When you start doing something like a podcast, you quickly discover that there is a whole new world of technical skill that you have taken for granted. Audio engineering has been around since the dawn of radio, but no one thinks much about it. We just expect radio to sound a certain way and audio for TV and movies to sound a certain way. Probably the closest we come to thinking about it is when stetting up a home theater or adding a sub-woofer to the sound system. Otherwise, there is no reason to think about it.
Start doing a podcast and you are suddenly made aware of this hidden world. One of the things on my 2019 list is to learn more about this dark art, in order to make the show sound better and more professional. I just acquired some new gear this week and this is the first show applying some new skills. Removing background noise or “room sound” is something I have added to the skillset. I also got better at removing those little breaths you can sometimes hear as I’m reading something from a news story of post.
Doing the editing with quality headphones was a learning experience. When I did that, I realized that the final product sounds a lot different to what comes from the speakers on my computer. They say headphones give a better sound quality, but I’ve never liked listening to anything through headphones. It’s why I use bone induction headsets for travel. Most people probably consume podcasts through headphones, so I figure I should optimize the sound for that way of listening to audio.
Another thing I’ve learned by listening through headphones is the stinger, that little explosion sound at the end of segments, sounds terrible. Through speakers, it sounds fine, but through headphones ti is awful. This weekend I will be auditioning new stinger clips for the show. Since the software I use allows for the creation of sound effects, I’ll use this as an opportunity to figure out how that works. There’s free stuff on YouTube, but not all of it is high quality. I can figure out how to make my own sounds this way.
This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below. I have been de-platformed by Spotify, because they feared I was poisoning the minds of their Millennial customers.
This Week’s Show
Contents
- 00:00: Opening
- 02:00: End Parliament To Save Democracy (Link) (Link) (Link)
- 12:00: Yellow Vest Evolution (Link)
- 22:00: Good News From Italy (Link) (Link)
- 32:00: Bad News From Venezuela (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link)
- 42:00: El Desastre (Link)
- 47:00: Defending German Democracy (Link)
- 52:00: The Bongos Of Gabon (Link)
- 57:00: Closing (Link)
Direct Download, The iTunes Page, Google Play Link, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed
Full Show On Spreaker
Full Show On YouTube
https://youtu.be/p3yghmvnvsk
Great stuff Z ! Nice to hear what’s going on in the other parts of the world. Stopped watching the news a long time ago. Nowadays it’s just all “orange man bad ” 24/7
Interesting times in Venezuela. Had no idea the Russians were down there. Then again they need oil too , right ? 🙂
I liked your closing remarks about Gabon. The problem is just like in the 1840s, Africa has lots of raw material big ‘pale face’ companies want to get for pennies (UDC and OPEX to produce a barrel of crude in the North Sea and GOM is more than double what you get in the gulf of guinea). They prefer interfering with these countries by propping up crazy dictators that will provide this service thus creating the migration of the ‘smart fraction’ legally and the dumb exasperated ones via the desert.
African countries aren’t real entities like what exists elsewhere and they need to be left alone to evolve organically. Whether they will be as successful as Asian countries is debatable but at least the migration of its people will halt and surely reverse and you wouldn’t need to fear an invasion of ‘lower folk’ anymore. As nice as Europe and the US are, a lot of the Africans living abroad will prefer to go back if their countries provided the sort of life people in Malaysia or Indonesia have (Not even Western standard).
These countries were set up for trading convenience by various large corps in collusion with their home governments. The current leaders just inherited that mess and we are here. When these things were set up, the USA was three months away and now it’s 15 hrs away.
Your blog should say this more often…Big corporations (read Total in Gabon’s case)+ its own government should stop interfering with these people and we’d see the states fail and organic ones rise in their stead.
Z… I’m about 50/50 listening to the podcast in my car or earbuds. The thing that gets me the most is the transitional ‘boom’ between segments. If I’m really focused on your line of thought the boom startles me. I recall once you used a horse whinny as a transition…I was driving in traffic and flinched thinking some redneck sure has realistic sound effects for his truck horn. If you make changes the bridge between segments is a possibility. Otherwise your style, tone of voice, content, etc are all pure Z and you shouldn’t touch it. In other words you sound normal.
Zman check out Late Night Linux for an example of home studio podcasting. IIRC they do not use stingers or pauses.
The new stinger is much better. I used to cringe whenever the old one hit.
Speaking of NATO. Saw an article about a week or so ago. I had to read one section twice because one of the voiced reasons for staying in Germany was that it was increasingly threatened by illiberal Poland and Hungary. I guess the Polish and Hungarian steppe nomads are preparing to rampage into the German heartland.
