When you can’t afford to forget
My way of making sure I’ve got the equipment I need to capture a seminar. After all, when you’re driving 150 miles to get a recording, forgetting the wireless mic base unit power supply just isn’t an option.
To Levelate or Not to Levelate…
Do you know that feeling when you’ve been doing something the hard way, repetitively by hand, a million times? For those of you who’ve wasted countless hours manually trying to balance the levels in your recordings, GigaVox created ‘Levelator’. But here’s a thing: search anyway you like in Google for software to automatically balance the levels in your soundfiles. You won’t come up with Levelator. There’s a bit of feedback for GigaVox.
At first go, Levelator balanced levels subtly and without hysterics. But it doesn’t last. As soon as Levelator hits a file with a period of extreme quiet (a distant audience question, for example, or a dramatic half-whisper) it loses its head and forces the whisper up to the dragged-down level of the loudest sound in the recording. The result is a series of noise-gates that give the entire game away and sounds awful. .
The bottom line is that for a spoken word recording with a relatively narrow range of volume, Levelator is excellent - so good it’s invisible. But if there’s so much as one half-whisper, it falls to bits and you’re forced to either abandon the whole attempt, or start cutting the recording into sections in order to deliberately NOT levelate the quiet bits.
New podcast in the pipeline
Rule No. 1 – “Be yourself”
We’re about to launch a new business podcast and we’re thinking about how far we go to try to make the content acceptable to everyone and how far we go in expressing views, insights or opinions.
Podcasting Rule No. 1 says that the most important thing is to be yourself. Which means this time round, it’s not going to walk down the middle of the road - and it isn’t going to please everyone.
We’re creating this podcast to give small, entrepreneurial businesses useful information that isn’t normally easy to get – and to give it to them in a format that is easy to consume. It’s going to be aimed at the commute to work, whether that’s by car, cycle, bus or on foot. There are many ways podcasting can pay off – and for us it’s a great way to highlight what we do; a perfect excuse to go out and talk to loads of interesting business people and way to generate valuable content.
A great podcasting tool
For many people, podcasting is about sitting in front of a PC with a USB mic. But if you’re like us, you’ll be wanting to get out there in the real world capturing interviews with people and ideas and opinions from all over. In which case, you’ll need a portable mp3 / wav recorder. The m-Audio Microtrack 2496 brings the world into your podcast.
Pros:-
• Fantastic recording quality with supplied stereo mic
• Small, light, easy to use
• Over 700 recordings so far without a single error (* DOINK!! See this post!!)
• Every input you need
• Plenty of mp3 recording capacity on even the smallest (supplied) 128mb flash memory card
Cons:-
• Non-removable battery
• Can be difficult to playback files when there are less than 3 recorded
• Clicky mic level controller sound picked up when recording with supplied stereo mic
• Almost feels too light and plasticy
We bought this unit for about £240, the price now is somewhere in the £187 region - a bargain if only you can get hold of one. It may be that currently, it’s a victim of its own success as suppliers everywhere are out of stock and waiting for delivery. Annoying since we need another 2 for a course at the end of September.
Update: It turns out that this unit is now ‘discontinued’ - (”this recorder is now discontinued in its current form and there will be no more shipments. We are advised by m-Audio that the new improved version 2 microtrack will ship ‘in the autumn’ “).
Recent recordings…
Audio Testimonials
Art of Accessorizing, Net Energy, Zoe Cook, ‘mu:kaumedia
Event feedback
St. Mellion Internation Business Show
Audio Ads
Steve Deeks, Tourism2007
Seminars
Brian Griffin’s ‘The Buying Centre’ and ‘Handling Objections’
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Poetic justice
This week has been busy - I’ve been out and about on the 4Networking circuit capturing more of Brian Griffin’s live sales seminars. Three 5 o’clock starts in a row; Clevedon, Cirencester and Exeter. At Cirencester, just after I’d got all my recording gear out, but just before I’d bought a parking ticket, I locked the keys in the car.
