The Podcast Pedant

This post is adapted from a reply I made on Podcast Alley. The question, from a new member identified only as “flextone,” was about getting started with sound improvement using Cakewalk and/or Adobe Audition:

I would appreciate any tips for getting the best out of the sound file such as what compression, EQ settings, adding any FX such as a little reverb.

The answer, of course, is that there are no universal “right settings” for any of these effects. If there were, there wouldn’t be any need for parameters and controls — just a single “Make It Sound Good” button. That said, here’s the best advice I can offer for anyone looking to find their right settings, based on my experience producing an audiobookish podcast and editing a wide variety of sound files sent to me from the wild.

Before you touch anything:
Take that money you were thinking about saving for a better microphone, and go out and buy a $100 pair of studio headphones from a real music outlet. I mean it. Good headphones are more important than a good mic, because if you can’t hear your podcast you have no idea if you’re improving it. I talk more about that subject here.

Compression:
The best tutorial I’ve ever seen on compression is this one from dbx. The recommendations it makes are an excellent starting point. From there, I recommend you experiment and decide what sounds best for you. In general, moderate-to-fast attack/release settings are better for voice and moderate-to-slow settings are better for most music.

Also in general, it sounds better to undercompress than to overcompress. You’ll know you need more compression if you’re driving in your car, listening to your own podcast, and find yourself having to ride the volume knob.¹ You’ll know you have too much compression if every little sound you make is as loud as your most emphatic speech. This is boring and undramatic, and it increases listener fatigue.

Equalization:
First, you may not need it. Lots of people sound better without any EQ applied than they do with a great deal of fiddly sound sculpting. If you aren’t sure, try it both ways and do a blind test with a couple of honest friends. Don’t ask your spouse or family — they’re probably too biased towards your regular voice — but try to find friends who don’t care too much. (Have them listen with your good headphones, of course.) If you do need it, exactly what you need will depend entirely on your voice and the tone you want for your podcast.

I have an unusually ‘bright’ microphone, and I’ve always thought my voice sounded a bit too nasal, so I use the parametric EQ on my Mackie to give myself a little bit of 80 Hz boost and a moderate boost at 1000 Hz. I think it makes my voice a little deeper and rounder.²

Other general EQ thoughts:

• Experiment, then listen, then experiment some more. Record yourself with a ton of different settings, announcing each setting as you change it, and with frequent “EQ off” breaks for contrast.
• Small to moderate changes are much better than big ones. Just because you can add 15 dB to the high end of your voice range doesn’t mean you should. Ever. Unless you’re producing a cartoon.
• If you’re a man, don’t just blindly pump up the bass in the expectation that it will make you sound like Movie Preview Guy. It probably won’t, and even if it does, nobody wants to listen to Movie Preview Guy talk for half an hour.³
• If a total stranger can tell you’ve used EQ on your voice, you’ve failed.

Noise reduction:
You should learn about this and know how to use it for special circumstances: field recording, voicemail messages and bad Skype calls, that time when you never noticed the air conditioning was on, etc. It always distorts the signal, but sometimes that’s better than the alternative. Do not allow it to become a routine production step in your podcast. If you have noise issues every time you record, find out what’s going on in your environment and fix it. Don’t form the habit of relying on a magic button to fix it for you. It won’t.

Expansion/gating:
An expander is the lesser-known opposite of a compressor: it makes quiet sounds quieter, and leaves loud sounds intact. Depending on your microphone’s sensitivity and your own speech habits, you might find an expander useful for cutting down on distracting breath noises, lip and tongue smacks, etc. It can be useful for cutting down background noise in specific circumstances — it’s kinder and gentler than noise reduction — but again, it’s better to fix the problem instead. If you do use an expander, use it at moderate settings. Reducing breath so that it’s less audible sounds natural; an entire podcast with no breath noises at all sounds cold and alien.

That brings us to gates (aka “noise gates.”) A gate is simply an expander with a very high ratio, just as a limiter is a compressor with a very high ratio.⁴ It makes noises below the threshold disappear. I used to use gate effects fairly often, but I almost never do it any more. It’s too hard to get the threshold and attack/release just right so you don’t lose any signal and the transitions aren’t too harsh. And if you try to use a gate to cut out major noise problems, it still leaves the noise in when you’re talking, so the end result has the “on/off” clipping of a walkie-talkie.

