DD Shift

I am not hearing any song right now. There are too many competing noises in my background- music in the kitchen, television in the living room, wind outside…

This is the third installment of the 3-part podcasting series that reviews different podcatchers for use in a school setting.

Podcatcher Review Part 3

Title: Podcatcher Review Part 2 by DD Shift
Opening and closing music: by Vasculoid

Here are some interesting links to follow from this podcast:

• Juice
• Podcatcher
• NPR’s Podcast Directory (OPML)

Today’s podcast was created again using Audacity and the Levelator. I used roughly the same process as in the second installment of this podcast series. I only played around with my microphone settings.

For this post, I did quickly install PodProducer and CastBlaster to see how they would do in helping me to produce a podcast. The interfaces for recording and mixing were more complicated than Audacity’s and were not self-explanatory. I didn’t have time to read, hear or see documentation for these softwares, so I have left them for another day.

I am hearing the song “Coin Operated Boy” by the Dresden Dolls.

Today’s podcast installation is part 2 of a 3 part series reviewing podcatchers. Today’s focus is iTunes.

Podcatcher Review Part 2

Title: Podcatcher Review Part 2 by DD Shift
Opening and closing music: by Vasculoid

To make my podcast today, I:

• created an outline,
• recorded and edited voice with Audacity,
• mixed the voice and the music with Audacity,
• exported the file as a wav and used the Levelator to even out the volume, and
• then I opened the updated wav in Audacity and exported as a 128 bit .mp3 file.

I would say that the quality is better than yesterday’s. I left out the Audacity noise-reduction step. But, I’m still not happy with the overall sound quality. It sounds like I am talking in a box. For the 3rd installment perhaps I will try a different piece of software to record… Or, I’ll change the microphone…

I am hearing the song “Synaptic Travel” by Vasculoid. I actually use part of this song as the opening and closing sounds of my first podcasts. I found this at a very cool site called opsound.org.

Today I really had my first podcasting experience. This podcast is the first of a 3 part series reviewing different, popular podcatchers.

DD Shift Podcatcher Review – 1

My ultimate focus is to choose a podcatcher that we can use in the school. I have limited time to review these, so my analysis is a bit rushed. If you know of a technology coordinator who has already done this type of analysis, let me know! I’m interested in gaining other perspectives.

This was my procedure to create my podcast:

• draft content outline
• find opening and closing music
• record podcast using Audacity and a standard headset/microphone
• use Audacity’s noise reduction to help reduce background noise
• combine music and audio
• export with Audacity as a .wav
• use Levelator to even out the sound
• export with Audacity as .mp3

I have to admit that the quality of the sound in my podcast is not great. The actually recording sounds fine, but when it is export to 128 bit .mp3, the sound becomes echoed, tinny and distorted. In future podcasts, I will play around with the different steps above and some different software to see if I can get better compressed results.