So I went off to the breakfast networking meeting determined NOT to let it spoil my day. No, I’m not going to get stressed. Not even when, five minutes into his presentation, I realised that Brian’s seminar was a repeat of one we already had in the can. Isn’t it incredible how you can lose track of where you are when you’re only dealing with 12 things?
The crowning glory of the day was waiting in the car park for, yes, you guessed it, the AA to come and unlock the car. “Winter, Spring, Summer or Fall” went the words, round and round my head as I put my head down on the car roof and soaked up the heat from the sun… and suddenly, I realised I was ‘relaxing’ - and enjoying every lolling, pointless second of it. To remind myself how good it felt, I took this picture of my keys through the window.
The man from the AA wasn’t my singing frey-hey-hey-yay-yend and he wasn’t Mr. Blizzard either but he did get me on my way again - leaving me privately promising to retract every unkind thing I said about the AA in my last post.
You gotta frey-hey-yeh-yeh-yend..
Winter, spring, summer or autumn. All you gotta do is.. er.. caught ‘em? Bought ‘em? Sort ‘em? Thought ‘em? Damn.
This is a loathesome ad. I can’t say exactly why, it just makes my skin crawl. I’m not sure where in the marketing lexicon ‘crawling skin’ is listed as a desirable audience reaction but the AA achieve by the bucketload.
There are some ads where the turgid workings of the ad agency are clearly visible. This is one. You can almost hear the ‘creatives’ round the table congratulating each other on this idea. Fall, call - brilliant. Real AA people! What a statement! What a team-builder!
I don’t know whether our dredded friend at the end is a talented AA man (hoping for that big singing break that will pluck him from roadside obscurity) or a session singer in a bib - and frankly, I don’t care. All I know is that he’s doing that jaw-warbling-overkill thing that proper singers do to prove they’re proper.
And as for that poor mumbling bloke in the fake blizzard..
The Best of.. goes over to audio testimonials
Award-winning local services directory The Best Of used to claim the only ‘talking ad’ in town. Now, with a recent shift towards public reviews of featured businesses, it looks like they’re turning their talking ads into talking testimonials.
We’ve always believed that TBO is the leader in its field - and deservedly so. TBO is built around a solid core of search engine optimisation and Pay-Per-Click expertise, packing a heavy punch in the Google visibility stakes.
But right now, the market is saturated with local business portals, directories and e-zines all trying to build themselves up from nothing. Many are busy selling their ‘franchise’ before the business model has even been tested. The best emulate TBO, offering a degree of search engine visibility. The worst offer nothing but a paper directory or magazine transposed badly to the web and offering little or no search engine visibility for their advertisers. And that’s putting it kindly.
Keeping an eye on the The Best Of over the last year has shown that the business is taking the word ‘Best’ in it’s name seriously. Anyone can advertise in any directory - but only the best can attract word-of-mouth recommendations and positive reviews.
It’s worth remembering that there’s a difference between testimonials and feedback, though. Testimonials are positive recommendations from existing customers. Feedback is whatever the customer needs to say - positive or negative. Handling testimonials is as simple as getting them and showcasing them whereas handling feedback requires the ability to respond openly and constructively to whatever the customer has to say.
Recording session with the great Brian Griffin
Nice to see Brian today - paying a visit to mKm to record the introductions for his forthcoming sales training seminars. We’re releasing a set of 12 seminars on iPod, audio CD and mp3 download in about a month’s time. What’s special about Brian’s material is his ethical, consultative selling approach: it’s selling with integrity, and that’s refreshing. Oh, and his silky-smooth, honey-tongued delivery.
So far, interest has been good and feedback has been positive. Have a listen to this seminar and see what you think. Better yet, put it on an iPod or mp3 player and take it on your daily commute to work with you. We’d love to know how you find it.
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An irony about pocasting
Isn’t it interesting that most podcasts are about podcasting and full of presenters saying ‘podcast’ yet the word ‘podcast’ is about the least-microphone friendly word there is?
Waveform of ‘podcasting’ in audacity:
And who thought of putting the hardest-to-pronounce letter of the English language three times in front of every website address?
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