The Podcast Pedant

(Yeah, it’s been a while. But look! Here I am again! Enough said on that.)

(Further note: I’ll stick URLs in later. It’s late, and I’m too tired to do it now.)

So I just got back from the 2006 Podcast and Portable Media Expo.

I made it a priority to go this year because, frankly, all of the talk about it last year made me jealous. It sounded like I’d missed the podcasting event of the year — and in 2005, I probably did. There was no PodcasterCon, no PodCamp, and very little at Dragon*Con. This year? It wasn’t the only game in town, but I think it was very much worth the expense to go from a business perspective, and it was a hell of a lot of fun.

I went partly to get some business done, and mostly to meet people. I’d call the business part about a 60% success — I’m not going to talk about everything I’ve been involved with, but I had a few important conversations and missed a few others because everyone was busy. No big deal; that’s what e-mail and Skype are about. The biggest accomplishment was the energy behind the Podcast Guild; we got some new gears turning, and it looks like it’s finally on its way to becoming what it needs to be. ¹ More later on that.

The people, though — that was hugely successful. I met most of the people I was hoping to meet, and many more. And it bears out an observation I’ve made from other events: despite our personas online or behind the mic, in person we’re a big circle of friends. I didn’t shake a single hand that wasn’t warm and welcoming. In some cases this surprised me: as much of a smartass as I am much of the time, I expected at least a few cold shoulders or even harsh words, but there were none the entire weekend. Everyone was cool. It was a great vibe.

Was it a deep learning experience? Not to me, though I confess I’m an unfair judge. I don’t know everything, but I know quite a bit already of what was being presented. However, the few program events I sat in on were more slick, corporate-vanilla, and “on the surface” than deep examinations of the issues. I’d even include Evo’s and my own presentation in that. I actually felt better about the panels at PodcasterCon last year, where there was less speechifying and more intimacy between the moderators and the audience. That’s not to say this was a dud; there were some good messages here. I’m just not sure from my own perspective that a session pass would’ve been worth the money, if I hadn’t had a free pass already as a speaker.

The exhibit hall was much the same: a fun place, but little depth and few surprises. Podcast Ready put on a great face as the primary sponsor,² and the Podango mini-conference³ seems to have been a hit. Most of the rest of it was what you’d expect: here’s Shure and M-Audio, there’s LibSyn, over there’s PopCurrent, yonder are a few podcast producers, etc. There were only two gadgets that threw me for a loop:

• Box Populi’s “Podcast in a Box,” a Linux-based recorder that delivers true, no-kidding, automatic podcasting with zero interface. Aimed right now at the university market under the Meedu brand, you don’t even have to push a button: your tech guy either schedules a start and stop time for your lecture and it begins and ends recording (and publishes to their Web host) with no intervention, or you pop in a USB flash key which triggers the recording, and it publishes when you take it out. I have never seen a podcast process with no grunt work before. I think it’s brilliant.

• The iMorphosis “PodcastLink,” a sort of hardware-based podcatcher that will plug directly into your MP3 player (including iPods) and populate it without a computer. ⁴ This reminds me of those old $100 e-mail and Web appliances — the ones they marketed to your grandparents. Like those, it will fail, because it’s a clever solution lacking a problem. Anyone who has the knowledge and desire to listen to a podcast is going to have a computer sitting around. Under what circumstances is it worth real money to avoid plugging your MP3 player into your computer?

What mattered far more than new gizmos was just listening in for the general tone of the Expo. Leo’s keynote, about getting down to business and protecting what we do as a brand and an industry, pretty much set that tone, and I felt it throughout most of the presentations and a lot of the conversations. You had plenty about podcasting for fun, sure, but underneath it, everyone was really focused on success. There was a drive throughout the whole thing. A hunger. I cannot tell you how many times and in how many ways I heard the word “metrics” used, during the day and late into the drunken night. I can’t really criticize — I was saying the same lines as everyone else.