Reverb:
This is one of the most overused effects in podcasting. Don’t apply reverb to your normal speaking voice just because it’s there and it sounds cool. It gets old very fast. Reverb is for music and used car commercials. Sounding like you’re podcasting from an empty cathedral won’t make your words any better, and will usually get in the way of people understanding them. If you do decide to use it, go with the subtlest possible settings that achieve your goal. Again, if a listener is able to say, “Aha! They’re using reverb!” — you’ve failed.

Anecdotal exception: I’ve used reverb for general speech exactly once. It was a story recording I’d received from another narrator, and it had high-frequency noise issues. Using SoundSoap took care of the noise but left the speech sounding noticeably distorted — that “tin box underwater” sound. A tiny bit of Soundtrack Pro’s reverb, using a small room size and a fairly short reverb time, helped to smooth out that distortion and bury it in the reverb effect. Even with low settings the reverb was noticeable, but worked okay in context — the voice for this particular story wasn’t supposed to be a normal human anyway.

Other effects:
By all means, play with everything until you’ve learned what it all does. Unless you have a specific reason for a specific effect, however, don’t actually use them in stuff people will hear. I’ve never heard a podcast where I thought, “Yeah, that guy needs more tremolo when he’s talking about cars,” or “If she’d only pitch-shifted her voice half an octave, I’d have learned a lot more about William Shatner’s butt!”

Most of those effects are gimmicks, and while the Beastie Boys may have uses for all of them, they sound pretty stupid on a single voice in isolation. It may be funny, in a vague sort of way, but “vaguely funny” doesn’t usually last the length of a podcast.

The mark of good sound engineering is that it’s transparent. If you do the job well, no one will even notice that you’ve done it. Your podcast will simply sound good enough that nobody pays attention to the sound; they’ll be listening to the words instead. Having people notice your effects usually means you’ve done them wrong.

Finally, listen to your own podcast.

Other comments and experiences encouraged as always, of course. This is one of those posts that I’m hoping will remain a document-in-progress.

1. That, or you need better mic placement and levels when recording. ↩
2. I’ve only had one criticism: my high school ex-girlfriend e-mailed me to say I was trying to talk too deep and sounded fake. But her experience with my voice isn’t that of the world at large, so I filed her opinion under H for “Huh.” and kept doing what I was doing. ↩
3. For women, I suppose the equivalent sin would be pumping the 6k to 8k range in the hopes of sounding more sibilant and sexy; but I honestly don’t think women go in as much for this particular sort of vanity. ↩
4. ”Very high” may mean “infinite” in both cases, but it might also mean something like 20:1. ↩

The following was posted to the Yahoo! list today by Charles Hodgson of Podictionary. I’m reprinting it here with his permission. At two minutes a day, I’ve said many times that Podictionary offers the highest quality-per-minute ratio of any podcast in my subscriptions list.¹ Listen to what the man says about his experiences getting the word out on his show. And then subscribe.

Similar writeups from others, BTW, will be more than welcome here. They’ll be trumpeted.

I am offering this up so that other podcasters can evaluate their
own efforts to build audience.

My listenership at www.podictionary.com is in the 3,500 range for each episode. The bulk of these daily (I also have a weekly feed that airs the same material). I just posted episode # 227 and will hit the first anniversary on June 3.

Early on I was lucky enough to get mentioned on several other podcasts. I attribute my biggest early gains to exposure throughwww.thewordnerds.org (thanks guys) and clearly the overlap in subject matter is very important here. I did get some exposure on very large circulation venues but although each of these helped, they never amounted to more than a minor boost (tens to a hundred or so). The exception was a weeklong exposure on iTunes which likely moved me from about 1500 to 2500.

Here is a list of other exposure that has had less impact:

• Several spots on Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code
• Featured on Yahoo beta podcast directory within a few weeks of it going up
• Guest (with podcast mentioned and linked from their website) on the NPR radio program and podcast “A Way With Words” (subject related and major listenership—why didn’t this one work?)
• Two local newspaper articles (Ottawa Citizen)
• Interview on local University Radio & weekly rebroadcast of one of my episodes
• Caller on an Ontario-Canada wide phone in (subject related)
• Small spot in JANE magazine.
• Numerous blogs and other podcast mentions (thanks all).

Other measures I have taken are to attend the local writers festival (my podcast is on words) and hand out cards. I have helped both this festival and some local poets begin their own podcast. I also set up a mailing list, thinking that not everyone is ready for podcasting, but most people understand email. It has attracted only a small following. For my anniversary I have set up a listener drive contest with an ipod nano as a prize and have been fairly surprised at the small number of entries. It’s not over yet, but so far seems like an experiment not worth repeating.