The problem is Germany has no military to speak since Merkel took over. Their soldiers practice with broom sticks, ships can’t go to sea and their aircraft are hangar bound.
They spend a lot but have nothing to show for it. Makes me wonder where the money is going
Bottom line, they basically could be overrun by a couple thousand infantry.
Stingers were slways too loud and low on relatively cheap car speakers. Wife has tinnitus so even worse. Clown car is way too loud for same reason
It would be cool to hear you spend five minutes on Australias politics sometime. We have a rapidly growing African crime problem which simply didn’t exist ten years ago and the progs are breathtaking in their mendacity and gas lighting on the topic
Oh, and they want to change the national holiday as they call it “invasion day”. I know were small beer but some interesting varieties of poz out here..
The population of OZ is actually less than the population of Texas. Or about the same as my home state of Ohio and the neighboring state of Pennsylvania.
The population of Nigeria…190 million.
Speaks to z’s point of “how many” from a few days ago doesn’t it?
Big fan of the blog and the podcast. I was actually just about to send a comment about production values. I live in the vibrancy of NYC, and listen to your podcast on the subway to work. Sometimes it’s difficult to hear what you’re saying. Not sure if you’re able to boost the volume on your end. Or maybe I just need better earphones.
That’s good to know. I’ve often thought my volume was too low as well, but I have no way really knowing. I can boost the volume easily.
I usually full download the podcast to an older tablet and play it out through the aux in my pickup while driving. The only time I saw the volume go too low was when you’d do a little vocal aside, usually in the form of a comment while reading an article. But then, I have lousy hearing so any drop is noticed.
The Stinger is way better. It used to be the reverse of the vocal aside where it would blast out almost to pain level. Whatever you did there it’s far superior.
“Rescue Ships”
Exactly – boats paid for by globalist billionaires trying their absolute best to destroy Europe and what’s left of Western Civilization.
Sounds good. Both the way it do now and what you’re trying to do.
That said, please remain mindful of the Fagen-Becker scale when it comes to this sort of autism.
Off topic: In one tweet the entire worthless nature of classical liberals and lolbertarians is exposed. Threatening disbarring for daring to act against the SPLC. But they won’t ban Mr. Popehat for what is a blatant example of “targeted harassment”
https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1085617674502037504
Completely off topic… Yesterday went to see the optometrist for a long overdue exam and another set of glasses. She was late coming back from an errand, so had to sit around for a while. In the last couple years her front office staff is now completely Hispanic. 8 or 9 people came in while I was sitting there. None left. It was the fucking Food Lion deli counter in action. Incredible amounts of chatter, rushing around, asking for forms to be filled out, then again, a few arguments about insurance. Everyone was zipping abut and busy. But. Nothing. Got. Done. The same batch of patients and customers were still milling around when I left. Thankfully I used the wait time to pick a new pair in advance, and kept one gal focused enough to write it up and got out.
The Latin Way. It is one of those things that people in Latin America know all about and learn to navigate around. In America, our worldly rulers know nothing about it.
My standing optometrist appointment is first appointment the day before Thanksgiving. Everyone wants no delays. Brisk efficiency is the order of the day.
Your stinger makes my old car’s speakers buzz in the worst way. I hope you changed that effect to something less dramatic. (It doesn’t bother me on headphones.) Just don’t use that gay bleep-bleep the Derb use.
Production wise, I’ve never had any issue with your podcasts. Or otherwise.
I would make any changes “evolutionary” in nature. You have a defined and distinctive “voice” (which gets into tone, pacing, word choice, time blocking, all of it), and you don’t want to lose it. Consultants always want their clients to throw out a bunch of stuff that doesn’t go “by the book”, and then something important is lost. Don’t fall into that trap.
About 15 minutes in. Since you specifically mentioned production values…I noticed that some of the edits now have a half second or so of absolute, dead silence. It’s actually enormously distracting and makes it hard to focus on the content.
Just a friendly note from a long-term, hardcore reader/listener.
Interesting. The advice from the professionals is to “silence” the pauses, which is what I did and shortened them to a half second or less. I used to just minimize them so you could still hear something, but it was very faint.
One thing I have been wondering is if these things can be too polished. That is, they stop sounding like a normal person talking in the normal way.
Actually had that thought… I find that here I prefer the unpolished natural format, which I think you do very well, and dovetails neatly with your prose style (so it’s easy to ‘hear’ your voice and cadence as I read).
Was also bothered by a couple of significant changes in volume, which isn’t normally a problem.
The old way wasn’t broke; don’t fix it.
A half second? Dead time a half second bothers you to distraction? What an unbelievable attention span. Get a grip.