Is attending the Expo important? That’s a complex question. It’s fun to attend regardless of its importance. I’d say it’s moderately important to attend if you’re treating your podcast as a business; and it’s critical to attend if you intend to stake a claim in podcasting beyond your own podcast. Events like this are, in a very real way, the conversation that podcasting has with itself. The sharpest observation I had was that the conversation was entirely about the people and companies who were there. People talked about Podcast Ready. People talked about SwitchPod. People talked about Blubrry and Podcast Pickle, both of whom had successful and fun party suites.

Apple was discussed very little except in regard to the recent fracas with Podcast Ready. And I barely heard Podshow mentioned at all. Even the Podshow podcasters who attended weren’t talking about Podshow. The ridiculous Hummer limo, running guests to their anti-conference or whatever it was, only got rolled eyes. I’m pretty sure they have no idea how much it’s hurting them to detach themselves from podcasting’s conversation. They weren’t there, so they weren’t on the radar. And a company that survives on the creativity of individuals can’t afford that.

Besides, they’re missing the fun.

I didn’t miss the fun. I had lots of it. All businesses, priorities, and importances aside, I’ll be going again next year.

And I hope to see you there.

1. That “industry consortium” Leo mentioned in his keynote speech? He was talking about the Guild. I’d mentioned it to him the night before. ↩
2. I don’t just say that because I work for them. ↩
3. They called it an “unconference,” but they’re wrong by all usual definitions. ↩
4. Except it’s configured from their Web site. For which you need a computer. ↩

In eight easy steps:

1. Have a great idea for a podcast network. To pick a random example:¹ The Sci-Fi Podcast Network. Start with a major name at the head of it, and recruit some early leaders in your category. Make a cute alien mascot. Get a lot of people excited.
2. Once you’ve got a solid base of resources built up, start screwing around with them a little. Message boards popular? Move them to a third-party provider with an inscrutable URL and inferior aesthetics. Wipe the archives. No sense living in the past!
3. Keep experimenting with the stuff that works. Make every change for the worse. Repaint your site in a horrible Day-Glo green and purple that causes physical eyestrain.² Replace the cute alien mascot with…a cow. Defend every decision with “Market testing shows people love this!” Ignore the opinions of members of your network. If people complain too loudly in the forums, delete their posts.
4. Meanwhile, start to erode the brand identity of your network. People are coming to your site to find science fiction podcasts? How limiting! Start two other “networks” on other subject areas. Cross-linking them would be obvious and banal. Instead, make sure the original “Sci-Fi Podcast Network” URL points to a meta-network page, and make people hunt for a smaller link in the text to click through to the list of SF podcasts.
5. Of course, the trouble with that is that there’s still a page somewhere with a list of science fiction podcasts. There are no synergistic cross-brand relational compatibilities to leverage there! So ax that page, and simplify things to much smaller lists on your front page again.
6. Oh, and the name? Gotta go. Make a new name. Something with zazz. Something redundant. Something like… The Podcast Entertainment Network. Or PodcastPEN for short.³
7. Finally, because you’ve probably got a number of pesky science fiction podcasts still hanging around, boot them all and hide their forums, and make them resubmit to your new network under a more restrictive set of guidelines. The new terms of service will require them to promote your non-brand more regularly and consistently, and maintain a show format according to a strict formula that conforms to your “right way” of doing podcasts. Oh, and it will also contain such gems as:

   Each show host should think in terms of a minute of ads per 15 minutes of show. You will keep (to use or sell) one of the 30 second spots and the network will fill the other (with a network show ad or an ad a sponsor has purchased)… PEN offers a generous revenue sharing program (50%) for each audio ad we secure for your show. If you do not wish to participate in our advertising program, please provide your reason on our submissions form. Exceptions will be considered on a case-by-case basis.

