Category Archives: Audioblogs and Podcasting

Brainwagon Radio: Dead KVM Switch, Rants, Dickens and Mediocre Audio

In trying to fix his previous noise problems, your host appears to have squelched that a bit, but ends up with clippy audio. Sigh.

More stuff:

Self Flagellation

My criticisms don’t just extend to others. Here’s my own attempt at self-flagellation today.

I fired up my ipod this morning and was listening to my latest show as I came in. I like to do this on occasion, mainly to monitor the technical quality as well as whether I sound like a complete dolt. I can’t speak to the second issue, but bleh. My podcast had some low amplitude noise which polluted the background. As the mp3 encoder shifted from frame to frame, the noise jumps in amplitude in a really annoying way. Yuck.

Two questions for myself:

  1. Why am I not hearing this when I do my post recording checks? (Likely answer: really cheap headset with poor response)
  2. Was it always this bad? A quick scan back through my recent episodes reveal that this one was particularly bad, but noisy recordings have gone out for the last three or four. Likely cause: change in my sound recording setup, mixer levels are perhaps too high.

Apologies for murdering your ears. I’ll have to work on getting this sorted out before my next podcast.

Frustration with two different podcasting clients

I must admit, I’m a little bit frustrated with the current crop of ipodder clients. I don’t know if it is just me, but I’m finding them to be relatively unreliable, and remarkably difficult to work with.

Before I go off (and people respond in kind with flames), I’ll admit it could just be me and/or my trusty WinXP box. But here’s my experience in trying to use ipodder, version 1.1.4.

It mostly worked, but for some reason I had frequent crashes of iTunes when I would run it. Sometimes, this would mean that individual podcasts which had been downloaded would be marked as downloaded and never retried, but even though they were downloaded, they would never get added to my iTunes list. So, I’d have to go in by hand and add them. Every attempt to get ipodder to redownload and add these skipped files (including uninstalling and reinstalling ipodder) resulted in it thinking it had already gotten it. I grovelled around, and found the history file and deleted that, and still no dice. In frustration, I thought I’d give another client a try:

Witness Doppler. Also a nice looking client, but it occasionally errors out while downloading as well, and fails to retry in any useful way. For reasons which escape me, I’m not receiving Dave Slusher’s podcasts, and even my own Cinnamon Bear Podcast has managed to skip three or four episodes. Sigh.

Here’s my wishlist for podcasting:

  1. I’d like a client that is invisible. Never fails. Don’t even know it’s there. Works by magic.
  2. Don’t care if it has directory support. Not even a bit.
  3. On the rare, unforseen occasion when it does screw up, make it straightforward to fix. Allow you to flag items which it think it has already downloaded, and delete it from its history mechanism so they can be fetched again. When you uninstall the program, delete every trace of its previous installation.

Can anyone suggest a client which fufills these requirements?

Brainwagon Radio: Kudos, Drawing and Helix DNA Server

Wherein your host lists a number of people who have said nice things about us, and mentions the weekend’s projects: a new icon redesign for brainwagon and Helix DNA Server.

Items mentioned in the podcast:

Why is podcasting important?

Yesterday, I experienced something new as I recorded a podcast.

It began innocently enough. I thought I would do ten minutes or so on basic philosophy: why I keep a weblog, and why I record podcasts, and why I think both are important. I’ve hinted at some of this before, but I thought that I might try to be more explicit as to the outcome that I am seeking when I publish my blogs and podcasts. It goes slightly deeper than just talking about gadgets and books and movies and cooking.

It is about creating. It is about conversing. It is about expression.

Think about what a remarkable thing your network connection really is. Up until about ten years ago, your own ability to publish your own works was severely limited. That is because your creativity had to have concrete, material representation, and copying and delivering these material representations (paper, cassettes, video tapes) required the moving and copying of physical objects, and that required costly labor and materials. The concrete, material representations of your ideas are not the ideas themselves, but there was simply no other way to get them to others without giving them material form.

