is “right” for the show.

Geeky Webby Stuff

I’m lovin Dave’s WordPress pluging Spam Karma which is really kickin’ butt keepin’ my email inbox clear of junk. I was gettin’ so many comment spam, that every time I saw a comment, I stopped even expecting it to be from one of you lovely listeners. If you use wordpress, check out Spam Karma.

Guests

There’s plenty to talk about in this show. Joan was my lovely bride’s granny (and my Boys’ great grandmother). She had an excellent bold sense of humour. Cheeky is the word that fits here in England. Weird how family makes you feel “connected”. Lucy and I are missing Granny & Granddad. Geographically, they were our closest relatives. Still, I’ve found it very rewarding and enjoyable talking to my brother on the phone lately.

Geeky Webby Stuff
I had a bit of my talking where my mind went blank and I couldln’t remember a name I was trying to dig out of my memory. I know to just keep talking and pause and say stuff again so I can edit it all out. But this time I was talking slowly as my brain “swapped and paged”. I tried to edit the word “in” to speed it up but Audacity made me sound like a chimpmunk. I tried chopping the ending of the word, leaving the length I wanted then fading out. But the inflection at the end was needed for it to sound right. Finally, I chopped the middle, leaving the inflections in place for the beginning and end… and… ta-da! Success! I’d love to tell you the exact minute and second in the show where you can listen to this amazing feat of audio special effects, but… Alas… I chopped the whole bit and rerecorded it in the end! Ha!

Audio Editing

I think I’ve made another step in gettting the sound levels better. It’s watching the levels in Audacity (keeping at around -6) by reverse amplifying or reducing volume of the particular track.

I’ll be learning some audio editing on a Mac and teaching a couple of groups of teens–probably before my next podcsat episode is published. That’s gonna be really cool. Can’t wait!

Podcast Agregator

Found a cool podcast aggregator which lives on your USB drive (MP3 player, or for me mobile phone). You don’t need to install anything on your PC at all. Just unzip this program onto your traveling storage device and each time you plug it in you can run the program right from there–whether it’s your laptop, your kids PC or the one at work.

Tom

I recorded this interview about the same time as Show #9 with Joanna. Both are colleagues and I recorded the interviews in a FirstPersonShow style. So Tom is my youngest male interviewee, and I think the first who’s not a granddad. What higher praise can I give for him than this: When my family joined some colleagues on a walking weekend in Yorkshire, all my Boys got on with Tom like a house on fire. (Kids are good judges of character, etc.).

Technically

I remember having my recording volume set to high in Audacity for this batch of interviews. Is it called overmodulating? I think so. The more microphones I try, the worst the volume gets. I’m hoping to get some good techie help from Phil next month when I’m in London. I am ready to spend more than £20 for a mic, but I’d like to do my homework beforehand.

RSS Feed

Loads of changes in the feed. It’s now “Browser Friendly” thanks to Feedburner. That means when you click on it, it shows formatted stuff and images and clickable links rather than just loads of xml code.

I also redid the “description” fields (both standard RSS and iTunes specific. That means when you view the Lyrics or Comments under Info you get the full shownotes. I’ve got the full html code in the standard RSS description field from the ShowNotes. That means if podcatchers don’t strip them down, folks’ll be able to follow the links to the artists websites and stuff right there from the RSS info. Everyone should be able to get the full timings now without going back to my website though.

Okay, I think I’m figuring out to not take this show too seriously. I was recording the conclusion and talking about how Ron helped me by pointing out that my audio levels weren’t consistent.. In this same segment, where I ask you guys to let me know if I’ve managed to improve it or not, you can hear this “beeping” in the background.

Okay, I heard it too. Sometimes I just can’t be “bothered” to go record in a soundproofed room. I was on the couch in the livingroom. I know what the sound was and it had nothing to do with my computer. It was coming from another room. Wanna guess what it was?.. I think we’ve just had an accidental contest launched:

The Annoying Sound Contest

I haven’t thought of a prize yet (you gotta have a prize, right?) but I’m thinking of a $10 (or £10) gift voucher from Amazon. Or should I do something a little weird like find an ordinary object here in England which might be kinda rare or unusual or interesting to a Yank? I could send a tabloid newspaper, our copy of the Radio Times (see what strange TV is shown here in England). The idea is that I’m not gonna buy you something really cool and expensive out of my own pocket, so should I just give up and send something ironic or odd?