8. Voilà! You’ve just driven away everyone who thought it might be fun to be listed in a science fiction podcast directory, but doesn’t want to be told how to podcast or how to advertise.

This might seem mean-spirited. Perhaps it is, although I didn’t start out meaning to be mean. But this really bugs me. A couple of people whom I really liked⁴ had a good, simple, effective idea and implemented it well — and then, over the course of a year, allowed their unfocused business ambition to dissolve a good community into nothingness. It’s a shame. I’m not upset that they wanted to change things. Nor that they wanted to make money. (Although a 50% ad commission is just wrong.) I’m upset because they didn’t realize what they had, and in trying to make it something else they lost something of benefit to everyone.

It’s a shame. And no, I don’t intend to just bitch about it. There are positive steps that can be taken, ways that it could be done right. The obvious response to my complaint here is, “If you think it could be done better, smartass, you try it!” And I think that’s a good answer. But that’s another post.

1. Okay, so it isn’t. You got me. ↩
2. To be fair, they did back off on the colors after some of us raised a rallying cry for listeners to check out the site and send feedback. The green and purple didn’t go away, but it retreated to the edges. ↩
3. The “P” in “PEN” stands for “Podcast.” Again. So it’s really the Podcast Podcast Entertainment Network, or PPEN. Turtles all the way down. ↩
4. And still do like, honestly, although I suspect that after this blog post they’ll never want to speak to me again. ↩

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.

I’m not kidding. It changes the shape of your mouth, and therefore your tone, in a way that people naturally find more energetic and likeable. You’ll get more brightness and range. It also changes your own frame of mind, and impels you to have more fun, if you don’t fight it. You’ll enjoy yourself more; and therefore you’ll sound like you’re enjoying yourself more; and that predisposes your audience to enjoying themselves more too.

Will you feel stupid making yourself smile and talk? Yeah. You’ll feel like a complete idiot. But when you listen to your podcast a couple days later, you’ll hear the difference; and next time it’ll be a bit easier, and the time after that it’ll be easier yet.

It’s something to try.

So I finally got a hardware compressor.¹ I was beginning to get tired of applying the same software compression in Soundtrack Pro over and over again — and also tired of the occasional clipping which software can’t solve. I wanted to move just one step closer to a “live to tape” scenario, although I know for certain I’ll never really get there.

After a few days of obsessive review-reading and wallet-shaking, I settled on the RNC 1773 from FMR Audio:

The RNC literally stands for “Really Nice Compressor.” You’ve got to respect that level of forthrightness. It’s a no-frills stereo compressor: there’s no gate, no limiter, no expander, no dual mono mode with extra knobs. What it does have are two compression modes:

1. Normal Mode, which acts exactly like a compressor should. I played around with this a little, and it sounded okay. The attack is very fast and hard, which I found a little jarring. Doubtless I could adjust it, but I never got that far, because what I really wanted to try was:
2. Super Nice Mode, which chains three compressor circuits in series for a very gentle, very transparent compression effect that still retains all its power.

If you Google on the thing you’ll find a large number of sound engineers who swear that the RNC is the best compressor you can find for less than $2,000. I got mine for $175 (plus state tax, and with some cables thrown in) at Humbucker Music, whom I will attest are a great bunch of folks. I ordered it on Wednesday, and it was at my door Thursday afternoon.

I’ve used it twice now for podcasting. I wish I could say something like, “Wow! All I had to was turn the thing on and nightingales dropped dead from envy at my feet.” Unfortunately, it didn’t work that way. New sound gear never works that way. Even on Super Nice mode, I’m still working on tweaking the settings just right. My first attempt (for last week’s Escape Pod intro) used a 6:1 ratio, -8 dB threshold, +6 dB gain. I personally think it came out sounding overpowered, way too flat and pushy. For this week’s intro I used a 4:1 ratio, and made the threshold and gain even at 8 dB (which the manual recommends). It wasn’t flat this time, but I clipped frequently. This could mean I need to make my mic gain part of the equation too.

