Tag: mp3

IT@Cork, Podcasting

IT@Cork member podcasts begin

IT@Cork is a not-for-profit organisation which facilitates networking amongst IT Professionals – by the holding of evening events, mini-conferences and the annual conference. IT@Cork has 220+ member companies drawn from fmcg, to banks, to pharmas to IT companies.

I have been working with IT@Cork to set-up a members podcast and we published the first podcast yesterday. The most time consuming part of the process was sourcing a sponsor for the podcasts – thanksfully Microsoft Ireland stepped in and offered to sponsor the first five of the podcasts (if anyone would like to sponsor the next five, feel free to drop me a line at tom@tomrafteryit.net).

The first podcast was an interview with Shemas Eivers – Shemas is the MD of Client Solutions and an engineer by training. Shemas has some interesting views on software development (“software development hasn’t changed very much in the last 5 years”) and he reckoned that one of Client Solutions recipies for success is by avoiding the bleeding edge!

I changed my podcast production strategy fot this podcast – I wanted to try out GarageBand 3! I should have listened to Shemas and avoided the bleeding edge right there! Editing of sound files is painful in GarageBand 3 – I quickly reverted to editing in Audacity. I then imported the edited file into GarageBand to take advantage of its easy music integration – I added the jingle at the start and finish using GarageBand.

One real pain factor in GarageBand is that the Export function exports to .m4a, not mp3. It is possible to import the m4a files into iTunes and convert to mp3 (which is what I did) but what is the point in forcing that extra step on podcasters? Why not have an export to mp3 natively in GarageBand, as it is in Audacity?

I’ll have to play a little more with Garageband to see if it is worth keeping but right now, I am thinking the extra time involved isn’t worth it – anyone think the sound in the IT@Cork interview is superior enough that I should stick with Garageband?

Blogging

Some WordPress permalinks 404ing

I was having a strange issue recently on this blog – occassionally a blog post would 404 when the PermaLink was clicked on – the post would appear fine in the blog’s main page but any attempt to view it individually would fail! Deleting the post and re-posting with a new title solved it, so some part of the title seemed to be causing the problem.

This happened twice in the last couple of weeks – both times with podcast interviews posts. This got me thinking – I checked the mp3 filename and in both cases the mp3 filename was the same as the post title (i.e. darren-barefoot-interview.mp3 in a post entitled Darren Barefoot interview). Again, another solution, if you come across this issue is to re-name the mp3 file – this should have less impact than deleting posts and re-posting under a new title.

Finally, being aware of this, come up with a procedure to ensure that your post titles and files don.t share a name and it should no longer be an issue.

Podcast

New Audible podcasting format – why bother?

I have recently started to take an interest podcasting again – I produced a few podcasts during the summer to dip my toes into podcasting but I had to stop when the soundcard on my PowerBook blew.

Recently, I have recorded a couple of my talks and podcast them with generous help from FrankP and NearFm and even more recently, Robert Scoble has agreed to let me record and podcast an interview I will do with him by phone tomorrow evening.

So I have been following the world of podcasting with increasing interest and was surprised to see a war breaking out there over the weekend!

The war is about what audio format to use in podcasts – traditionally the audio format has been mp3 files but a company called Audible has proposed a new .aa format. According to Mitch Ratcliffe (an Audible consultant), the main advantage of the .aa format seems to be that it is possible to audit how often they have been downloaded – this is, of course, important from a monetisation point of view! However, Mitch rather lost the head (and thereby the argument) when not everyone agreed with him.

As Michael Arrington put it:

Instead of embracing the bloggers that would normally talk about this, Mitch Ratcliffe (an Audible consultant) went on an unmitigated, unprovoked character assasination romp (with follow up attacks) against Dave Winer (â€?he’s willing to stealâ€?), Om Malik and others. This sure is an interesting way to engage the sneezers. As Om puts it, Mitch “goes after the dissenters with a verbal baseball batâ€?…. If you find yourself on the other side of a debate with Dave Winer, Om Malik, Doc Searles, Jeff Jarvis and others, maybe you should rethink your position. Because it is very likely you are wrong.

Doc Searls, Dave Winer, Michael Arrington and others have been mounting a robust defence of mp3’s.

In my own case, I don’t see myself shifting away from mp3s any time soon. As far as I can see from reading about Audible’s new format, you upload your podcasts to Audible’s servers, they convert to .aa and host the podcast there. It is a paid service.

My podcasting is pretty basic – I record the sound, convert to mp3, upload to archive.org (free hosting and bandwidth) and then link to the archive.org file from within my wordpress blog. WordPress recognises the .mp3 file as an audio file and creates the correct enclosures transparently for me so I don’t need to worry about the tech side of the podcasting. How would WordPress deal with .aa files? I have no idea. I suspect, it wouldn’t recognise them as audio and therefore podcast subscribers (listeners) wouldn’t know you had published new podcasts.

I think Audible’s strategy is wrong here – I think they would have been far better served coming up with a mechanism for measuring stats on mp3s rather than coming up with a new proprietary file format. What do you think?

UPDATE:
Post updated after comments from Mitch and Pete informed me that .aa is not a new format – sorry ’bout that guys.