Listen To Your Podcast
4
Once, long ago, I was subscribed to a podcast. This podcast was a rather prominent member of The Sci-Fi Podcast Network.1 So at the start of each file, it began with a TSFPN audio tag: “This is TSFPN.com. You’ve found the best podcasts in the universe.“
Which is all wonderful. Except that where the podcast itself sounded smooth and high-quality, the audio tag sounded like Alvin the Android Chipmunk. It was too fast and too high-pitched.
Half of you are nodding now: you’ve seen this happen before. There are a lot of ways to make this mistake, but one of the most common is to combine two sound files of different sample rates in the same Audacity track. It’s easily done, and easily fixed. Just put them in different tracks and then mix down.
But here’s the kicker. I listened to this podcast, and heard the exact same chipmunked tag, every week for four months. It was the very first thing you heard. It sounded terrible, and it was never caught. I eventually lost interest in the subject material and unsubscribed, but for all I know it’s still going on.
That was definitive proof to me that the guy never listened to his own podcast. If he did, he’d have noticed and fixed this easy bug. He didn’t, and he started off on the wrong foot every week, and never knew it.2 And that’s today’s lesson:
First, you should always listen to your MP3 file before you upload it. If it’s a long podcast, at least skip through it to make sure all the pieces are there and sound like they should. Never skip this, or you’ll be sure to embarrass yourself with some technical gaffe sooner or later. Even if it’s 6 AM by the time I upload, I always take at least a minute or two to jump through my podcast beginning, section transitions, and ending. Those are where mistakes are likeliest to happen.
Second, you should subscribe to your own podcast feed and listen to it with all your other podcasts. This means you’ll catch any RSS screw-ups without having to have your audience tell you about them; but more than that, it gives you the opportunity to evaluate yourself as a listener and decide if there’s anything from week to week that needs improvement. Are your levels uneven when you listen on your car stereo? Great, now you know. Did you drone on too long about something unexciting? It’s easier to notice that a couple days later, and you’ll be more conscious about it next time. Continuous improvement means continually evaluating your work, and the best way to do that is to listen to yourself the same way everybody else does.
This will seem like common sense to a lot of you. Some of you will find it inconceivable not to listen to your own stuff — after all, if you didn’t like to hear your own voice, why podcast? But in practice it’s very, very common to skip these steps.
You do so at your peril. If not the peril of losing audience and reputation, at least the peril that someday some smartass like me will make a blog post about you. And who wants that?
- Which, if you click on the link, you will see has lately dissolved into a cheerful puddle of brightly colored goo. But that’s another story. ↩
- Should I have dropped him a friendly e-mail? Probably, and in most cases I would have. But there were some personality factors, too, and… Well, I didn’t. So. ↩
Yes but my issue is like that and it is soooo frustrating–and for the likes of me I cannot work out how it is caused in such formal terms as you explain here.
Mine is the problem of , what I think is, called clipping.This is usually caused by having the volume too loud — over 0 dB — before final Mp3 compression. But I find that I get it if I mix tracts from different sources into the one Mp3 file. I can deal with my noise levels (even when I combine different tracts) but this is something else.
I record something in Mp3 at say 128 kbps and I import this into Audacity as a separate project tract with something I’ve used before or I recorded as a standalone recording in Audacity.
Essentially I combine what were WAV and Mp3 tracts in Audacity project mode which of course converts the lot to the Audacity format. Played in that environment it sounds great. No audio problems are indicateddespite their different origins. But as soon as I compress it to Mp3 I get these awful clipping or surge sounds that seem to be caused by a single tract (say if I combine music that was in WAV with a Mp3 voice audio)but are shared throughout the whole recording when ,and only when, in is compressed.
I think the different sources of the recordings are the problems and that if I record one tract in Mp3 I need to do that for the rest (at least in the main).
But this could instead be a problem of kbz — and thats’ something you don’t address here. Should all tracts be at the same kbz?
The other related issue/cause could be over compression as the probelms with using Audacity for editing audio which was originbally Mp3 can be that you can compress over and over again without realising it –thus corrupting your sound by reducing its quality.
Comment by Dave Riley — May 18, 2006 @ 4:09 am
Hi David,
It’s hard to say what your problem could be without example sound files and without knowing more about the specific settings you use in your workflow. Two questions:
The LAME encoder that Audacity uses to create MP3 files doesn’t work with 24 bit uncompressed files — it understands 16 bit files only. I’ve been burned by that before: you try to convert the file and it’s nothing but screechy garbage. So that’s the first thing I’d look at. The second thing, well, I don’t know. Feel free to send me a private e-mail and I’ll do what I can to help.
Comment by SFEley — May 18, 2006 @ 4:44 am
On the opposite side of this issue is listening to the podcast too much. My wife and her co-host at lipglossandlaptops.com record their show, and I engineer it. It’s usually 40 minutes to an hour long each week.
So generally I listen through once to hear what they did (they record it without me there), listen again as I edit it, listen again to the preliminary mix (which I send to them for evaluation), listen again as I make any changes, listen to the final master (I compress and boost levels in Audacity), and then listen again once it’s published to make sure it worked okay. Not to mention all the sub-listens to segments at each step.
I have to figure out a way to cut that down, which essentially involves reducing my anal-retentiveness about the mix. But I have caught a few things over time, and that only prods me to keep overlistening to the show.
And this is a topic that’s not even really up my alley (cosmetics). If it were a real techie thing I’d probably go right down the rabbit hole.
Comment by Derek K. Miller — May 18, 2006 @ 6:31 pm
[…] As you’re listening to your own podcast, do your recordings sound flat to you? Do they fail to hold your interest? Another tip for recording: smile. […]
Pingback by The Podcast Pedant » Smile When You Say That — May 24, 2006 @ 8:48 pm