Conversation Studio: video blogging meets Twitter

May 18, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Is Conversation Studio any good for Twittering video bloggers?

‘Conversation Studio’ is a Twitter-enabled video & image & audio podcasting site by Michael Bailey (who created the cute little ‘MyChingo’ audio widget a few years ago).

Seems to me it’s easy to use from my macBook.  What do you think?  Any good?

Or is it an evolutionary dead end just waiting for a video-enabled iPhone to come along and kill it off?

God this stuff rushes on at a pace! How anyone (Michael included) makes any money trying to keep up is beyond me.

Filed Under: news, podcasting technique, Twitter Tagged With: , , , , ,

Podcasting is dead! Long live Podcasting!

May 18, 2009 By Leave a Comment

AudioBoo – podcasting meets social media (finally!)

Once upon a time there was a thing called podcasting.

You got some kit together, took a deep breath, recorded your words of wisdom spent hours editing them and then?  Then you faced the daunting technical task of distributing them to an unsuspecting world.

To do that, you had to build a site to host your files and create mysterious (and unfathomable) things called ‘RSS feeds’ so that people could become regular subscribers. The technical stuff was hard enough, but harder still was attracting subscribers in a ‘pre-social media’ era.

‘AudioBoo’ connects podcasting to social media. No more worry about where your stuff lives (they host your audio), no distribution worries (it integrates with Twitter and Facebook plus has its own social network) and no recording hassles (it uses your iPhone as a good quality mic).

Perfect.  Except for the silly name and the fact that there’s no search facility yet although they say they’re working on it.  Makes it hard to, er…network.

And don’t forget that you still have to create interesting, quality content that your market will want to hear :-)

Filed Under: iPhone, news, podcasting technique Tagged With: , , ,

Audio case studies recording session

October 24, 2008 By Leave a Comment

A fun day recording case studies with a charity client from London

recording studioMonday this week saw us in a studio with Jonathan Werren from Elizabeth Finn Care recording some historical podcasts and an audio ‘case study’.

Case studies are an excellent way to create trust and confidence in what you offer.  And we’re finding that audio case studies are better still – because they’re your happy customers speaking in their own words directly to your prospects.

Not only are audio case studies powerful testimonials, they’re also brilliant for explaining to prospects how your products and services work – and demonstrating how they benefit your customers.

Between 4 and 6 minutes long, ‘mu:kaumedia audio case studies take up no space at all on your website – just a link. A link that can be put in emails, web sites, documents, forum signatures, blog posts… you name it.

Filed Under: marketing, podcasting technique Tagged With: ,

Audio editing fun

October 23, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Why is audio editing fun? Because you can do this.

Here’s a little clip of a ‘before and after’ from a recent client recording.

Filed Under: podcasting technique Tagged With: ,

How to podcast a conference: our simple setup

October 16, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Podcasting conferences made easy with our reliable, low-cost setup

Podcasting the speakers at a conference is a great way of capitalising their knowledge and experience and turning it into useful content. You might as well – after all, they’re doing the presentation anyway.

If you’re looking to audio podcast conference speakers, here’s our top ten tips.

1) Most voice, least background noise. That means putting a mic as close to the speaker’s mouth as possible. We always use a wireless ‘tie-pin’ (lavalier) mic to capture our speakers.

2) Buy Sennheiser Freeport wireless mics. The best wireless mics for the least money from the company that also makes the best wireless mics for the most money.

3) Capture the audience questions. Use a hand-held Sennheiser wireless Freeport mic (set to a different channel to the tie-pin mic). If the questions are planned, get the people to sit in the front row and wait for you to bring the mic to them. If not, be prepared to simply pass the mic along the line – whatever it takes to get the questions recorded.

4) Keep channels separate. Run your speaker mic into one channel on your recorder (we use the mAudio Microtrack) and the hand-held into the other. This means you can cut questions into the audio when you edit, omitting any extra mic noise when it’s not in use.

5) Do whatever you can to reduce background noise. Turn things off; move things, relocate if you can. Definitely turn your mobiles off – and ask your speaker to turn his/hers off too.

6) Monitor your levels visually. Set your levels visually first with the headphone volume off. Headphone gain can fool you into thinking you’re recording a strong signal when you aren’t. When you know you’ve got a strong signal, then bring up the headphones’ level.

7) Stop the recording after each talk is in the can and save. If your recorder’s going to crash, it’s better to lose one presentation rather than all of them.

8) Keep a spare set of batteries for everything charging. In our case, that’s 2 x 9V for the wireless mics and 4 x AA for a power-charger pack for the mAudio. Nothing is worse for your professional reputation than blowing a conference with dead batteries.

9) Carry your own extension reel and gaffer tape. Never assume there are enough sockets for what you need, where you need. The gaffer tape will make your snaking cable safe – and stop someone pulling your kit off the table.

10) Take your time mic-ing up your speaker. They’re nervous, you’re nervous (because you’re holding up the whole proceedings) – but just take your time and be calm and focused. Minimise loose wire and friction noise.

That’s it. It’s all about getting a strong, clean recording on the best equipment you can afford. The Sennheisers are about £115 each; the mAudio mp3 recorder about £200, batteries and cables etc about £50.

Go-anywhere professional quality podcasting for interviews, outside location, seminar presentations, conferences.. you name it – all under £500.