The podcast is a project all on its own, but it dovetails well with a book I have coming out and I have linked the two in my promotion efforts including mentioning the podcast in the Amazon page for my book.

I hope this little story will help others in planning their audience building. The biggest issue is just being there. Keep on pumping out your good quality stuff. Plus, if you have an idea that might work, try it. If it doesn’t work, then try the next one too. Eventually something will work!

1. The runner-up would be Ask a Ninja. Go figure. ↩

…Yeah. So people are starting to ask me why I haven’t blogged about Podshow yet, or the episode of Keith and the Girl where they take apart an anonymous Podshow contract. It’s well known that I have opinions on the subject,¹ and I’ve gone on at some length before on the Yahoo! Podcasters list and on Podcast Alley.

That’s probably why I haven’t brought it up yet. I’ve talked about it so much elsewhere that I’m getting more easily tired. That, and I’m afraid if I get started I’ll keep going ad nauseum. I don’t want this to become the Anti-Podshow Blog. There’s a lot of other stuff to talk about. Like, you know, making podcasts.

But I seem to be expected to say something, so I’ll say this in brief: Long-term exclusivity sucks. I’m not suggesting that it sucks for me, and it might not suck for you. It sucks for everyone.

A man whose last name is synonymous with a popular Indian food dish² has contacted me directly to tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about, and that everything I seem to think about Podshow is wrong. He has been unable to tell me what specifically I’m wrong about, which is a shame because I can’t correct my statements. Being right is a whole lot more fun than being wrong. So to cover my hindquarters: if I’m wrong that Podshow puts its podcasters into long-term exclusive distribution deals with no termination option on the podcaster’s side, then obviously all my complaining is groundless and nobody should worry about what I say.

But if they do, they suck. And you should avoid making such a deal for content that you create and own. With anyone. Ever.

Questions?

1. Many would call that an understatement ↩
2. No, not Eric Rice. The other guy. ↩

So the word is that Apple is now shipping the universal binary version of its Final Cut Studio applications. They said they’d have it out in March, and it looks like they made it just under the wire. For those who don’t speak Modern Mac: “universal binary” means it’ll run on the older PowerPC Macs and the new Intel ones.

This is of interest to me because I do my podcast production in Soundtrack Pro on my little Mac Mini in the basement. I have a much nicer dual core Intel iMac¹ but since I haven’t been able to run STP on it, I’ve been using it for everything except podcasting. I’ll still record on the Mini no matter what, but it’d be nice to do some of my editing upstairs where it’s warm and carpeted.

Crossgrade deals are available. The major problem here is, it doesn’t appear that I can get a universal version of just Soundtrack Pro. Instead they’re ditching the standalone applications, and making me an offer to pay two hundred bucks to get the full-blown Final Cut Studio. Now, $200 is a hell of a deal for all those applications. Would I use them? I don’t know. Final Cut would be nice if I ever do video podcasting. Right now I’m neither for nor against that notion. The other programs (3D animation and DVD mastering) just aren’t in my interest set.

So I’m trying to decide. “Crossgrade” or not? I realize this is exactly what Apple’s infamous for — making it very easy for you to spend more money with them to get what you’ve already got — but, well, they do make good stuff. And if I don’t do this, the only way to improve on my current workflow will be to ditch Soundtrack Pro for something else.  I doubt there’s anything for the Mac right now that’s better for fine-grained podcast crafting.

Opinions welcome.

1. Bought it with this year’s tax refund. Hooray for having a baby! ↩

This is something that’s been bugging me for a while. As I keep moving along my own hardware and software path, adding bits and pieces as the money meanders in, I’ve come to the conclusion that the books and forums and that smartass who tells you what to do because he’s been podcasting two weeks longer than you all have it wrong.¹

Let’s say you have $100 to spend on your podcast. You want those dollars to go as far as possible to improving your sound. All of the above sources will tell you “buy a decent mic.” Either a USB microphone like the Snowball or Samson, or an MXL mic and a Behringer mixer to plug it into.

Am I right? Have you heard this advice before? It’s wrong.

Unless your current rig is a tin can with a string, the first money you put into your podcast should not go into improving your input. That’s step two. Your first hundred dollars should go into buying a good pair of headphones.