And sorry the clip from my little interview on our local BBC radio station sounded so quiet and bad. I’m sure that sounded fine when I recorded it… Oh well…

Bob in Colorado, may I wish you a speedy and full recovery from your operation. On a lighter note Bob said he listens to his podcasts on his Creative MP3 player.

I use my No-Name Brand SD/MP3 player while walking, my PC while sitting and my new JVC SD/MP3 Car Stereo

when driving/riding! Click on the main home page and tick your answers on my ‘lil poll about your podcasting listening habits.

Thanks again so much to those who have sent me emails and posted comments here. Getting an email is one of the best things about doing FirstPersonShow.

-Kevin

He’s “The Daddy” of podcastin!

I’ve been doing this show for 7 months and just discovered a really obvious way to make the shows!…

Templates!

The format of my shows have more in common with each other than not. transition “whooshes” and such, signature introduction & outtroduction theme songs. So I make a copy of the last show and then chop out the talking bits and songs, replacing them with the new one. Just line up the bits based on the slightly different timings, make any little changes, and wha-la! (To be fair to myself, I guess this system wasn’t very plausible before I got the disk upgrade).

Joanna

…is my youngest (by far) interviewee. The idea for this show originated around interviewing grandparents and older folks. But I interviewed Joanna for a fun little Christmas project at work, but thought the material was perfect for this show. I found her conversations interesting and intelligent. So I might include a few more interviews from my contemporaries rather than just my “elders”. We’ll see.

Do email me and let me know your thoughts & preferences.

This show was gonna be a little longer, ’cause there was so much good stuff from Fred, but in the end I decided to make it a 2-parter like I did with Jerry’s interview. I enjoyed the coupla’ hours that we talked “offline” just as much as the recorded hour.

Several recent shows have had the headache of me moving a gig’ or two around as my disk has been filling up. Well, I’m geekily excited that I’ve now replaced my hard drive with one Five times the capacity!

I hope my “whistling nose” isn’t too annoying. Let me know if you noticed it! Maybe it’s just me hearing it several times during the editing (I hope!).

Interview Stuff Tony is one of those people with a great voice. He also has some great things to say. I took a day off work for the first time to do this intervew–and Fred’s which you’ll hear more of in Show #8. Pushing Audacity So, I set a personal record with this show. I am learning that it’s supposed to adversely affect your sound quality each time you encode from Audacity to MP3. So I’m trying to line up everything in one series of tracks in the same session. That wouldn’t mean such a big thing, except with all the clips and commentary for the 2nd Song Contest, I have over twenty tracks to line up time and mix together! I first thought my laptop was “swapping” (memory to disk) as the disk light is going crazy and the machine is hanging for minutes at a time. Now I think it was the disk “thrashing” from one location to another to another as it tried to play so many different files that must have spanned a good way accross the disk–all in a small space of time. Hard to explain, but I know what I mean.

Sound Techie

I apologized in this section of a recent Technicalities entry… and it’s time to apologize again. I positioned the microphone too close to Tony’s mouth for his interview. I was pretty sure it was too close after a few minutes, but for some reason I thought it ‘d be rude to stop him. Arggh!

Podcasting has introducted me lots of new stuff. Wordpress, Drupal, iTunes, RSS and much more. I made a rare “hardware” purchase.

After months of listening to podcasts only on laptop and desktop computers, I now have a good MP3 player.

I bought it on eBay for a good price. It took a while for it to arrive from Hong Kong, but it works well.
I can put MP3’s in subfolders and they still get found and played. I use it as a “pen-drive” thingy to transfer movies and photos from my camera to computers. Since it takes my SD card, I ‘m getting twice the use out of them. Since it has a built in USB plug, I don’t need to carry around a cable or docking station. It has loads of information on it’s LCD display like min:sec of current song, number of songs in total.

A feature that’s very useful for me when listening to podcasts is “fast-forward”. My first MP3 player was a real cheap-o and if you accidently bumped the “next song” button after 20 minutes of a podcast, you had no way to get back to where you were except by replaying the same 20 minutes again. Also skipping past songs and bits you listened to previously makes it handy. Of course the next feature would be for it to “bookmark” the exact location in a track so you can turn the MP3 player off and back on and go back immediately to the part of the MP3 where you left off.

It even shows lyrics!

I found all ya hafta do to make your own lyrics scroll by in time to any MP3 is create a file with the same name as the MP3 but give it a .lrc extension. Then put some stuff like this in using your favourite text editor:

_____________________
[ti:99:99]
[ar:] Ar-Test
[al:] Alb-Test
[by:] By-Test
[00:00]yesterday once more
[00:02]2 secs
[00:08]8 secs
[00:10] 10 secs
__________________________

Doesn’t Barbara have a great laugh? Sorry I positioned the microphone too close to her mouth. I’ll get that right next time. But at least the volume isn’t too quiet for either one of us.

