Last Chance to Blog

This is my last chance to blog for credit this quarter. I got so busy working on podcasts and videos in the last few weeks that blogging had to take second place, and that translated into not blogging at all. Last night I finished the first and second versions of our group podcast and now I’m waiting for feedback from my group before adding images for an enhanced podcast. I’ve got a few minutes this morning before heading up to Kirkland to teach an all-day video class, so I’m going to blog about whatever pops into my head.

It seems to me that there really is no ideal software for creating podcasts. My brief experiment with Audacity made me crazy because I found I could not accurately navigate around the timeline, due to the fact that the playhead disappears when you hit pause. I do a huge amount of razor sharp trimming and volume adjustment, so I need the playhead to stop on a dime while I’m listening and remain visible so I can see where I am.

GarageBand is pretty good for doing precise edits and it’s certainly wonderful to have all those loops available, right there in the same program, for adding music and sound effects. I actually have all of the Jam Packs, so I’ve got thousands and thousands of loops to choose from.

I discovered the biggest drawback to GarageBand when I got feedback from my group on my first version of the South Lake Union Walking Tour. A couple of people wanted me to add new material or re-do sections of the narration that would have expanded the timeline. Because my podcast is made up of hundreds of individual voice, music and sound effects clips, this would have meant moving all of these to make room for the new material. There’s no problem doing this, except for the fact that I also have scores and scores of volume and pan keyframes that are associated with all these clips.

In Garageband, you place keyframes on the track, not on the clips. This means that when you move a clip, the keyframes that control its volume and panning do not move with it. You must move these or else delete them and re-do them at the new clip location. This is different from other editing software, such as Final Cut Pro, in which keyframes are placed in clips themselves and so move with them. Adobe Premier actually gives you the choice to adjust volume (and perhaps panning as well) either in clips or on tracks, or in both.

Of course Final Cut Pro and Premier are video, not audio editing platforms. Nevertheless, I almost wish I’d edited our group project in FCP. Not only would I have the freedom to expand the timeline and add new material freely, without worrying about moving keyframes, but I’d also have access to FCP’s fairly sophisticated audio filters, including a Notch Filter that lets you EQ out a precise spectrum of sound frequencies. This can be handy for getting rid of, say, the whine of an air conditioner without losing too much of similar frequencies in people’s voices that you want to hear.

And of course any professional sound engineer would tell me that I need to be using ProTools. But ProTools is quite expensive and I’ve heard that it’s somewhat difficult to learn. For most podcasters, I’d think ProTools is probably overkill. Then there’s Apple’s Logic, which is probably comparable to ProTools in sophistication as well as difficulty.

So, it seems like there is a great opportunity for someone to develop the perfect podcasting platform – somewhere between GarageBand and ProTools. Or perhaps the folks at Apple could improve GarageBand with podcasters in mind. The most important thing they could do, as I indicated above, is provide the option to place volume and panning keyrames within clips rather than (or in addition to) placing them on the tracks.

When I get home from teaching tonight, I plan to start work on the enhanced podcast version of our group project, with graphics and still photos to illustrate the audio. I am definitely not planning to do this in GarageBand, even though Garageband provides a track for images. Confident in Final Cut Pro’s capabilities for manipulating images, this where I will be finishing our podcast.

Digital Folklife

I don’t have much to say about digital technology this weekend, having spent most of the last three days at the Folklife Festival. Except for a conspicously out-of-place (but very popular) Wii-Fit booth, there wasn’t a whole lot at the festival that reminded me that we live in a digital age. For hours and hours in a crowd of thousands, I hardly saw anyone talking on a cellphone and absolutely no one tapping away at a laptop.

Very much in evidence, by contrast, was the multi-culturalism and internationalism of our era. I floated happily from culture to culture as I drifted around the Seattle Center. I also saw what seemed like every type of human being mingling, dancing and playing music together. There were strange combinations and juxtapositions, such as a dreadlocked guitarist and mohawked punk playing together in a traditional Irish band, a huge white woman in her late sixties leading an African highlife and reggae band, and a little East Indian man dancing ecstatically by himself, first to a bluegrass combo, then to a Greek band, then to a Flamenco ensemble.

It was nice to be able to take home CDs from virtually any band I saw — even from many of the buskers. I was entranced by a playful jug band from Eugene, OR, called the Blair Street Mugwumps, who dressed in dirty clothing and played dirty blues and fun old-time music on washtub bass, ukeleles, kazoo and musical saw. I bought their $5 CD, not expecting much, but found it to be a very well-recorded live performance that almost perfectly reproduced what I heard at the festival.

I was also fascinated by a group of buskers called “Abandon Ship” from Santa Cruz, CA, who looked like homeless punk teenagers and played original polka songs on accordion, banjo and washtub bass. Their home-made, hand-labeled CD was also excellent. Talking to the bass player, I learned that they are in the middle of a Northwest Tour, which consists of playing for tips at various street fairs, farmers markets and house parties around the region, and staying at the homes of other small bands they have met through Myspace.

Except for an ugly vibe on Saturday that culminated in three people getting wounded by a nut with a gun, the festival was wonderful. It’s been a while since I heard so much laughter and saw so many people enjoying such simple pleasures. It’s also quite surprising, in this day and age, to find out how many people actually still know how to square dance.

