In an effort to make 535 York Podcast accessible to the most people, we have been experimenting with Skype as a platform for the show.
The folks at Leoville Town Square Podcast have always used Skype. Skype for Mac OSX seems to be a little more flexible, no doubt due to the nature of the macintosh sound system. On Windows, patching into Skype's audio for recording purposes is a challenging proposition!
Many podcasters (as with TWiT) have used a mixer board along with digital recorders to get their audio tracks. Our goal so far has been to use the same hardware we would have had all along. To that end, Powergramo has been the most stable. Until something better comes along, that's what we'll use...
For those of you having trouble with Powergramo, I'd like to share one fact that we have discovered.
When quality or outright recording failure occurs, close both Powergramo and Skype, then restart the two programs. In our experience, buggy or skippy audio is always produced after a second recording has been started. Make sure you actually terminate the running applications. Their default setting is to run in the background. Even the act of exporting a recording to ogg vorbis or wav format can result in a locked up Powergramo. Skype always continues to work, but the recording process will be dead or disrupted. What a frustrating development!!
In any event, until the Skype team decides to directly support podcasting; or a better alternative is written, we will use Team Speak as our primary software of choice.
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Thanks CuberDs, for the invitation to Vox. This new blogging service looks interesting. Now that I have the account setup, I plan to look around and try various features. A review over at Long Live TechTv will be forthcoming. Along the way, I might figure out why Leo Laporte has adopted Vox as his personal blog. From what I have read about Leo, I think he would appreciate ease of use combined with the most features. His time is limited and it seems to me that he would be interested in making a good impression on the web with as little setup time as possible.
Afterwards, I am thinking that this blog might be a good place to post about various podcasting experiences. Although I have a lot of other personal interests, podcasting is the only subject that I feel compelled to share with the general public. The art of recording and editing a "radio show" is always a good subject to write about.
The fact that we started ours with very little preparation and zero investment might be of interest to some readers. Books are now being sold on the subject and many people feel the need to invest large sums of money into the creation of a podcast. We have managed to skirt under the radar with 535 York using the equipment and expertise we possessed all along. The rest was learned along the way through trial and error. We are still learning with every episode!
If I'm not careful, this post will end up being a brief summary of everything. I'll stop typing now to avoid rambling on....
on Post Number One