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It’s down to the closing bell on substitute selection! Who will be the one to snag the coveted cohost’s chair? The answer might just shock… you!
This podcast contains a samples from the Free Sound Project by geoffbarkman, Benboncan, thetruwu, and Syna-Max.
Good to have ya back, Bongo.
I was wondering what you guys use to record and edit your audio. my friends and i are working on a little project and we were wondering how you get that professional sound. also i was wondering what the general process for the show is, or do you not want to ruin the magic?
Elijah, “professional sound” is pure flattery on your part, and I approve. We use a pair of Logitech headset microphones (I think each was in the $15-20 range) and record directly into Audacity, a free audio editing software program, while we’re on the phone to each other. Stephen compresses his side of the audio as an OGG file and emails it to me, at which point I import it as a new track and sync it with my side.
I go through the show, chopping garbled lines and boosting the volume where necessary–I rarely have to use noise reduction or anything–and adding music, bleeps and sound effects on their own tracks. Then I export the file as a high-quality mp3 and re-encode it using CDex, another free program that allows a great deal of control over the compression. I upload it to the blog via WordPress and add it to the feed with Podpress, and that week’s show is piping hot and ready to eat!
As for the rest of the process, it’s not complicated–we write the show over email and IM in fits and starts until we’re well past deadline, edit it in a state of panic, and then Stephen calls and we’re back to the top. You’ll note that we tried to improvise the first episode instead of pre-scripting it, which is why the first episode is terrible.
Hey, so this show is copyrighted under creative commons?? Am I close to correct on this? I’m a little puzzled by the whole copyrighting thing.
Boone, the show is copyrighted under standard US copyright law, like any other creative work once it’s fixed in a medium. It is also released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license. What that means is that we’ve effectively signed an open-ended contract with anyone who wants to share, republish, or even edit and reincorporate the show. They’re free to do any of that on two conditions:
A) they give us a clear credit and, if possible, include a link back to the site (that’s the “Attribution”), and
B) they release the results under the same Creative Commons license (the “Sharealike”).
There’s plenty of information about how Creative Commons works out there, written by people with more expertise than me.
All right, well cool. Thank you sir, I appreciate it!
thanks for taking the time to explain it all, can’t wait for the new episode