Back to the Cracker Barrel

After a long period of skepticism about the South Lake Union streetcar line, I had a major change of heart the first time I actually saw the three streetcars parked in their barn, awaiting their inauguaral run. What won me over — and actually shocked me — was the fact that they had NO ADS on them! Although they were a far cry from the picturesque old Seattle Waterfront Streetcar, they pleased me with their sleek modern lines, fun colors and, most of all, a feeling of PURITY and singleness of purpose that I could only attibute to their not being rolling billboards.

I am an enthusiastic proponent of public transportation, and yet I grimace almost every time a Seattle city bus rolls into sight, because it forces me to contemplate some giant, univited advertising message.

Mitch Joel points out that the Advertising Era is but a tiny “blip in the history of the world,” but from my perspective it feels like it has been around for a very long time. Looking at photos of cities in 1900, with billboards and placards crowding every wall and public conveyance, I feel like little has changed, except that advertising has found ways to seep ever deeper into the crevices of our lives.

In her book “No Logo,” Naomi Kline quotes an anonymous advertising executive who said that consumers “are like roaches – you spray them and spray them and they get immune after a while.” Thus the advertising industy’s need to concoct stronger roach sprays all the time. I hope that Joel is right in suggesting that social media and Web 2.0 may break the established cycles of marketing and usher in a new era of commerce. My eyes are stinging from all that roach spray.

If new media can bring us back to an era when commerce was conducted by people interacting with each other, I will be very happy. I am leery, however, of the possibility that new media will only bring us more pervasive and insidious forms of marketing in the guise of person-to-person interaction.

I love the ability to shop on the Internet, read customer reviews of products and research products by visiting chat rooms and technology blogs. And yet, not long ago, I completely abandoned the Internet when it comes to buying one type of product that is important to me: audio gear. After several bad experiences buying microphones and adaptors that looked great but turned out to be completely wrong for me, I discovered that there is an actual store for professional audio gear, called Pacific Pro Audio, tucked away in the fifth floor of an obscure office building in Queen Anne.

Going in there for the first time, I was shocked to discover a little gang of audio experts, surrounded by all sorts of gear, who were ready to sit down with me and discuss my needs, ask me questions and then pull something out of a drawer or a catalog that was exactly what I wanted. Even if the item only cost $5, they treated me with as much courtesy and interest as if I were buying the most expensive thing they offered.

Going in there now, I feel as if I’m visiting an old time general store, leaning against the counter and chatting with the store keeper, then watching him as he pulls something out of a cracker barrel for me to sample. He never gives me a sales pitch, never pressures me to get on their mailing list or join their club and never offers to “supersize” my order. He just shares his expertise and gets me what I need.

I LOVE DOING BUSINESS THIS WAY! I love it so much that I grab every opportunity to buy something at Pacific Pro, and I reccomend the store enthusiatically to my friends and clients. I consider it a personal mission to bring this company as much business as I can, in hopes that it will never dry up and blow away.

I’m hoping someone will find this blog post in a Google Search and share it with others, starting a little viral marketing campaign. Maybe someone in another business will read this and realize that they ought to be doing business like Pacific Pro. Maybe what I’m doing right now is exactly what Mitch Joel is talking about. If social media and Web 2.0 can bring back some of the best aspects of commerce in the pre-marketing era — the days of the cracker barrel — well, then I think we’ll really be getting somewhere.

PodPower to the People!

This week’s readings got me fired up about the egalitarian aspects of podcasting. It really is incredible that we have this new medium in which anyone can say anything they want to an unlimited audience around the world. What a slap in the face of corporate media, who have enjoyed such a monopoly on information, opinion and entertainment for so long! It’s also wonderful that the prevailing trend in podcasting is toward an informal, honest style.

I was struck by a section of the Business Podcasting book in which the author included producing “infomercials” in his recipe for failure in podcasting. I am a person who is allergic to advertising — even the “suggestive selling” of a waiter in a restuarant makes my nose start to twitch — so I appreciate the fact that even businesses have recognized that when podcasting, they need to put away the big drill they usually use to bore into people’s brains.

In my career as a producer of corporate and organizational videos, I’ve always used and advocated a style based on documentary film, using interviews rather than scripted voice-overs and candid footage rather than staged scenes. I realize that my ultimate goal is to produce propaganda, but I feel that this style forces both me and my clients to approach the ideas or products we are promoting in a more honest and down-to-earth manner than we would in a strictly advertising style. I’m glad to see this same approach becoming widespread in business podcasting.

The list of leading podcasts in the genres chapter of “Tricks of the Podcasting Masters” book is really intriguing. I definitely want to listen some of these fun-sounding podcasts. I think I’ll have a few minutes of free time to do this, oh, maybe in late August. Yikes!

Podcasting Therapy

Yesterday during a long commute I was staring out the bus window at a lot of ugly new condominium buildings. Rather than just brooding, as I usually do, about the low state of contemporary architecture, and getting depressed, as I often do, about the state of contemporary culture, or heck, the whole state of the world (why not?) — instead, I started composing a fantasy podcast about these subjects in my head. I started imagining all sorts of wry things I might say and various sound effects and voice impressions I might do to lampoon various subjects.

Hopefully my lips weren’t moving too much while I was doing this, but I found the mental exercise to be sort of comforting. It soothed me to realize that instead of just thinking cynical thoughts all the time, I could actually speak them out loud to the world! And that some people might actually listen! I’m not sure that I will actually do any of this, but just the idea that I can if I want to, thanks to this rather extraordinary new medium of podcasting, gave me a sense of freedom and even a little hope.

The next time I see one of those angry people talking to themselves loudly on the street, I’ll be tempted to walk up to them and say, “Hey! Did you ever think about starting a podcast?”