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10月7日 Skype + podcasting = Skypodcasting?You would think this subject has been ground into the ground, wouldn't you? Well, pardon the alliteration, but I've yet to find a single how-to that explains how to do it right.
Lets start at the start (I'm all alliterations today - must be a weekend thing). What is this and why does it matter?
Lets bust through the jargon. A "podcast" is an MP3 file played back on an MP3 player. Since the Apple iPod made the MP3 player step out of geekville and into the hip pockets of the hip set; the world started calling these things "podcasts".
Alright, that was an over-generalization. Not all MP3 files played back on MP3 players are podcasts. Some are just "regular music". The kind that make for "podcasts" are the ones that have less poetry and more prose, so to speak.
Translated into English and out of quippy Sujspeak - the MP3 files that consist mainly of conversation make for "podcasts". Those that contain professional / amateur attempts at sounding melodious are called music.
Before all you podcast gurus start sneering at the slimmed-down summary and let your fingers run wild over your keyboard to conjure up some snarky comments, here's the caveat. That little description above is not the "definition". It attempts to be summarize the common perception of the podcast.
So, yes - a "podcast" can contain music - professionally composed, too. Yes, a podcast can, in fact, be composed by professional talk radio hosts in a studio environment. And yes, a podcast can be that, and then some. However, at the end of the day - its still an MP3 file posted up on the Internet and made available for download - either by itself or in an RSS gravy so that it tastes good to your iPod.
If the "RSS gravy" part didn't make sense; leave it be. It isn't important. It was thrown in mostly to assure those same podcast gurus reading this that this "tutorial" isn't written by somebody who doesn't know a thing about podcasts. Two negatives do make an affirmative.
Alright, back to the chopping board. Think of a podcast as a downloadable radio show that you make, all by yourself. Your computer probably has a microphone embedded along the keypad or in the monitor, or perhaps its that unused little stick with the bulbous tip jutting out of your headset that always gets in the way. If none of those seem familiar, here's a good pick - America's favorite retailer has a really good uni-directional boom microphone going for under $10.
As is with most 'hot topics in technology", you could probably find yourself pausing to think about "what you've heard" about this subject and how what you're reading right here doesn't quite exactly gel with the rest. That's 'cause good technology makes good minds draw slightly different interpretations of its optimal use.
Most people would recommend going with microphone and headsets with USB tail ends. I must confess I have one of those, but would recommend the WalMart microphone that doesn't have a USB tail end because an RCA connector is very important if you want to use hardware mixers. They haven't yet made hardware mixers with USB inputs - and till that happens, the only place your USB is good for is a computer - and you'll soon find out that software doesn't quite do everything you'd like it to do in the world of podcasting.
(Unless, of course, if you have a ridiculously obscene amount of money to spend on your new hobby. If so, this isn't the right tutorial to be reading. Call up someone at your nearest Bose or Bang & Olufsen office and let them know you've got a few thousand to spare to get a podcasting setup. I'm sure they'll have a well-dressed sales rep and the mandatory twitchy geek show up at your doorstep in no time to take that money off your hands!)
So - if you've got a working microphone, a working sound card that accepts microphone inputs, a working computer and all the critical peripherals that let you use it, electricity, some time and a fairly controllable environment when it comes to noise levels - you're all set to podcast.
Oh - alright...you'll also need a sound recording application and lets you record a sound file long enough to accomodate your podcast. That means the Windows Sound Recorder and its "powerhouse" ability to do little 30-second clips isn't going to work. You're going to need something a tad more flexible than that. And this is a great pick. It comes very highly recommended, both from me and from pretty much anyone else who likes podcasting, computers and open source software.
Where does this Skype bit come in, you ask? Good question. The way I figure it - you've gotta be really, really, really, really supafly if you think you're going to be able to hold everyone's attention with just your voice. And that's a lot of performance anxiety to be carried alone.
When in trouble, always work in the collective singular. Flip the "m" in "me" to get "we". That's where Skype comes in. It lets you make free voice calls over the Internet and offers a ridculously high level of service and call quality. Seriously, its so good - it'll put your brand new 5.8 GHz phone to shame. Or even that corded wonder you kept around because you saw it in the Matrix. Skype officially rocks. And the eBay buyout doesn't really hurt its service levels. Its peer-to-peer computing showing itself in the right light, and that's a lot of bandwidth might.