FirstPerson Interview Contest

I’m editing the interview segment right now, and am thinking of doing a contest where you can vote for previous “stars” and the interviewee with the most votes will get a second show (I have enough good footage from my conversation with Barbara to do another one with her already).

Web & Stuff

I’m testing the stuff needed to get my feed iTunes compatible. There’s a plug-in for WordPress which automates it nicely. I’ve got album art working, I think.

Thanks to Steve for the logo he made for me:

And I found a cool website which creates a “favicon” which means the little browser icon to the left of your website address is customized for FirstPersonShow, like this:

iTunes

Look out for a new icon on the left under “Subscribe”. I’ve got the RSS feed iTunes compatible and it’s been submitted tonight. When (if?) it shows up I’ll put up the link and then there’ll be yet another way to find & listen to the show.

Sound Techie

As I said at the beginning of this entry, sorry about having the microphone too close to Barbara for her interview. I don’t know the technical term for it, but it ended up sounding like when I had the microphone voume set too high for Jerry in Show #4 and Show #5.

Anyway, I did my first techie sound experiment last night when I saved my draft version of this show (everything except the into/outro and background music during interviews) in two copies: a 128kbs and another at 64kbs bitrate. Then I queued them up and played a small section of each–side by side. If I compared them myself I’m sure the verdict would be that they both sound exactly the same. Sparing no expense, I brought in an expert (well, my Bride has a much better ear than me). She listened and wasn’t sure which one was which. So, this is my first show created at a lower bitrate. That means it’ll download faster for you and take up less space on your computer/MP3 player.

As I said in the last entry of Technicalities, sorry about the sound problems with the talkie-bits.
When I can’t go back and re-do the interview, I’ll choose a good interview with some sound problems anytime over just throwing it away.

One of my microphones was making a lotta background noise everytime I moved my head (in intro & outro). I’ll do some more tests before using that one next time. I actually recorded a much better intro/outro at work on my lunchbreak, but the sound quality using my dictaphone feature on my digital camera just didn’t cut it (too much background noise). Shame, my enthusiasm for Ann Heaton came across much better in that version.

Web Stuff

I broke the RSS feed (the automagic thing which delivers new shows to your computer/MP3 player) simply by putting:

“PubDate” instead of “pubDate” in a file with loads of other stuff where it was hard to spot.

I’ve got a little script to make the new entry for each show in RSS format, but I need to expand it to do iTunes stuff.

Interview

I went to Texas and celebrated a big birthday for my Dad. While there I got lots of interview footage from my uncle. Jerry is a pretty good talker. I expect to have another show soon with more of his stories.

I am relaxing in a lot of ways as time goes by with this whole podcasting thing. I still don’t know if anyone’s listening, but I’ve had enough positive feedback & time take it a bit easier. I’m rembering that this show is more for the interviewees and their families then anyone else! Anyway, although I talked way-too-fast in the intro, it came out much better because I wan’t so nervous about recording myself “talking to myself” in a quiet room. Maybe I need to go outside to record more of these segments–just to help me relax. See I didn’t ever dream of being a disc-jokey. Recording my bits is my least favorite part of the show. Getting feedback is my fave part. (thanks Mary!)

Sound Stuff

I promised to tell you about the mic experiments that my son and I did. It was real fun “father & son” stuff. Reminds me of when I was a kid taking apart broken radios or getting the tiny motors out of little toys then hooking them up to batteries, making little fans, etc. What we were doing is trying out my “y-adapter” which splits the microphone input in two.

Anyway, I brought my laptop thousands of miles, particularly to do the interview, plugged in the two microphones and guess what… No sound! After playing ’round with it I got it working eventually, but an unfortunate side affect is that I accidently left the microphone volume setting too high. (Is it called “gain”?) That’s why the interview bits of Jerry sounds screwy.

The reason why my bits sound messed up is another matter. My home-made clip-on is useless. Next time I’ll use the same kind for me as the interviewee. (I promise!)

Interview

My wife really liked this interview. I was doing a little bit of editing, sitting next to her on the sofa. Being considerate, I asked “is this distracting?, should I get my headphones?”. She said no & that she really was enjoying listening to Rod–she says his interview is her favourite so far.