The ubiquity of computer networks and digital media has blown that whole notion away. Now your ideas have only the thinnest physical existance. They move at the speed of light (or at least the speed of your network connections) to anyone else on the network. Your creativity can now be shared by hundreds (in my case) or thousands or millions and soon to be billions of others.

This realization has not escaped the many hardcore capitalists of the world, and their response is obvious: “With an audience that large, let’s try to sell them something!” Some think they can do this with advertising: reminding people that without their own particular product, they risk falling behind on the endless treadmill of life. Some think they can do it by selling their own punditry, because listening to someone else’s thoughts saves you the tedious burden of forming your own thoughts. And some think they can merely repackage the same old stuff onto new gadgets, and that you’ll gleefully pay for the experience.

It’s kind of sad actually.

The revolution doesn’t occur in the few-to-millions capabilities of the Internet. The revolution occurs in the long tail of communication, where millions communicate with each other in exchanges of rich media.

I suspect that most A-list podcasters are nodding their heads at this point, but I suspect (as my rant yesterday hinted) that they don’t really get it. When Dave Winer turns around and says that to solve the problems of podcasting, we need to create an industry to support it, he doesn’t get it. We do not need an industry. We need individuals with very modest resources to get out and start weblogging and podcasting, to listen and respond to other blogs and podcasts and to encourage others to do so. I don’t need to develop a business plan to achieve those goals.

I’m interested (despite the rather pedestrian choice of blog topics that I pick) in the development of culture and individual expression. That’s not an industry: that’s a personal responsibility. Take responsibility for creation and sharing, and utilize the unprecedented tools that we have to build the kind of world of ideas that you desire.

It’s powerful stuff.

So, back to yesterday’s aborted podcast. Yesterday’s rant generated more email response and comment than any other item I’ve posted in recent memory, if not the entire 2+ year history of brainwagon. And that feels good. It feels good that people are actually reading and responding to my commentary. That my readership might be up. That people might talk about what I talk about.

Therein lies the trap. It’s tempting to just continue to flame away: to go back to the well again and again, to milk the apparent popularity of this observation to make myself feel more important. And in listening to my podcast, I realized that might have been what I was doing. So I decided to trash yesterday’s episode. To me, it’s more important that I promote what I view as the ideals rather than just fuel my own popularity. Being provocative or negative is one way to generate traffic, but it doesn’t generate culture.

If there is a philosophical underpinning to brainwagon, it’s the idea of individual empowerment. You can figure it out. You can do it. You can understand it. Go do it. Program. Build. Cook. Write. Talk. You don’t need to have the industry tell you how, or wait for a product to appear to make it easy.

Have a good one.

Scripting News, Trade Secrets and Ego

My rant begins with Dave Winer’s post on Scripting News, from which I quote:

Here’s the Trade Secrets podcast I promised yesterday where we explain where Adam and I see podcasting going. Since it’s a travel day (flying to Boston for the I&S conference) there won’t be much to read here, so I’m asking for forty minutes of your time today to listen to this cast. I don’t think you’ll regret it. We’re at a moment when this new activity is starting to make sense in a broader way, and the next set of problems are evident. The problems are industry-size, that is, it will take an industry to solve them. Hope you enjoy the story!

While I didn’t actually hear alarm bells, I did feel the hair on the back of my neck prick up. I don’t listen to Trade Secrets much anymore, but Dave said it was important, and that I wouldn’t regret listening to it.

Well, I do regret it. I’ll summarize what took Dave and Adam forty minutes to meander around:

  • Dave is still upset that Adam gets credit for inventing podcasting. Not with Adam, but with the world.
  • Dave and Adam are working on a business based upon podcasting. No real details were announced.
  • The people who are working on iPodder scripts? They aren’t listening to Dave and Adam enough, and they should because they are the number one podcast.
  • Dave and Adam need to make money off of podcasting so they can go on and do the next big thing.

I suspect I might be in the vast minority, or perhaps even alone in this, but did anyone find anything of interest in this podcast? I’m sure it is all of intense interest to Dave and to Adam, but why should we care about what they are doing? When Dave says “listen, you won’t regret it”, I feel that you have to deliver some reason for us to care. I don’t think they gave us any reason whatsoever to care about what they are doing.