More alliterations, and now they're rhyming. Must be a bug I caught. Wot?
Put Skype and podcasting together, and you've got the new-age equivalent of a radio show host broadcasting a caller on the air. You're the radio show host, and the person over Skype is the veritable equivalent of the caller. Banter makes for a good listener experience, as I'm sure you've experienced in the hundreds of hours you've spent in the commute. Sometimes it makes you change the channel. Fortunately, in a podcast, the "forward" button is readily available in your iPod / MP3 player version (hardware or software) and you could easily go past the "boring" parts.
Convinced? I hope so. Its a really good idea to be able to record a Skype conversation into a podcast so that you can generate some witty and hopefully relevant banter as the basis of your entertaining podcast. Unfortunately, its a lot easier said than done.
Tutorials on how to do this are popping out of the proverbial woodwork on the Internet, but they often refer to non-standard operating systems (yes, that's what I call the Mac) and they also refer to interesting software that "hijacks" your audio stream from one application and takes it to another and does all sorts of interesting things with it.
I don't know about you, but that doesn't sound very appealing to me. Those are the kinds of things that tend to make your sound card keel over, or at least go comatose, at times when you least need it to be - and that's never a good experience.
Enter the hardware mixer. Your local Tandy store carries one for under $50. Tandy?!!! Didn't that, like, go away before Green Day sang on Seinfeld?
Like, yeah. I just like throwing in some baby-boomer references to warm up to the paying crowd.
Anyway, this hardware mixer looks really, really promising. Its got enough inputs to allow you to:
So, your Skype goes out via your sound card into the mixer as input #1; your microphone goes in as input #2 - and your Audacity picks up the mixed output on your computer. The level controls let you fade out anything that you don't want, and Audacity would let you 'get creative' later anyway.
And unlike dedicated "Skype recording" software that's beginning to pop up on the Internet, you could actually unhook everything and use this as a standalone mixer at your next party. Line in two CD players into the mixer and line out the output into the speakers - and you could be mixing Britney with Natasha Bedingfield on the fly...and be very, um, supafly.
I'll be posting pictures et al at http://skypodcasting.sujeet.net shortly. 7月17日 Under the hood: Episode 4Many moons ago, there lived a device called the "modem". Conceived, coincidentally, in the same year as the birth of yours truly, the modem evolved from a baud-speaking slowpoke to a kilobit-burning hipster within a few years. The progress wasn't surprising, since the modem shone a brilliant light on several routes into collaoborative academic and social electronic networking that were unexplored till then. At first, there was the BBS, then came the geekspeak Internet, then came games that allowed some level of multi-player activity using modems, and then came the mammoth that all of us grew to know, love and cherish as a critical element of society...the public Internet.
How was it different than the aforementioned "geekspeak Internet"? Well, in summary, people started putting some charts next to the numbers, some graphics alongside their reports, and some sounds on their webpages. Having the computer sing to you when you reached a website sorta caught a lot of interest - and the rest is history.
The beauty of the modem was in its (fair amount of functional..) simplicity. It used the telephone system, squawks, cross-connections et al notwithstanding, as its medium of moving data packets around from one computer to another. Essentially, it sang data over the wires.
Over time, operating systems evolved and the Internet continued its accelerated roll over life, as we knew it. The kilobit-speaking analog modems soon started getting replaced by cable modems and DSL routers that used a hybrid variant of the same fundamental technology - but with data rates that made people really sit up and take notice. As of now, the average DSL / cable subscriber isn't surprised when he / she is able to download a file off the Internet at 300 Kilobytes per second - and that's no little feat for telephone wiring that's been sitting in the ground for decades, surviving earthquakes, floods and then some.
In the days of the analog modem, there was this utility called "MTUSpeed" that essentially crunched the numbers between the bandwidth on offer and the capabilities of the operating system, and then moved some digits around to optimize throughput accordingly. Perhaps part psychological, but it worked. Yes, I used it.
And now, in the age of our bandwidth-burning speed monsters that speak DSL, cable and wireless with equal ease - there's a similar freebie that lets broadband users do ditto to optimize their download rates. Its called "TCP Optimizer".
It works just as well, only better - since its broadband. I spotted a difference in a bandwidth test before and after the customary restart, so I'll vouch for it. Oh, and its one of those, well-made, non-nagware, no-installation-routine things that didn't make my spyware scanner or my paranoid firewall hiccup; even after a couple of runs...