Don’t take this as criticism of the compressor. The RNC does what it’s supposed to, and it really is beautifully transparent. There’s no change at all in the sound’s tone or noise, just its volume, and that’s rare and lovely. I’m being honest with you about my trials to make the point that there’s no magic bullet. The more gear you have, the more skill you need to develop. Once I learn to use the thing properly, then I believe it will add a volume and clarity to my podcast that will make the investment more than worth it. I can already sense parts of that. It’s just a matter of getting all the pieces into place.



1. I should probably write a post at some point about the finer points of compression and what compressors do. For now, if you didn’t already know, take this for a definition: “A compressor evens out the volume of your signal by making loud sounds quieter.” ↩

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?

1. 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. ↩
2. 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. ↩

(This began another recycled post from the Alley — but then I started elaborating, and now very few of the original words have survived.)

The home recording business is moving more and more these days towards digital interfaces on all their low- and mid-end stuff. This makes sense: almost everybody is recording into a computer now, so if putting a USB interface on your otherwise-average mixer will give it a competitive edge, why not? It simplifies life for the musician or podcaster, and sending a digital signal to your computer means you aren’t bound by the computer’s sound card. ¹

I’m of the opinion that it’s a very good idea to have a USB or Firewire interface for your audio — whether it’s built into your mixer, or a separate interface box, or even a standalone USB microphone. But if you can afford it, get Firewire.

Why?  What’s the difference between Firewire and USB? From the outside, they’re both just cables. You can chain stuff together or put them on hubs, and you can buy a lot of the same sorts of devices for each. USB 2.0 and Firewire 400 have similar speeds “on paper.” (480 megabits per seconds and 400 megabits, respectively.)

But even a casual look will show that USB audio devices tend to be cheap and Firewire devices tend to be expensive (barring the odd exception). And just about all A/V geeks will agree that Firewire is better, and even necessary for complex work. Why is that?

The difference is a fundamental one, but it’s internal to the way these things work, and pretty subtle. The following represents my best understanding based on a few hours of research and being a computer geek for several years. If I get any of it wrong, someone please correct me.

USB

USB is a hosted networking protocol — which means every device talks only to your computer and is utterly reliant on your computer to tell it what to do. You can have up to 128 devices on a USB network, and they might be chained and hubbed in all sorts of interesting ways, but they’re all just passing their bits back to the computer to decide what to do with them.

USB devices are asynchronous, which means that any device has the power to send any amount of data at any time. If two devices decide to talk at once, their data can collide with each other. If the traffic’s not highly time-sensitive, this isn’t a big deal. There are routines in place to manage it, and you’ll never notice if your mouse click happens a couple microseconds later. BUT. There are a few applications where it matters, and one of them is audio. An audio interface is sending a constant stream of sound data back to the computer. It rarely uses up the whole pipe, and so it’s still possible for other devices to talk — but the odds of collisions are higher, and if you get too much other traffic the errors can pile up beyond the computer’s ability to stay “caught up” and you lose some sound data.

The details of the protocol are typically implemented in software. That makes it very cheap and easy, as it pushes the work onto the CPU, and the devices themselves don’t have to be very smart. But it also means that USB traffic has a direct impact on system load, and vice versa. For most common applications this doesn’t matter — the traffic from your keyboard and mouse is so slight that it’s hardly going to bring your system to a crashing halt, and most of us wouldn’t notice if our external hard drives slow down for a second when our screen saver kicks in. For audio, however, it does matter. Same problem as collisions. Audio devices are pushing data out at a constant rate, and if the computer’s too busy running sound effects or switching programs or swapping out RAM to pay attention, some data can get lost. And then you get glitches and/or latency.

In case anyone’s wondering, audio glitches are bad. Latency (the delay between the creation of a signal and the final reception of it) isn’t quite as bad unless you’re trying to monitor yourself through headphones while you’re talking. If you are, a latency of a fraction of a second can be unsettling. Like you’re living in the future.