Filed Under: how to, podcasting technique Tagged With: , , , ,

What’s the best wireless mic system for podcasting?

October 13, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Sennheiser FreeportA Sennheiser Freeport wireless tie pin or hand-held mic system is hard to beat

If you’re looking for a mic system that’s good enough quality to use in video and audio podcasting and seriously affordable at the same time, I can’t fault the Sennheiser.

We’ve been using the tie-pin version for over a year now and it’s never failed us yet.

It’s ideal for capturing seminars and keynote speeches. You can sit way off from the stage and monitor your recording and the rotary gain on the back of the base unit makes a nice ‘analogue’ control for those who like to adjust their levels on the fly.

I just ordered the hand-held unit to give us the possibility of capturing audience questions since we’re podcasting from an academic event at the University of Plymouth in a couple of weeks time.

On the day, I’ll be running the tie pin from the keynote speaker into one channel of the mAudio microtrack and the hand-held into the other channel. That will keep the signals separate, allowing me to create a final mono mix with the audience questions mixed in only when they occur, doing away with any additional background noise.

The Freeport is fantastic value for money – but be warned; take it to a busy conference at your peril as the unit only has 4 preset frequencies to choose from. The chance of someone else’s system interfering with your is high – and unlike the really expensive versions, your system won’t retune itself to a free frequency.

Filed Under: podcasting technique Tagged With: , , ,

What is a podcast?

August 11, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Good question. Here’s my best shot – in picture form.

WIt’s you going out to the world – standing and falling on your own merits.

I’ve tried to capture the key processes in making an audio podcast in this quick sketch. If I had to list the 10 hardest things about podcasting they’d probably be:

1. Getting started.

2. Keeping going.

3. Planning what you want to going to get out of it.

4. Working out what an RSS feed is, what you can / can’t do with one.

5. Actually performing. It can be hell and you can be rubbish.

6. Recording too much stuff and leaving yourself with a nightmare edit.

7. File formats, bit rates, quality issues, download sizes

8. Finding a grown-up, reliable host for your media files

9. Writing show notes and putting in all the links

10. Taking feedback. Ouch.

Filed Under: podcasting technique

What is podcasting?

July 25, 2008 By Leave a Comment

There are two interpretations of what podcasting is

1) To the podcast producer / purist, a ‘podcast’ is – strictly speaking – regular, episodes of content that are published online via an RSS feed and to which a listener / viewer can subscribe using a piece of software called an ‘aggregator’.

2) To everybody else, podcasting is putting some audio and/or video out on the web so that other people can listen to it / view it / download it when it suits them.

For most businesses, definition 1) is a solution without a problem, but definition 2) makes a lot of sense. In actual fact, our podcasting work consistently falls under that definition.

What then is podcasting?  It’s simply a process to capture useful content and deliver it to the PCs and/or portable media players of people who will benefit from it.

Filed Under: podcasting technique

Make your own podcast!

June 19, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Making a podcast is easy – relatively speaking ;-) Make your own podcast cartoon

The basic steps in making a podcast are:

• Plan what you’re going to be saying, to whom, how often – and most important, why.

• Record your content – which could be a mixture of you speaking, conversations and interviews. Record on anything that can capture audio in wav format. It could be direct to your PC via a built-in mic, onto a mobile phone, a minidisc, a voicemail line or a whole range of mp3 recorders.

• Edit your sound and export it as a mp3 file

• Upload your mp3 file to a server (ideally a dedicated commercial podcast hosting service which is easier and cheaper)

• Put a link to your mp3 file anywhere you like (website, emails, blogs, documents, listings etc) and distribute so people can listen

and / or

• ‘Publish’ your episodes in the form of a podcast so that listeners can use iTunes to automatically pick up content when you publish it.

• Promote your podcast – use the power of the web to let people know it’s there

The good news is that it’s easy to get going on a very low budget. We have packages ranging from our Fastcast right up to our great ‘Start Podcasting Now’ package complete with professional recording kit, training AND your first 4 podcast episodes to get you going!

Our advice? Don’t wait to be perfect. Take a risk, get going and make lots of mistakes. We did and we have great fun doing it!

Filed Under: how to, podcasting technique

G2B@podcast says ‘ciao 4 now’

May 27, 2008 By Leave a Comment

We said ‘ciao’ to the G2B@podcast in its current form today after 7 months of production. The show was a good excuse to talk to people in business in the area and we gained quite a bit more experience of production while raising our profile as podcasters in the region.

I think we also learned that this podcast worked best when it focused on things that most interested us and less so when it was trying to talk broadly about business networking.

We also learned that you need a carefully balanced return on your effort / investment. In our case, the effort required to research and compile the events diary ended up being greater than the return it offered.

We’ll be looking at creating a new podcast focused on feedback and online reputation management for www.mukau.co.uk soon – so we’ll no doubt be trying out new approaches as we go.

We may well continue adding shows to G2B@ with a different focus and a different approach – possibly reviews of events we’ve been to or sites we’ve explored.

An interesting footnote is that the G2B@podcast blog occupies the first 5 results on page 1 of Google for the term ‘podcasting in devon’. This is in part a reflection of the fact that there isn’t a big enough market to make podcasting a sustainable business yet – but its also attests to the effectiveness of the G2B@ blog in achieving Google visibility.

Filed Under: news, podcasting technique
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