Not hav­ing had much expe­ri­ence with audio pro­duc­tion, record­ing the Perth Web Stan­dards Group pre­sen­ta­tions involved a bit of a learn­ing curve.

Based on some excel­lent advice from the other WSG city groups, we man­aged to get a pretty good result, so I thought I’d share some of the tips and also things I learnt the hard way. While there are a lot of blog posts and arti­cles online about record­ing a pod­cast, most are geared towards cre­at­ing a record­ing for release, sit­ting with a head­set in front of your com­puter, not record­ing a live pre­sen­ta­tion where there are lots of exter­nal fac­tors to con­sider. Max­ine Sher­rin pre­sented to the Syd­ney Web Stan­dards Group on the topic of pod­cast­ing an event, based on her expe­ri­ences with Web Essen­tials 05 — and yes, a record­ing of that pre­sen­ta­tion is avail­able from the WSG. My method is more the small scale seat-of-your-pants style record­ing, how­ever, and is more suited to small events like user groups and small lectures.

There’s an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion between “pod­cast­ing” and “mak­ing an MP3 file avail­able”. A pod­cast (and I’m not really lik­ing that term, but any­way) is an audio enclo­sure made avail­able through an RSS feed. As the Web Stan­dards Group takes care of the RSS bit, all I’m really con­cerned with here is get­ting the audio recorded.

Equip­ment

To record the pre­sen­ta­tions, I used a Sony mini­disc recorder. I had a unit that I paid an exor­bi­tant amount of money for about 6 years ago when MP3 play­ers were still a major nov­elty and the iPod still a twin­kle in Mr Jobs’ eye. The built-in recharge­able bat­tery on my recorder was long dead, but it had a caddy for a sin­gle AA bat­tery and that was still work­ing fine. I was pretty stoked to have found a new use for the poor thing, which had been sit­ting in its box unused for at least the last four years. Newer ver­sions of the same unit are sig­nif­i­cantly cheaper — I found one for sale online for AUD $99 brand new. There’s also a new type of media that stores 1GB (the old ones have the same capac­ity as a stan­dard CD).

I bought a Sony tie/lapel micro­phone for the princely sum of $30. I don’t know if that’s bot­tom or top of the range, as it was the only one they had a Dick Smith’s, but it’s a Sony so I fig­ured it must be ok and the results were very good. It didn’t come with a bat­tery of course, so that was another $4 (it took a watch/calculator style battery).

While I was at it I invested in a pack of blank mini­discs as they are magneto-optical media and prob­a­bly don’t last for­ever, and mine had been in the box with the unit for a few years. JB Hi-Fi only stocked one type of one brand and only in a 5-pack, so that was another $15. I also made sure I had spare AA bat­ter­ies just in case.

Set­ting up and recording

The speaker clipped the mic onto their shirt and put the mini­disc unit in a pocket. The mini­disc recorder had a ‘lock’ switch so I made sure that was on in case the unit got knocked around in the speaker’s pocket and switched off acci­den­tally. Unfor­tu­nately the on-switch on the back of the mic didn’t have that capa­bil­ity, and one of the speak­ers acci­den­tally turned it off while clip­ping it on, so that’s some­thing to be care­ful of. Before send­ing them on to speak I did a quick record and play­back test to make sure the mic wasn’t being obstructed — in this case I used ear buds to check the record­ing level. Being in a hurry I had one ear plugged in only and couldn’t work out why the first test wasn’t work­ing. Even­tu­ally I realised the ear bud I had plugged in wasn’t work­ing prop­erly, and the other ear bud was ok, and the record­ing was work­ing after all. Minor heart attack averted.

In our case the speak­ers weren’t using an ampli­fied mic. We held our event in the Edith Cowan Uni­ver­sity Tav­ern (we were the only peo­ple in there) and it would have been small enough for the speaker to be heard clearly with­out ampli­fi­ca­tion, except for the very noisy refrig­er­a­tor behind the bar. While this made it a bit of a chal­lenge to hear the speak­ers, par­tic­u­larly one who had a quiet voice, for­tu­nately the noise wasn’t car­ried through to the record­ing. Next time we’re hav­ing the speak­ing part of the event in a lec­ture the­atre close to the tav­ern so we won’t have that prob­lem again.

Both our speak­ers invited ques­tions from the audi­ence both dur­ing and after their pre­sen­ta­tions. On the final pod­casts, some­times you can hear the ques­tion clearly and some­time you can’t, depend­ing on how loud the ques­tioner was and how far they were sit­ting from the speaker. In future, I will make sure the pre­sen­ter repeats the ques­tion for the ben­e­fit of the record­ing — and for the ben­e­fit of the rest of the audi­ence, if the ques­tion was hard to hear.

Because I’m para­noid, I changed the AA bat­tery in the recorder between speak­ers and popped in a fresh mini­disc just in case dis­as­ter occurred and the first record­ing got over­writ­ten with the second.

Digi­tis­ing

I down­loaded Audac­ity, an open source audio appli­ca­tion, to do my audio edit­ing. Trans­fer­ring from the mini­disc recorder to PC was as sim­ple as plug­ging in the cable, hit­ting record in Audac­ity and play on the mini­disc unit.

Based on some advice from other WSG mem­bers, I ran a nor­malise fil­ter (to equalise the vol­ume across the record­ing), then a high pass (to remove excess hiss) and low pass (to remove excess boom). This made the record­ing very quiet, so I nor­malised again. I worked out later that I prob­a­bly shouldn’t have nor­malised before I ran the high and low pass fil­ters but the end result sounded ok to me so I didn’t think it was worth start­ing over.

To ren­der the Audac­ity project down to MP3 I went with a 32kbps bit rate and 16kHz sam­ple rate, as these set­tings seem to be the norm for other pod­casts that I down­loaded. The file sizes seemed pretty rea­son­able — just under 5MB for the 22 minute pre­sen­ta­tion and just over 2MB for the 10 minute pre­sen­ta­tion — so I was happy with that. Finally I added ID3 infor­ma­tion — artist (speaker), album title (Web Stan­dards Group), Genre (Other), Title (pre­sen­ta­tion title), and com­ments (date and loca­tion recorded). Although there’s a thou­sand ways to edit the ID3 tags on an MP3 file I did it straight from the sum­mary tab of the Win­dows file prop­erty dialog.

In con­clu­sion…

I’m pretty happy with the end result. It was sug­gested that as they have record­ing capa­bil­ity it might be eas­ier to record with an iPod, as the file is dig­i­tal to start with. See­ing as I don’t have an iPod and I do have a mini­disc recorder on hand I went with what I had. I’m not sure of the record­ing qual­ity of the iPod or if the record­ing is com­pressed at all to start with — at any rate the mini­disc player pro­duces an out­stand­ing qual­ity record­ing and the process was not dif­fi­cult so I will prob­a­bly con­tinue record­ing WSG pre­sen­ta­tions this way.

Next task was get­ting the tran­script done… but that’s a post for another day.

 

pod­cast­ing audio record­ing