Podcast

Nov 26 2009

What I learned about

podcasting by failing

a lot and banging my

head against a table

by Leif Norman

I wanted to make a podcast for this breakfast website using Apple all the way. I like Apple and am familiar with lots of Mac stuff but I also went into the experiment as, well, an experiment, to see what was good and bad about the process. It’s not that I don’t like PC Windows stuff; well actually I kind of don’t to be honest. I’m one of those people who exemplify the “Once you go Mac, you don’t go back” people.

Let’s call the experiment: Could Apple software and hardware handle a podcast from beginning to end?

Using my iPhone 3Gs I played around with the Voice Memos app

that came with it and the built in microphone. It had pretty good quality in mono, but something told me I could do better.

Lucas, the manager of Powerland computers where I sometimes work at the University of Winnipeg knows I like interesting computer and electronic doo dads showed me a new microphone from Blue called a Mikey.

The thing plugs into the business end of pretty much any iPod, not just the iPhone, and uses the power from the iPod.

After testing it I knew it gave better quality than the built in iPhone mic, and in stereo too!

The Mikey can also be set to three different gain levels depending on if you are at a heavy metal concert or trying to record the philosophy lecture from the back of the class. We set it in the middle position when recording in restaurants and it picks us up and all the clatter of dishes and chatter of people around us at a good level.

Next I decided to look around the iTunes app store to see if there was a better app to control the mic. The FiRe field recorder was $9.99 but well worth it. I don’t know how but it improved the quality of the sound with the Mikey mic and gave many different file types to export as and three levels of quality to choose from.

It also displays the input level while recording so you know it’s not too loud or quiet.

The Voice Memo app does that but I like how the FiRe app looks better.

Then I discovered the “Blue FiRe” app. Only released on Nov 6 2009 and FREE! It doesn’t have as many of the file types and options available (like ogg vorbis) as the $9.99 app has but it has everything I want.

The way to get your audio file off the iPod/iPhone is a bit odd: you connect the iPhone or iPod to the same Wi-Fi network as the computer you wish to transfer it to. Then the iPhone tells you to go to a web address on the computer that looks like this:

http://10.0.1.7:53237/

It chooses different numbers for the last five each time.

You can then wirelessly transfer the file to your main computer in an AIFF, WAVE or CAF file type.

I use WAVE set at medium quality.

If there was no wi-fi around I’m not sure how one would get the data into your computer. I don’t think there is any way to do it by connecting them with the iPod cable.

So that was the whole recording bit handled. We record live at the restaurant with the iPhone/Mikey on the table in front of us, and I use the iPhone camera to snap shots of the food, menu and restaurant to add to the podcasts and breakfast website pages later. The iPhone together with the Blue Mikey and the free FiRe app makes a nice little package for field recording.

I dump the medium quality audio file into Garageband and the pictures into iPhoto where I tweak them a bit.

The iPhone always seems to underexpose a bit and the colour always needs a kick up. A bit of sharpening too.

In Garageband ‘09 (Ver 5.1) I used the pre-existing loops and sound effects to make a ten second stager/intro and then I dump the audio file from Andrew and I prattling on at the restaurant into the podcast track.

By the way, Garageband comes with a PodCast project template

which has tracks set up already for Jingles and voices. Awesome.

The top “Podcast Track” is where you put the pictures from iPhoto. They of course should coincide with what is being discussed at the moment but sometimes I just chuck them in randomly. When Andrew says “Coffee” there is usually a picture of the cup in the podcast. I don’t know how many people on average take full advantage of this “augmented” slideshow podcast style, but we will keep on doing it anyway.

With the Podcast all done I then go to the “Share to iWeb” button built into Garageband. This sends it right to iWeb and creates a new entry for this podcast and all following podcasts. This is what is so great about Apple software. It is very friendly with itself. (Not like that you dirty minded human.) One can take audio from iTunes and use it for a slideshow in iPhoto. Photos in iPhoto are easily accessible within iWeb and Garageband. Movies made in iMovie with audio from iTunes or Garageband can be watched and organized in iPhoto and then burned onto media with iDVD. Take that PC! I don’t think anything in the Windows world allows for such easy manipulation of your sounds and pictures. And it comes included in every Mac! Alright; I’m done cheerleading now.

iWeb has a PodCast template built in, so I used that.

When you give your $99 for a yearly MobileMe account (it used to be called .Mac) you get another email account and 20 GB of online storage for your most precious files (just in case your house burns down and your computer and all the back up drives are destroyed). You also get the ability to share photos within iPhoto and Aperture in Web Galleries. This is very useful when you need to get 100 pictures to Australia in an hour. I have done this. MobileMe saved my ass. But more importantly for our experiment; MobileMe gives us web hosting.

I set up MobileMe hosting within iWeb by clicking on File, and “Set up personal domain on MobileMe”. I had purchased a domain for $9.99 from Netfirms previously. Oh, and if anyone tells you if costs $50 or something to buy a name for your website they are totally full of shit and trying to rip you off. You can get them from GoDaddy or Netfirms or a million other places and they are $10 per year, or cheaper if you buy three years up front.

You have to enter in that MobileMe is hosting your site in the Netfirms Control Panel: Domain Manager. The CNAME box is where it goes. Except that Netfirms’ control panel is confusing and my podcast website ended up being www.breakfastwinnipod.com/brekpod/home/home or some nonsense like that. I could never figure out how to get it to just be www.breakfastwinnipod.com when you were at the home page. Annoying.

