In keeping with my habit of staying at least a year behind rising internet trends, I’m considering starting a podcast. I have a hard drive full of obscure shit dating back to my grade nine days of audio piracy using IRC on a Performa with a 28.8k modem. It’s high time I started bringing it to tha masses.
I’m thinking of a quick 15-25 minute program where I’d play three songs that are at least abstractly related and talk briefly about them. As any stranger who’s ever had the pleasure of sitting next to me for nore than seven minutes in the presence alcohol will attest, I can go on for quite a long time about probably-meaningless links between seemingly mundane things.
Then I pause for a few seconds and say with low, breathy awe, “everything is the blanket.”
So what I’m soliciting now from anyone out there who’s done this before is advice on how to get started. Is there recommended software, hosting service, hardware, technique? Would anyone listen?
I’m planning to post my first attempt the week after Christmas. Help me out and you may have your minds blown by just how extensive my Thrush Hermit rarity collection really is.
Comments 9
I’ll listen for sure. It’ll be nice having more friends that are pod people.
Posted 21 Dec 2006 at 7:57 pm ¶I just found out that one of the people I work with is friends with Plaskett and was hanging out and having a good time with him when he was in town a few weeks ago.
Posted 21 Dec 2006 at 8:05 pm ¶I would try and listen. Once I made it halfway through a penny arcade podcast. Maybe you could throw in some unrelated, utterly banal stories. I like those.
Posted 21 Dec 2006 at 10:27 pm ¶For programs, Garageband is the easiest, but since you know your way around computers and I’m not sure if you have a Mac or not, I’d recommend SoundStudio - http://www.freeverse.com/soundstudio/
You can only use it so many times for free, but if you plan on doing this for a while, it’s worth the investment. And at $80, it’s much cheaper than most recording programs.
Posted 22 Dec 2006 at 10:17 am ¶Corwin: Damn right you’ll listen.
Amy: your coworker needs to be my friend.
Sra: I’m chock full of banal stories. And if I don’t have one that appeals to you, I’ll make one up.
Carly: If I end up falling ass-backwards into a pile of money some day soon I may end up with a Mac, but current projections have me building a new computer out of three old ones while house-sitting for my parents over New Years, so we’re looking at Windows or cross-platform stuff for now. I’ve been playing around with Audacity, which has the valuable attributes of being free (as in beer) and free (as in speech) and will work on just about any machine running Windows, Linux or OS X.
However, I’ll definitely check out SoundStudio, because if Audacity is anything like its cousin The GIMP, it gets the job done, but not elegantly.
Posted 22 Dec 2006 at 10:29 am ¶I downloaded an illegal copy of WaveLab, which is what we use for our podcast, and the program CFMU uses in the production room.
cheap hosting can be found at http://www.1and1.com
Posted 22 Dec 2006 at 12:36 pm ¶Megan makes a good point, the cornerstone of your podcast really needs to be piracy.
Giant robots not being key and all that.
Posted 23 Dec 2006 at 2:00 am ¶Huh. I had planned for the cornerstone of my podcast to be shoutouts to Corwin, but I guess piracy is a good theme too.
I investigated WaveLab and found it intimidating, particularly in the system requirements field. Despite the fact that I Know Stuff About Computers, I don’t really have a lot of hardware at my disposal. So I’ll stick with the lightweight solutions available to Pentium-3 users.
1and1.com looks like a pretty good hosting company though. They may one day soon find their servers clogged with audio recordings of my majestic voice and text files packed with my witty, clean Python code.
Posted 23 Dec 2006 at 2:11 pm ¶randomly found this blog on google searching for thrush hermit. i’m in the markey for some thrush hermit rarities in fact. i’d love to get my hands on some.
Posted 07 Mar 2007 at 10:05 pm ¶Post a Comment