Not to be overshadowed by Rita Hayworth and Gilda, the latest Eat This Podcast also looks into The Swedish Conundrum.
What are Swedes getting when they open a tin of “ansjovis”? Not anchovies. Or at least, not Engraulis encrasicolus.
A space for mostly short form stuff and responses to things I see elsewhere.
2024-08-16
Audio cleanup
1 min read
Editing audio, you accumulate so much cruft it is amazing. Out-takes, duplicates, alternative mixes etc etc. You pretend you might come back to them. But you don't. Eventually you decide to save only the final mix and the sound files it needs, and you spend about 90 minutes doing every podcast from 2014, and you reduce the size of that archive from 21.3GB to 9.1GB and that is a good thing.
2015 can wait.
2021-10-01
International Coffee Day
1 min read
It's #InternationalCoffeeDay2021, the whole point of which is promotion, right? So here's a link to all previous episodes of Eat This Podcast on coffee https://www.eatthispodcast.com/coffee/
How Long Should a Podcast Be?
1 min read
Podnews has a piece that many podcasters could usefully read. The bit that resonated was this quote from Roman Mars:
If you have 100,000 listeners and you edit out one useless minute you are saving 100,000 wasted minutes in the world. You’re practically a hero.
Not quite a hero, I can at least count myself a mini-hero.
2018-12-10
1 min read
New podcast episode out now, tasting the delights of Nürnberger lebkuchen, at https://www.eatthispodcast.com/lebkuchen/
2018-05-17-02
1 min read
If you're looking for a really good introduction to the #IndieWeb and insights into how it all works, you could do a lot worse than listen to . They do a tip-top job of explaining for people less knowledgeable than they are, and the audio quality is very acceptable.
Owning my audio clips
3 min read
In the past couple of days, prompted by Marty McGuire's write-up, I raved about the potential of Audiogram to help promote the podcast by making it easier to share audio clips to social media -- by turning them into video clips. This afternoon, having managed to get tomorrow's episode edited early, and having had to chop quite a few interesting digressions, I thought I would have a serious play.
Tl;dr: It worked. I'd show you here, but I haven't found an easy way to upload video to Known yet. If you want to see the result, you can go to Patreon right now.
Installing Audiogram was not entirely plain sailing. Marty used Docker, and so despite warnings from other IndieWeb friends, I tried the same. All went well out of the gate, but then fell at the first. Something to do with virtualbox. So I switched to Homebrew and that did the needfull. Even then, though, Audiogram wouldn't start, but the error message made it clear that I needed to update node.js and npm. That done, it still wouldn't start.
Turned out I already had a local server running, via MAMP, and that was getting in the way. Switching off that server, and all was good.
That was two days ago. Today, I tried to use it for serious, and although there were plenty of hiccups along the way, I got there.
The instructions for modifying the theme are very straightforward, and with a bit of trial and error I was able to create a background for any future clips.
Uploading the audio, inserting the caption, all that was dead simple thanks to Audiogram's editor. Actually generating the videos, though, generated error after error, and some of them scrolled through several screens. But I kept my nerve, turned to search engines and StackOverflow and eventually got there.
Some of the fixes seemed to be pure voodoo. There's an invisible file that one of the Audiogram developers suggested deleting. The first time I tried that, it worked beautifully. The second time, not so much. Nor the third. But then, it worked again, at which point I called a halt, for now; a wise decision in my opinion.
I'm looking forward to seeing whether clips will attract listeners to the podcasts in their entirety. I put the first one on Patreon because the episode is not yet public, although Patreons have received it. I'll probably use clips there as bait and see how it goes. Once episodes are public I'll send clips to Twitter and, maybe, Facebook which will, I think make it relatively easy to trace any impact. And if the whole process isn't too hard (getting to the first video uploaded took almost three hours today) then I can imagine it might be useful to promote older epsiodes too, when there is a news peg.
So, grateful thanks to Marty McGuire and WNYC.
"Paying to podcast is so passé"
1 min read
On what planet does live? Their report on Anchor's bid to lure podcasters from SoundCloud says n0thing about whether audio hosted there will be sharable via, say, Huffduffer, which to me was the biggest single problem with SoundCloud as a podcast host.
I would also argue that a promise by Anchor "to cut podcasters in when it starts to earn money" isn't much to go on.
But what do I know?
No. 2 is my favourite
1 min read
Dave Winer offers [three reasons why he will not point to a Facebook post](http://scripting.com/2017/05/31.html#a110526)
No. 2 is my favourite:
> It's supporting their downgrading and killing the web. Your post sucks because it doesn't contain links, styling, and you can't enclose a podcast if you want. The more people post there, the more the web dies. I'm sorry no matter how good your idea is fuck you I won't help you and Facebook kill the open web.