Enjoy. 7月3日 Under the hood: Episode 3: How fast is "fast"?This one is probably a tad more suited for the keyboard cruisers than those of us with an eye out for police cruisers as we, ahem, let our foot weigh down just a little on the gas pedal.
If one pulls on one's Skeptics face mask and looks at the change in the average ISP's marketing ploy under the light of one's lightsaber, things get quite interesting. At first, they were talking about how broadband would change our lives by letting us "get more done". Then they tried to get us hooked onto the ability to download media and drum our fingers on our computer tables as we apparently focussed on getting real work done.
Then there were some who ran ads that seemed to tout the concept of email as something new, and offered broadband as a means to being able to email image attachments to friends and family - and tried to play the "keep in touch with the ones you love" bit.
And then there were the comparisons between 'regular DSL' and their form of DSL / cable that did the magic numbers' bit. "4 times faster", "20 times faster", blah, blah, blah...
Now lets really sink our teeth into this. One hears and one listens at a certain set pace. The fact that your network pipe lets you get your streaming audio at 4 megabits per second as compared to your neighbor's 2 megabits per second isn't really going to let you listen to it faster than him / her. Ditto for video. And when it comes to video, the sky's literally the limit. There were those of us who thought the jump from VHS to DVD was pretty cool - and tried to compute the banwidth requirement for stuffing a DVD-quality movie down the pipe to come up with some numbers that most ISPs would still have trouble signing SLAs for. But, it didn't stop there. The video industry has gone up to High Defintion in a big way, and the amount of bandwidth that would be needed to stream true HD-DVD / SuperBit DVD content down a network pipe is still in the realms of ISP dreamworld, and perhaps local Gigabit network servers.
Translated, do you really need all that bandwidth? Yes, there's BitTorrent and Skype and XBox Live and your PS2's network adapter - all of whom could pretty much expand their "bandwidth needs" to whatever you've got. Translated yet again - have you done the "real value math" on the "want" versus the "need" when you paid for your broadband?
Don't get me wrong - this isn't a new version of someone saying "640 KB should be good for anyone". I'm certainly in favor of laying optic fiber straight from your computer to the Palo Alto Internet Exchange. All that I have trouble is with; is the price that one has to pay for this "convenience". ISPs are in the business of providing you a service that lets you access the Internet. Their pricing model is probably based three parts on what makes business sense for them, and one part on whatever's cool in the land of the not-so-bandwidth-savvy consumer. I believe that should be flipped around.
And if you read the fine print on ISP SLAs (service level agreements - the bare minimum that they actually agree to provide you with, by law) with the same lip-smacking taste as I do, you'll see that they're not really "bound" to do a lot of what you're paying for. Case in point - try asking the tech rep on the phone at the ISP company if he / she can "guarantee" that you will be able to download at 4 megabits per second once your ugrade order goes through and watch them try squirming through a lot of computer-related caveats and network-related loopholes. In effect, its a good faith verbal promise that you will get a 4 megabits per second download rate. Verbal promises don't hold up in court, and they could always claim that their system registered a 4 megabits per second bandwidth available to you...at 3:30 AM on a weekday morning.
Waittaminnit, wasn't this an "Under the hood" episode? Ah, yes - good observation, young Sherlock. Here's the piece de resistance..
Free, effective, honest, not ad-supported and always available - as all good things on the Internet should be (when managed by people with deep pockets)
Its one of the best bandwidth tests I've seen, for a lot of technical reasons that would be quite a grind to read through if I were to wax eloquent here. I would recommend using it at different times of the day, over a period of a few weeks, to get an adequate representation of what you're actually getting versus what you're paying for.
And then call the ISP to upgrade / downgrade as required. Don't pay for 3 Mbps if you're getting 1.5 Mbps even after you're paying for 3 Mbps. And don't wait through the tech rep spiel about how you're 'too far from the connection box'. You're not getting what you're paying for - and you shouldn't. Downgrade if necessary and save those dollars for another gallon of gas... 6月21日 Under the hood: Episode 2Not that I'm anywhere near close to starting this post with "If its Tuesday, its time for another episode of 'Under the Hood'", but allow me to humor myself just this once..