I’m speaking specifically to podcasters who do postproduction here. If you’re a “talk-and-send” podcaster, you don’t need this advice.² If you spend any time after you record on editing, compression, trying to improve the sound quality, you need to be able to hear your podcast. Most likely you’re listening through your computer speakers, or your iPod earbuds, or whatever Best Buy was selling with the best-looking numbers and graphs on the back. You probably think you can hear your podcast. You’re probably wrong.

I learned this lesson back in December. Before then I’d been doing the Best Buy thing, and I was editing my podcast with a $30 pair of Jensen headphones. I thought I was doing an okay job.

Then a little before Christmas, I went looking to upgrade a few things. I went to Guitar Center and tried a few studio headphones in the $100 range: Sony, AKG and Sennheiser. They all sounded great. The AKG set was by far the most comfortable, but I went with the Sennheiser HD-280 because it was a closed design so you could hear more at lower volume.

I took them home and listened to the podcast I’d uploaded the day before. The difference was night and day. I had no idea how many sound artifacts I’d been missing.

Since then I’ve been able to tune my noise reduction better, get more accurate EQ and compression, and catch more clicks and pops that I’d have missed otherwise. And that’s why I think you should put headphones before a better microphone: with good output, you can do better sound adjustments and compensate for defects. If you don’t have good output, you can’t tell what you’re not hearing.

The same advice would apply for speakers, of course. Even expensive computer speakers made for gaming won’t give you the sound reproduction you need: they’ll pump up the bass and try to make things sound artificially good. You don’t want pleasant sound, you want accurate sound when you’re editing. You need studio reference monitors. But those are very expensive, and lacking any knowledge of good monitor speakers in the $100 range, I’d say go for headphones first.

Then buy the better mic as soon as you’re able, because you’ll want it even more after you’ve got the studio headphones. Bad sound will start to get on your nerves, because it’s obvious and glaring. But I contend that if you can’t hear the mic properly first, there’s no point in improving it until you can.

1. Unless, of course, that smartass is me. But I’ve been wrong on this too. ↩
2. Nor my broader advice, which would be “Stop doing that.” ↩

A simple thread about cheap microphones on the Alley disintegrated into a multi-front debate about elitism, personal finance, and exactly what price range for recommendations constitutes an unacceptable barrier for starting podcasters. It’s all too tedious for me to trouble you with.

But from the flames emerged this old bugbear, with a throaty growl and singed fur:

Michel: I know you mention content a few lines later, so don’t think I’m ignoring that, but content is so much more important that sound quality. Good job if you have fantastic sound quality and a boring show. It’s the best sounding crap out there.

Sigh. You know what? I’m getting tired of that whole argument. People keep bringing it up as an excuse to ignore the technical aspects of their craft. It’s like arguing that roots are more important to a tree than leaves. Yes, you need to start with content. No content, no show. But if you don’t eventually open up and sprout some production quality on the outside, that tree is gonna die.

The ideal podcaster is constructively dissatisfied with everything. We should all want better content next week than we’ve got this week. And we should want better sound quality, too. That doesn’t mean spending a lot of money. I’ve given lectures on how to get better sound out of free tools. Eventually you do hit a threshold where you need to scale up to better equipment — but not for a while. That’s fine. In fact it’s probably better than starting expensive, because getting good sound out of cheap gear will give you the skills to use the good gear properly.

But you need to care. You need to listen to your show, pay attention to what’s good and bad about it, and strive to make the whole thing better. If you’re apathetic about any part of the experience you present to your audience, your audience will be apathetic too.

All right. It’s about time this blog started putting out some productive advice and opinions. This post is an extension of today’s warning about bad bandwidth plans, and is meant to answer the question, “Okay then, smartass, what should I do for hosting?”

Here’s what you should do.

First, look at cheap unlimited hosting. As of today, the end of February 2006, you’ve got four practical choices in this category that I know about:

• Liberated Syndication: Starting at $5/month. Full-featured, excellent service, and a unique “rolling archives” feature that ensures you’ll never have to delete your old files for space. A large percentage of the podcast world is hosted at Libsyn, which makes for a mighty uproar when they suffer one of their occasional downtimes.
• Podlot: Also starting at $5/month. No frills, and a Web site that almost seems calculated to make you think the company is deceased. For that matter, they have a habit of closing to new customers every so often, to ensure they don’t outgrow their service capacity. But if you can get past those hurdles, they are rock solid reliable in my experience.¹ If you don’t need much hand-holding, just a place to put your files, Podlot will give you that.
• The Internet Archive: Unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth, no cost. The site’s run as a public service. ² The catch? There’s an approval delay before each file’s available, so if you’re podcasting on a schedule you can’t rely on timely updates. Also, transfer speeds can be erratic. But it’s a hell of a deal, and when combined with a free blog provider or the community front-end OurMedia it’s one of the best ways to publish a podcast for free.
• Gcast: A relatively new player on the scene. I know that they’re free, and they don’t seem to have any restrictive limits, but to be honest I don’t know that much about them. I do know that they’re a service of GarageBand Records, and that there are buttons and levers inside it to help promote GB’s music, but it isn’t compulsory. Rob Walch recommends them to many people, and he’s a smarter podcasting guru than I am, so that ought to carry some weight.