Of course she hears all my shows many times over before they’re actually published. Unfortunately she hears them repeatedly while I’m editing a particular interview segment (trying to get rid of all my superfluous comments without cutting out the interviewee). Or she hears a new song I’ve just stumbled on and can’t get enough of. By the time the show’s been published and I’ve checked it a few times to make sure it’s as ready as it can be, we’re both a bit fed up with the sound effects and talking bits.

This show is really a work in progress. When I talk about it to people, I’m not quite sure how to express what I’m looking for in the interviews. But that’s because I’m not quite sure yet. I wrote about it a bit here, but to be honest I’m figuring it out as I go. I think the interview with Rod will help to balance the show a bit, even if it just stops folks thinking this site is all about World War II.

Music Stuff

I’m enjoying finding absolutely “stonkin‘” songs for the show. It’s really cool getting in touch with artists too. I’ve got an excuse to contact them, I can say nice stuff to them (how their music is so good). At first I’d just include a show if it was referred to as PodSafe. Now I read the blurb on their website, see if it’s copyrighted, and go ahead and ask the artist for permission to include it in the show. It’d be really great to help a talented artist to get some folks listening and talking about their stuff. I’ve become really big fans of quite a few musicians I’d never even heard of a few days before. Sometimes I find great sites which I know are hosting more than a few talents in the same few minutes. Other times I go a few weeks without anything worth keeping. It’s a lotta fun when you “strike gold”.

Interview

I’m happier with this show, compared to the first one. Better sound with a mic connected to my laptop, plus I wasn’t quite as nervous doing the “talkie-bits”. Still, it’s my least favorite part of the whole process: talking. Which is funny ’cause in real-life it’s one of my favorite things. Must be knowing you’re being recorded, and not knowing who’s listening or whether anyone’s listening. My wife says I sound very flat in my show whereas I’m much more “animated” the rest of the time. I wanna be myself and “real” rather than try to sound like a “radio guy” but I still expect to get more comfortable with it all.

I’ve spent loads of time on the website. My perfectionism sticking out like a sore thumb. I have a “beta” version of the website now so I can experiment without breaking the “real” website. I want the best from two different WordPress themes, but need the patience to rewrite the CustomStyleSheet in one of them to match the colors from the other. It’s tedious enough that I haven’t gotten very far with the idea yet.

Computer Blues

The excitement with producing this show was that I filled up my hard disk drive halfway through production. I was attaching my 1GB SD memory via my trusty DigiCamera, and attaching another little USB pen-drive thingy just hoping I could scrape through without loosing any more editing than I already had.

Obsession

I am also trying to come up with a bit of a “production schedule”. It’s not really as impressive as it might sound. The whole idea is a way to stop me from spending all of my time on the show. I’m gonna ration my FirstPersonShow work such that I can only produce one show every month and a half. That is to try and protect a little of my wife’s sanity and keep me from neglecting her and the Boys. It’s just that when I get a new interview I can’t wait to hurry up and edit it. Then I think, “right, almost done (Ha!) so I’ll just spend a few minutes (Ha!) editing it. Then I think, all that’s done, so I don’t want to wait any longer than needed before publishing it–what a shame to have it almost ready but not available for anyone to hear! I really don’t want to slow down making the shows, but it’s a good idea for me to be balanced and sensible. We’ll see how it goes for July and August.

Reading about “listening skills” you are told that giving the person “feedback” like nodding your head or saying, “uh-huh” or parroting back some of their comments are ways of encouraging someone and letting them know you’re listening/interested. But Maurice is a natural-born story-teller and he gets going easily and doesn’t need any encouragement. I actually edited out a lot of me doing this feedback stuff as it just interrupted his flow. Maybe I talked more than needed because I was a little nervous–what with it being my first interview.

I definitely was self-conscious recording my Intro/Outro bits. I think I should talk a little bit longer next time. Maybe I’ll be a bit more relaxed and confident as time goes by.

The first ever show was recorded on my digital camera (using the the dictaphone feature), which is my excuse for all the background noises. I read something about microphones a while back and I think the type in my camera is “multidirectional” whereas I really need a unidirectional one. Sorry about all the traffic noises, but now I’m using a ‘lil Skype kinda microphone attached to my laptop. When an interviewee shows his or her photos, I take a photo of their photo with my DigiCam–to display on this site.

All the editing was done with Audacity, which was really easy to learn. I spent so much time playing with the “sweepers” transitions like the “whoosh” and Sponge Bob clips. Thanks to Joe for the help and encouragement (and for saying “First-Person” in his British accent).