The sounds of bugs. Plenty of them. But I'm getting better, even if it's not quite so obvious to the handful of listeners out there. Podcasting in 2004 is a lot like blogging in 2000: few tools, lots of technical mistakes by the podcasters, and voices still under development. In 2000, professional publishers could easily smile down at the bloggers, confident that their place as the source of news and commentary was secure. I'm sure audio broadcasters feel the same about podcasting. Howard Stern and Mel Karmazin are pronouncing satellite radio as the future of audio, but I see the future of radio as the user-enabled network. Unless the users can send their own broadcasts over the satellite, Sirius will remain at the margins of mainstream radio. I've never aspired to be a DJ, but I do get excited when I see the future. And the podcasting wave is too exciting not to hop on and see where it takes me.

I'm now doing my podcasts in real-time. This is a big change for the better, but it also means that I have to learn how to fix a whole new category of bugs and mistakes. I consider my set-up a "Reverse-Adam-Curry." At Bloggercon, Adam explained that he was using his Powerbook as the source material for his music, sound clips, microphone and mixer and then using a line-out to an mp3 recorder to make the real-time recording. I'm going the other way. I have my music on one station (a Powerbook, an iPod, or a MP3 player). From the headphone cord of that station I connect to the line-in port on my PC. I also connect a microphone to the PC and use the Wave-Out Mix setting in Windows to combine the two. Sony Sound Forge 7.0 on the PC is where I make the sound recording. I now have a set-up capable of providing excellent sound quality, but I still have to solve two more problems. The first one is to find the optimal encoding that matches high quality sound with small file sizes. That's as much as matter of taste and download tolerance as it is a technical problem. The last podcast was 22,100/16 bit, but checked in at 35 megabytes. Above average sound quality but I'd like to cut the file size by about 10 megabytes. What's the right compromise? I don't know yet. The other problem will only be solved by practice. I don't yet have the timing down for starting and ending songs or fading them in and out. At Bloggercon, Adam described this as the Nintendo-skill part of podcasting -- in other words, I have to get faster with my hands juggling the sound levels and the play and pause buttons. It's just a matter of time. In the meantime, I could edit out all the mistakes or just continue to post the new podcasts warts and all. I'm going with the latter approach. Chirp, Chirp.