Those are the major options. If you have other recommendations, please let me know and I’ll update this. The only other free-and-cheap plans I know about are either poorly supported or stick ads into your podcast as a tradeoff for the hosting. I consider that a bad trade.

So what if you don’t like any of the above options? Hey, that’s fine. You may prefer having everything on your own domain. Managing your own content gives you flexibility. It gives you peace of mind, and possibly service level guarantees. And it means everything that goes out is under your own URL, which looks professional and keeps your branding consistent. These are all good reasons. They may or may not override “Free or cheap unlimited” for you, but it’s at least worth thinking about.

If you do decide to serve your own files, shop around carefully for a hosting provider. Pay close attention to their usage agreement: some ultra-cheap shops have language in their contracts that restricts your use of adult language or content, or says you can’t serve MP3 files, or other such nonsense.³ And check on their reputation, too. My favorite place to research providers is WebHostingTalk.com. A bad host will probably have dozens of posts trashing them in the forum archives there. A good host will only have one or two.

As I mentioned earlier, pay close attention to the bandwidth offered in the plan. Don’t even think about a host offering less than 100 GB a month — you’ll be sweating bullets if your podcast gets popular all of a sudden. Fortunately you can get good plans meeting or exceeding that for less than $10/month. The host that handles my Web sites, Dreamhost,⁴ recently upped its bandwidth from 120 GB to a ridiculous 1 Terabyte for $7.95 a month. That’s a deal that would cover all but the top tier of podcasts. They’ve got some quirks in how they do things, and I did have some technical issues with them last year (eventually resolved), but they’re feature-rich and I never had a problem with actually getting the files served.

I want to emphasize again, however: check the host’s reputation online. Every shared hosting plan sells more bandwidth than it has. Usually this is not a problem, because very few users are capable of getting close to the limits. But podcasters can, and a bad host with a shoddy network can easily buckle under the strain once your new episode hits the feed and you’re serving several dozen large media files all at once. Don’t agree to anything that will lock you in if your host turns out to be a bad one.

Beyond $10-and-under shared hosting, things start to get pricy. If you’re really serious about your content, you could look at dedicated servers. Your very own machine in a rack in some high-tech bunker, serving only what you tell it to. You need to be technically savvy to even consider this option, and it’s probably not economically wise for a podcast alone. Plans start at around $70/month, and you can start to find unmetered bandwidth plans (where what matters isn’t how much you serve a month, but how “wide” the pipe is, i.e. how many bits per second) for about $120/month. That could be smart if you’re running a whole online business, but if you’re thinking about that just for some MP3 files, I’d go back and look at Libsyn and Podlot again in the list above. Similar benefits, but for $5/month. Both services have served very popular podcasts. If you think you’re too big for them, you’re probably not reading this blog for advice.

So those are your “good” options. Pay $0 to $5 for unlimited bandwidth managed by someone else; or take matters into your own hands and pay $5 to $10 for large finite bandwidth (100 GB or above) managed by yourself. Both are respectable choices, although people in both camps tend come up with reasons for thinking the other camp is crazy. Seeing the options laid out like that, you’ve probably got an instinctive sense for which one you’re comfortable with.

Do your homework, take your pick, and good luck. Meanwhile, don’t forget to record something to host!

1. Disclaimer: Yes, my own MP3 files are hosted at Podlot. You should evaluate all advice for bias, including mine. ↩
2. And someday I hope Brewster Kahle wins the Nobel Peace Prize. ↩
3. Some hosts do this for fear of copyright infringement suits. Some do it for fear that you’ll eat too much of their bandwidth. Either way, you don’t need them. ↩
4. Yes, that’s a referral link. Don’t like it? Chop off everything after the slash. ↩

Via Podcasting News: another hosting service for the mathematically challenged. This one’s called PodshowCreator.com.