We know, you invented podcasting, but the cat is out of the bag and kitty doesn’t want to go back in. While you guys might hold the number one slot now, here’s an update: it won’t last. Just as nobody goes back and watches Edison’s early motion pictures (okay, I do, but very few do) being first doesn’t give you any real guarantee of immortality. As a consumer, I’ve moved beyond your podcasts, because you continue to talk as if the medium was important and your role in developing the medium is somehow important. You can go on and get interviewed by the BBC and CNN, you can be approached by radio and television executives, but none of that matters in the slightest to me. That world has nothing to do with what I do, and has nothing to do with what interests me.

I’m just a hobbyist. I do my podcast because it is fun for me to. The topics I choose are designed to appeal to me, and to the extent that my interests are eclectic, my popularity will always be limited. I am not going to hire production staff or run gigabit networking to my house. I’m not going to play RIAA music, or interview movie stars or music celebrities. Why? Because we already have big media to do that. Duplicating existing big media on handheld devices isn’t innovative or interesting, just as having traditional journalists publish blogs isn’t interesting. What is interesting in my mind is the ability of everyone to participate in the exchange of rich media to communicate with each other. And we can do that now.

Podcasting appeals to me because nearly anyone can do it. On any budget. For any reason. To communicate with family. Or their community. Or their church. Or people with similar interests. Or people who don’t know what their interests are. Or people who just need something different to listen to. There aren’t any real obstacles to doing it, at least to anyone who wants to actually do something. We certainly don’t need an industry to make that happen: it’s happening already.

Brainwagon Radio: Too Long Since the Last One

Damn, it’s been nearly a week since I put out my last one, and this was painful to put out. Hopefully it isn’t too painful to listen to.

Items from the show:

  • Shameless plug for my Cinnamon Bear Podcast.
  • I upgraded this weblog to use the latest version of the CG Powerpack.
  • I rambled about the phase vocoder some more. mostly incoherently, plugging papers that I’ve mentioned before.
  • I extol the virtues of cheese once again. Have you considered that the key ingredients in Welsh Rabbit are in fact all ancient foods? History in one dish.
  • The gents at SawStop have electric saws which detect when fingers get in them and break quickly to keep you from lopping off your finger.
  • An Internet Archive “gem”: Superman battles Japoteurs in an interesting (?) look back into wartime propaganda.
  • Need to convert MPEG2’s from archive.org to a DVD? I wrote up how to do that once before using command line programs. Works great because it doesn’t re-encode the video.
  • Want a Matlab compatible language? Try Octave. Need more Octave libraries? Try octave-forge.
  • Try wearing a Santa hat wherever you go.
  • Closing music: We Wish You a Merry Christmas by T. Stipe

Referer of the Day: RasterWeb!

Occasionally I scan the referer list on the right and see who is linking to me. Today’s cross linker is from Pete at Rasterweb. This fine gentleman listed me in the same category as Adam Curry, Dave Slusher, Dawn and Drew and Michael Geohegan. Cool! Or should I say, S-C-H-W-I-N-G.

I think my total bandwidth is still in milli-Curry range, if not the micro-Curry range, but this minor bit of validation makes a grumpy morning seem a bit better.

Thanks for the link Pete!

Addendum: the mobile edition of RasterWeb! looks good on my new cell phone’s browser.

Images in MP3 files for iTunes

The other day I noticed that several of the podcasts to which I normally subscribe started having cover art visible when I played them in iTunes. I thought that would be fun, so I tried to figure out how I could do this. I could, of course, just load the mp3 file into iTunes and then drag the desired image file onto it, but that seemed like it required more button clicking than I normally would like, so I tried to find a command-line gadget that I could add to the script that I normally run to upload my podcasts to my server.

The winner: eyeD3, a python module that allows you to add id3 tags (including APIC tags which are used to put in artwork). It includes a command-line program, which you can invoke like:

eyeD3 --add-image=foo.jpg:FRONT_COVER some.mp3

Coolness.