Firewire

Firewire is a peer-to-peer protocol,² meaning that every device on a Firewire network is equally capable of talking to every other device. Two video cameras on a Firewire network can share data with each other. A Firewire audio interface could save sound data directly to a Firewire hard drive. ³ Your computer is just another peer on this network, and has no inherent special status.

Firewire is always implemented in hardware, with a special controller chip on every device. So the load it puts on your CPU is much lighter than USB communications load, and you’re much less likely to lose any sound data just because you’re running fifteen things at once. Specialized hardware usually makes things faster and more reliable, and this is one of those times. (By the way, it’s also one of the things that makes Firewire more expensive. It’s also a reason Apple dropped it from the iPod Nano — there was just no room for the Firewire chip.)

But the real reason Firewire is more reliable than USB is more fundamental than that. It’s because Firewire allows two operating modes. One is asynchronous, as we described above with USB. The other is isochronous mode, and it lets a device carve out a certain dedicated amount of bandwidth that other devices can’t touch. It gets a certain number of time slices each second all its own. The advantages for audio should be obvious: that stream of data can just keep on flowing, and as long as there isn’t more bandwidth demand than the wire can handle (not very likely) nothing will interfere with it. No collisions, no glitches.

From a practical perspective, this also makes it safer to send a lot more audio via Firewire. That’s why most of the multichannel interfaces (18 channels, 24 channels, etc.) are Firewire devices, and USB devices usually just send a two-channel stereo signal.

So there you have it. For hooking up your mouse, keyboard or thumb drive, USB is plenty fast and plenty cheap. For hard drives, either one will do (although Firewire is somewhat more reliable). For audio devices, USB will do fine if no other devices are competing with it and if you have processor room to spare. But Firewire will always be able to handle more load with lower latency and no glitches, because it has resources it can set aside to make sure your audio gets where it needs to go.

…And that’s why Firewire’s more expensive and taken more seriously.

Just in case you were wondering.

1. Which is good, because most sound cards are crap for recording. And even the ones that aren’t have to worry about electrical noise from the rest of the stuff inside your computer case. ↩
2. Hello, RIAA search bots! No, I’m not talking about that kind of P2P. Go away. ↩
3. Note that it could. I’m not completely sure whether any actually do, but I’d appreciate information on this. ↩

Happy Beltane, everyone!

I hope that everyone celebrated today by listening to the Jonathan Coulton song (MP3). It contains the wisdom of our age. ¹

That’s my hope. Of course I know that most podcasters celebrated, as they celebrate the beginning of every month, by asking/begging/cajoling/bribing/menacing their listeners/colleagues/henchmen/old-ladies-in-the-street to vote for them at Podcast freakin’ Alley.

I know I’m a heretic on this issue. I’m fine with that. I’ll keep bitching because the PA voting system was obsolete, useless, and annoying a year ago, and by this point it’s got all the relevance of an indigenous people dancing and singing around a Coca-Cola bottle praying for cargo. ² It’s not just annoying any more to have people spend five to ten minutes on their podcasts begging for votes. It’s embarrassing.

It embarrasses the whole medium, and it loses listeners because it distracts from content. We want to go up against broadcasting? You don’t see the whole cast of Lost lining up on the beach once every episode to shout, “Don’t forget to vote for us at TVGuide.com!”

Does it work? Hell if I know. I’ve always gotten a few hits from Podcast Alley, albeit not that many, and I’ve always been ranked somewhere around 100 even though I’ve never once asked for a vote. Don’t get me wrong — I don’t begrudge the people who voted for Escape Pod there on their own initiative, or who left comments. The comments especially are valuable. My problem isn’t with the voting, it’s with the asking for votes. It’s bloody annoying, and whatever audience gains your podcast gets from being higher-ranked could surely be dwarfed by spending the same time talking about your podcast in places where people who are interested in your subject matter hang out.

