Podcasting

I did my first podcast this week. It took me hours to produce a 13-minute piece. A lot of the time was researching and selecting creative commons-licensed music for bumpers between segments, and a substantial part of it was finding and learning to use some audio-editing software (Apple’s Garage Band sucks for this, but there’s an open source program called audacity that’s pretty easy to use and does exactly what I need it to do. Still, to compile it and all its dependencies on my laptop today took an hour or two. Anyway, the podcast can be found here with all its warts and boils. It’s a dull work podcast, so don’t get too excited unless you’re interested in what I’m doing for work. Getting up to speed on all of this was rough, but from here on out, I think it’ll be easier, and it’s a somewhat more lively medium for delivering content than blogging is. While I think I can communicate more clearly and eloquently in written words the things I want to say, it takes me a while and loses some of the tonal nuance I hear in my head as I write things. And if you don’t overproduce it, I think podcasts stand to be a quicker way of generating off-the-cuff content, if a less polished way for microphonophobes like me. I’m thinking very hard about supplementing portions of this blog with podcasts. It’ll be easier for me to record a quick 30-second blurb about Lennie than to sit down and dread having to stitch together a month’s worth of updates. I’ll feel less self-conscious about producing a mediocre podcast than writing a mediocre post, perhaps because the podcast is more transitory and less open to scrutiny. My ever-discriminating audience is more likely to forgive a vocal blunder than a written one. There are some things I’ve written in particular that I’d like to capture vocally, as they’re definitely more alive in my head than they are on the computer screen.