The name is a striking example of audacity — or perhaps the scarcity of podcast-related domains now. I’m no fan of Podshow, but I suspect they’d be entirely justified in nailing these guys to protect their trademark. I hope they won’t have to, however, as I sincerely hope there aren’t too many people who’d sign onto a podcasting plan offering 2 GB of transfer for $14.95 a month.

I’m saying this not specifically to embarrass PodshowCreator.com (they don’t need my help there) but because they’re exemplary of an entire class of hosting providers that consider themselves “podcast friendly.” The main problems with these providers needs to be made obvious and conspicuous, for the benefit of newbies Googling for a podcast host.

In PSC.c’s case, the long division is easy. At their cheapest level you get 200 MB of disk space and 2 GB of bandwidth. Let’s say you run a twice weekly music podcast, and your files are all 20 MB each. 2000 MB / 20 MB = 100 downloads. If you’ve posted ten shows in a month, you can afford a maximum of ten subscribers before you get hit for extra bandwidth charges. At $14.95 a month you’re paying a buck fifty per subscriber. And you’d best hope no one ever downloads twice, and your MP3s don’t get crawled by engines like Podscope, Podzinger, etc.

“Ah, but you can upgrade!” the provider would probably say. That’s just shoveling money into the fire. Their highest level, at $97/month for 20 GB, boggles the mind. You could get a dedicated server with unmetered transfer for just a bit more than that.¹

So what should you do? I’ll have a post about that shortly. For now, the significant takeaway is that any hosting plan you ever consider for podcasting should be measured at least in the hundreds of gigabytes, if not unlimited. That will give you room to grow. High-bandwidth and unlimited plans are available for much cheaper than $14.95 a month — they’re even available for free. That doesn’t mean that “free unlimited” is the right answer for everyone, but getting less than you need for more than you need to pay isn’t the right answer for anyone.

1. Believe me, I’ve thought about it. ↩

Huzzah! It looks like at least one of my goals with this site is already in motion — we’re initiating dialogue and getting responses and ideas back from the people making news in podcasting.

In this case, Gretchen from Mommycast read and commented on my post on their deal with Dixie. First off, thanks very much for coming by and taking the time. My wife and I have both listened to your show before. You’ve got an engaging style, and the topics you hit on are real ones. I can see why your show is popular.

Now. You said:

This is actually going to be a partnership. MommyCast is going to be included in their print and television advertising throughout all of the campaigns this year. Hmmm…millions of dollars of advertising with MommyCast included….millions of potential listeners being introduced to MommyCast….I’ll let you do that math!

Congratulations! That sounds like a terrific opportunity, and I wish you the best with it. However, I think this only reinforces my point that your compensation is undervalued. Millions of dollars invested in messages connected to your show… Exposure to a potential audience of millions… And you guys only get $40,000 at the bottom end of that deal?

What you’re saying is that Dixie recognizes that your show matters. You’re worth a lot to them. And you’re clearly worth a lot to Podshow. You should be worth more to yourselves, too. You deserve a lot more than you’re getting from this. A flat-rate year-long deal means that even if you get those millions of listeners, the payoff to you doesn’t change. It’s too low now, and if you’re superstars in eleven months then it’s really too low.

Perhaps it will pay off for you in secondary advertising, or in new deals after the year is over, and I sincerely hope it does. But as “a standard for others to follow,” I think this dilutes the perceived value of podcast content. Dixie and Podshow are getting far more from your hard work than you are. And as another hardworking podcaster, that bothers me quite a bit, even if it doesn’t bother you.

Finally:

Now, as for the comment that we don’t have day jobs…KaPOW! On behalf of all of the moms around the world…shame on you!

I think you misunderstood me here. My wife and I have an eleven-month-old son. I’d never insult moms — I prefer to keep breathing, thanks. That wasn’t a dig at you, that was a dig at Curry and Podshow’s “Quit Your Day Job” campaign. And the irony in the footnote was meant to be sympathetic irony.

Moms? Big fan. Podshow? Not so much. My mom did get exclusivity from me for a very long time, it’s true — but she never asked me for 60%.

Patrick (from Nobody Likes Onions) and I have had our differences in the past. I cannot elaborate, or I risk collapsing under the weight of euphemism.

Disregarding all that, however, he has written a fairly kickass tool that will check your podcast’s RSS feed for errors that could break clients, common mistakes that could confuse people, and missing elements that it simply thinks you should have. And he’s just updated it to bring it more in line with current iTunes specs and to be more thorough in its RSS syntax checking. Find it here:

http://www.nobodylikesonions.com/feedcheck/