fling93 loves fishies

Adventures in Podcasting

As I mentioned earlier, I’m taking part in “an open source audio-literary attempt to harness the power of the many to record and disseminate, in podcast form, books from the public domain.” Namely, LibriVox. Essentially, a bunch of us volunteered to record ourselves reading chapters from books available freely from Project Gutenberg, and Hugh is assembling them into a podcast.

The book we’re doing right now is Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. I was originally assigned chapter four, but the guy doing chapter three needed some more time to sort through issues with his recording setup, so I got bumped up in the batting order (despite the fact that I have a lousy on-base percentage).

Anyway, that’s how I spent the last weekend. So without further ado, here’s my reading of Chapter 3. It clocks in at 33:48. For those who missed out on the earlier chapters, you can get chapter one here, and chapter two here (these are read by other people). You can also subscribe to the LibriVox RSS feed or their podcast feed.

And if you don’t care about the minute and uninteresting details of the story behind the making of this recording, you can stop reading right now. Those of you who are too bored to bother to look for something else more interesting, continue on (there’s a cute kitty cat picture!).

Ooh, I guess reverse psychology does work. Either that or you’re a cat lover. Anyway, as I mentioned in my post on The Teaching Company, speech can and should be encoded at a much lower bitrate than the standard 128 kbps used for music, and I’ve had good results using the Fraunhofer IIS Codec at 32 kbps, 22,050 Hz, mono (the encoder comes free within Audiograbber, a freeware application that I use to rip CDs). The resulting file is only 8 MB, compared to the 33 MB file at 128 kbps stereo. However, if you find the distortion and digital artifacts too annoying, you can get the higher resolution version here.

And indeed, it’s in that version that you can tell that I actually used a microphone, that same Shure SM57 dynamic mic that I used in My Stunning Rendition of Ordinary Day, and still plugged into the trusty Tascam US-122. And now I also have a pop screen. So I feel like a real pro. Of course, all of this equipment has been otherwise been sitting around idle because I haven’t been recording much music lately (well hey, I’ve got a new hobby — no, not stalking Natalie Portman, which is not a new hobby, but an old… er… I mean, I’d never do that), which was one reason I volunteered for this.

I recorded into GarageBand, doing relatively short takes alternating between two tracks. I think I did a pretty good job making it sound relatively seamless. However, I regretted choosing GarageBand when I discovered that Apple, for some reason, decided to hobble it for podcasters in version 2 by limiting songs to 999 measures, which is about 33 minutes. I know, podcasts ought to be shorter, but in some cases, like this one, a longer length is appropriate. And I’d have to agree with John Oram in that it definitely seems like a marketing decision, not a technical limitation. For shame, Apple.

I ended up recording it in two pieces and using Audacity to stitch them together (it’s a free open-source audio editing software application). I probably should’ve used Audacity to record it in the first place, but I’d never used it that way before. But next time I will.

And if those adventures were too boring for you, well, this huge ferocious mountain lion kept attacking me, and I had to scare it away with my trusty San Francisco Giants jacket. Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. Our adorable little kitty cat, Miette, just kept jumping on the digital piano keyboard where I have my recording setup. And she only started doing it after I was already done recording.

Indeed, the other time she did that was the same night I recorded that free jazz improvisation, and I actually thought to record a “duet” with her, just to see how it’d come out. But that’s a post for another time (and I bet most of you are very glad I’m not a podcaster).