So at this point the podcast was actually up on the net and accessible through the MobileMe hosted website and it looked pretty good. (See image) You could download each episode individually or hit a button and subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, but I had not told iTunes about it yet. No problem. I went to the iTunes store, hit podcasts, and hit the button “Submit Podcast”. Then it asked for the Podcast Feed URL. I wasn’t exactly sure what to give it so I gave it the address of the MobileMe hosted website. That didn’t work. So I got a bright idea and copied the link associated with the button “Subscribe in iTunes” and it worked! It turns out they want an address with “feed” or “rss” in it. So they accepted the feed and hooray!

A day later I went searching about in the iTunes store for my podcast by entering “Breakfast” and “Winnipeg”. which reminded me of a previous life using JellyCast and PodBean to host another podcast. Where were the keywords? I had not told Garageband or iWeb or MobileMe about any adjectives to describe the podcast. Hmmm... Then I found the podcast. It had the generic purple podcast image where my nice logo I designed should have been. Grrr... Also there was a problem with the labels and descriptions of the podcast in the iTunes page. Grrr... I went back to Garageband, iWeb and MobileMe and searched for hours for a button I had not found to re-enter some info and also get iTunes to recognize the proper podcast logo. Nothing.

I figured I would try another podcast hosting service. I found Podcast Machine

from Denmark which seemed pretty cool, had stats (something iTunes and MobileMe did not supply easily) and had a very decent free package. Lots of memory and bandwidth! During this poking around the net and banging my head into ignorance I also discovered FeedBurner

and Feed Validator and was trying to reconcile all the parts into one nice package. Frustrating.

I sent a message to iTunes to cancel the previous MobileMe hosted pod feed. (I had also completely screwed up the connection between MobileMe and Netfirms by trying to repair the unnecessarily long web address problem. Now it didn’t work at all. All the CNAME and forwarding options in Netfirms confused the hell out of me.) Then I sent iTunes a NEW pod feed from Podcast Machine. Everything seemed better.

The Danes had told me to submit the AAC feed to iTunes if it was an “augmented podcast” which it was. That means I had pictures going along with the audio like a slideshow. (Remember Garageband from above?) Problem was that the new iTunes podcast did not display the slideshow.

Also, from the playing around with FeedBurner and Feed Validator I was slowly learning about XML. XML is code that describes your podcast to iTunes and other podcast aggregators on the net with titles, subtitles, short descriptions and long descriptions and those pesky keywords.

It was slowly dawning on me that I would need a third option. An option that would allow me to control the XML directly so that I could ensure everything was in order. I am, after all, a control freak. So I put out a help signal to all my friends. Karina, of Hole in the Wall hosting, pointed me towards Podcast Generator.

She said she would host the whole thing for me since she already is hosting the main BreakfastWinnipeg.com website. It’s open source. It’s not as pretty as the iWeb page, but it gives me control.

I had finally learned my lesson. Setting up again, I put all the podcast audio files into the new PodGen page. I had to tell Garageband to export the podcast in an AAC format to a file folder instead of sending them directly to iTunes (meaning my OWN iTunes music collection on my computer) or sending them to iWeb. The podcast files actually end up as m4a files not mp3 files. (mp3s are audio ONLY. No pictures.) So then I got the new podcast feed from the newly hosted PodGen site and fed that to FeedBurner.

This is the trick. Feedburner takes the XML from your original feed and adds all the good stuff like logos, who the author is, copy-write info etc... and spits it back out onto the web where hopefully more than just iTunes can pick it up. It can customize the feed for iTunes too but I’m also under the impression that it controls the XML for the rest of the world who don’t own iPods and use iTunes. Plus it has stats built in. I love stats!

So there it is. I think it’s finally good. The major FeedBurner gives me, since the XML coming out of Podcast Generator is tip top, is stats. Fine. The reason I know the XML is tip top from PodGen is that I ran it through Feed Validator and it came back with only one error, and that error was minimal. Interestingly enough the FeedBurner feed has several errors. Nuts. These errors have not revealed themselves to be a problem in any way. Yet.

One thing that is odd is the logos in iTunes. When the title of the podcast is selected an older “coffee” logo appears.

I don’t know why. This third and last iteration of making the podcast only had the newer “piggy” logo involved, not the coffee logo. When an individual podcast is selected then the proper “piggy” logo appears. Odd.

Maybe it’s because the iTunes store was given three podcasts with nearly identical information and content.

So everything seems to be running well right now. The two previous breakfast podcasts are still hanging around the iTunes store, but they will hopefully be removed shortly.

So the conclusion is that Apple handles everything wonderfully except for the hosting. It’s a pity the iWeb podcast site couldn’t get used, it looked great. My advice is to use Podcast Generator and get your local web host to serve it for you and then put the feed through FeedBurner to handle stats and further distribution.

I also just discovered a site called Odeo where you can submit a feed and hopefully some more listeners can find the podcast and subscribe.

Update: I learned you should send a note to iTunes from the actual podcast page in question

. Hit “Report a Concern” and select “Remove Podcast” then tell them it is yours and you would like it removed. There. That should take care of it. I also deleted all the episodes from Podcast Machine and told iTunes to delete the two previous podcasts. Phew.

Update: iTunes caught on that the original MobileMe podcast feed is dead and emailed me a letter saying the podcast was “rejected”. It is now gone from the iTunes store. Good.

Also after debuting with 17 subscribers in the first three days of (re) launching the podcast we have now dwindled to 9 subscribers only a week later. Sad. I don’t know what other podcast stats are like but sheesh if that isn’t a kick in the pants of my ego. Almost half of the listeners (apparently) signed up, listened to some podcasts, and then quit. Do we suck?

Also: when looking at this page in Internet Explorer, I discovered none of the wrap-arounds work and the whole body of text shoots off the bottom of the page. Curse you IE!

Voice Memo App

Mikey microphone

Blue FiRe field recorder

Garageband

Podhosting web page in iWeb

Our wonderful site host