Lets skip the OJ and head straight into the brunch entrée. The "FreeMeter" is, as its name suggests, a freebie that allows you to meter / measure something. Since its an app that I'm talking about in an "Under the hood" post, I'm sure you can do the math about what it does.
I've used the FreeMeter for a while now, and the free version works just great for one thing alone - breaking down disk space usage by volumes and folders. I figure the rest of the stuff it tells me in that nice little translucent window (a feature that could be either something its developers put in, or something that my graphics card allows me) is stuff that the Windows Task Manager could already tell me.
So, is it worth downloading a utility just to find out how your disk space has been used up? I think so, especially since this one's free and uses a very small amount of memory. Also, Windows and a lot of programs that one installs (in)voluntarily tend to deposit a lot of gunk in areas of the filesystem that one wouldn't normally think of looking at, while pruning disk usage.
Next time, I'll be talking about a cool little freebie that NASA has put out and an even more interesting freebie from a land where 'smaller is better'. 6月14日 Under the hood: Episode 1If you're reading this, you're probably someone who fits, or is very close to, the description of 'digerati'. Meaning, you understand and use computers & computing, and the use of the ubiquitous 'processor' in everyday life. You pay a good amount of your bills online, comparison shop online and find yourself feeling comfortable when your eyes rest on a URL at the end of a paper brochure that could be advertising anything from a weekly community meeting to discuss garbage disposal to a weekend store ad.
Anyway, an oft-ignored aspect of the average digitally-aware person's life is the insides of his / her primary computer. Be it a laptop, desktop, PDA or a smartphone - or all of them - somehow we've gotten to the point at which they're used more than they're cared for; and that's not exactly the best approach to keep your supercharged silicon assistants in the prime of their health (that has so much potential to be sliced and diced into a colossal cliché...).
The average computer, or form-factor-permutation thereof; has a screen, a keyboard, a processor, and storage. Bless the souls who thought this up, but most of these hardware resources now come with freebie capabilities that let inherenet / aftermarket sensors be deployed in order to monitor their "health", and in some cases, to rectify minor faults.
Lets start with the storage. "Disk" to some, "hard drive", to others. MB to some, GB to others. IDE to some, SCSI to others. "Platters" to some, "solid-state" to others...I could go on.. I think the hard drive isthe most critical part of the average consumer computer system today. Think about it this way - if someone were to tell you that they were breaking / selling your computer - what would you think of saving first?
My thoughts, exactly.
So, lemme ask you this - when was the last time you defragmented? Checked how hot your disk gets during the average turn-on to turn-off duration? Checked for physical bad sectors on your hard drive? Know the exact response time and how "fast" your disk is?
Do these questions matter? To those of us who couldn't care less, that string of questions sounds uncomfortably close to a sales pitch.
Here's why I think they matter. Aside from the obvious benefits of defragmenting your hard drive, stuff like checking for response time and temperature is a freebie feature that's built onto most new disks - and it usually takes some freebie software to hook into these hardware controls to monitor what and how your disk is doing.
"Oh, great - another piece of software "that I need to install"...how interesting..."
I agree. But would you rather have your disk kill itself heating up, trying to keep up with your frantic searches for, ahem, "that picture", in your filesystem? And how about when you've gotta copy a truckload of data from / to an external hard drive? Blaming everything on that USB / FireWire / Ethernet port is far from the right answer. That little port is a mere conduit. Its usually your hard drive that can't spin quick enough to keep up with the copy process, thereby yielding those gargantuan numbers on the copy progress window...
'nuff hype already. Here's the entrée. HDTune's probably the best disk management freebie I've seen in a long while. I had been using HDD Thermometer for the longest now to monitor the hard disk temperature on a system that seemed to be heating up waaayy too much too quick - but I think I prefer HDTune over HDD Thermometer just because of the additional features on offer, and the absence of the startup nag screen.
HDTune's also got the nifty screenshot and text-grab features that scrape up the actual dialog box and/or copy the contents of the disk check results to the clipboard. Very cool for comparing numbers and the sort. Not that I do that sort of thing, of course...I know mine's better.
So, what's with the "Under the hood: Episode 1"? Well, I figured I'd do a series of "hot tips and tricks that matter". The "HIP" stands for "Helpful, I promise".
Its 11 PM on a Tuesday evening - do you really expect slick humor at this time of the day / week? |
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