Market yourself outside of podcasting, and spend your listeners’ time on good content, and you’re taken seriously. Podcasting is taken as a serious form with serious ambitions. Everybody wins. Spend your listeners’ time hoping to rope them into status games with other podcasters, games that the listeners don’t care about, and we look like a bunch of kids wrestling over King of the Sandbox.

Either way — enjoy the weather!

The water’s not cold, baby, dip in your big toe…

1. But not at work. Really. ↩
2. Someone’s gonna come after me for inappropriate cultural epithets, I know. Or for inappropriate use of a trademark. I can’t wait to find out which. ↩

Just a moment ago I said:

And when you’re done, consider putting a Creative Commons blurb at the end of your own podcast. It takes all of ten seconds and letting your audience know that they’re allowed to copy your podcast and share it with their friends may inspire them to do it.

I got an e-mail from a listener that said:

“Recently it was bothering me again that I didn’t have all of your episodes in one nice spot in iTunes. However, this time the Creative Commons bit sunk in and I did something about it! Presenting… Escape Archive!“

QED. Which is Latin for, “Rock on.”

You probably already know about this because you read Podcasting News,¹ but in case you haven’t: the Creative Commons foundation has put out the first iteration of a “Podcasting Legal Guide,” summarizing in thirty pages everything you need to know to probably not get sued. It’s intended as an extension of the EFF’s Legal Guide for Bloggers:

When creating your own podcast, it is important to make sure all necessary rights and permissions are secured for the material included in your podcasts. This is relatively easy if you create all of the material that is included in your podcast but can become progressively more complex the more you include material created by other people. If you do not obtain the necessary rights and permissions, you may get into legal trouble for incorporating third party material into your podcast and for also authorizing others to use that material as part of your podcast. The main legal issues that you will likely face that are unique to podcasters are related to copyright, publicity rights and trademark issues.

There’s an online version of the document and a PDF version. I’ve just finished reading it, and disregarding a few typos and grammar flubs, I was impressed. The most complex section is about music, of course. It points in the same general direction everyone else does (to keep things simple, stay podsafe or get permission) but if you do happen to be insane enough to want to play major-label music, it tells you exactly what licenses you need and why.

There’s also a handy section about implied and express licensing, and misconceptions about fair use, and… Well, just read the thing.

And when you’re done, consider putting a Creative Commons blurb at the end of your own podcast. It takes all of ten seconds² and letting your audience know that they’re allowed to copy your podcast and share it with their friends may inspire them to do it.

1. At least twice now I’ve thought seriously about putting together a site or feed specifically to cover news and current events related to podcasting. Then I keep going back to Podcasting News and realizing that I couldn’t do half the job those guys do, so why try? The niche for commentary and sarcasm is far more open. ↩
2. Five if you’re good at tongue twisters. ↩

Want a fast, cheap, probably obvious trick for noticeably improving your podcast voice? Stand up when you talk. It’s well known that standing straightens the air passages and gives you a lot more power. It’s why you always see singers and voiceover artists standing. I started standing for my story readings and intros when I moved my podcast down into the basement studio, and I could immediately tell the difference.¹

Obviously this trick won’t work for everyone. You need either a tall mic stand or a boom arm, and your content and style may preclude it. Couplecasters would likely find it too weird to chat with each other while standing; and if your podcast is mostly improvised monologue, you may find it difficult to (literally) think on your feet. Some people do it very well, or learn to, but it’s far more important to feel comfortable. Standing up probably works best for pre-scripted content, or improvisation with a semi-formal or formal structure to it.

But if you can make it work for you, and make it natural, you’ll be surprised at the difference it makes to your sound — and, very possibly, to your attitude and confidence in yourself and your podcast.

1. On top of the acoustic and psychological benefits of moving my podcast out of the living room. ↩