Blog Relations

How iTunes ranks podcasts is a little mysterious, but I think I can confirm that the number of downloads of files – rather than the number of times people check your feed – is what counts. This means, if you want to do well in iTunes, you have to publish regularly, to encourage more downloads. Once a week is probably the minimum.

For a variety of stupid reasons, I was late publishing our latest Storynory episode this week, and we’ve slipped, losing our much prized first ranking in iTunes kids and family in the UK. I hope we will be back up later in the week.

We’ve published regularly every week for a year now, and this is partly why Storynory does reasonably well, and hopefullly will continue to build an audience. So my top tip for iTunes, week in, week out, publish on time.

Interesting to see that Podshow’s slick new site is putting a big emphasis on video, and is calling itself a “media network”. Deeper in, you’ll find that a lot of the content comes from “across the net” i.e. from YouTube. In the UK Podshow has teamed up with BT and is looking for video-on-demand talent.

We still believe that there’s a lot of demand for audio – it’s a very special medium – but there just isn’t enough top-quality speech talent in podcating.

At the minute video is hot even when it’s crap, but soon quality will rise to the top. It’s the same with audio. People will try out cheap and easy podcasts and then stop subscribing. You have to aim to be up with the best of them – and that means the BBC and NPR. It means a lot of time, thought, and effort and little up-front reward. This is essentially the story of why the indies are losing out in the podcasting wars and moaning about it over on Britcaster.

I am sitting in the lobby of my Seattle hotel with a beautiful MacBook Pro on my lap, kindly lent to me by Exbiblio on Monday. For the past 20 years I have been a PC / Windows user, but already I am looking with a scornful eye at the Compaqs and Dells of the other hotel guests. The Mac is a beautiful (expensive) and quite possibly elitist machine, and I love it. BUT, and this is a big but, I can’t for the life of me find a decent audio editor that runs on the Mac.

For my money, Sony Sound Forge (review) is the best sound editor in the world. Adobe Audition is the choice of many sound engineers. But neither have Mac editions. This is a huge gap waiting to be filled – surely. I’m trying to get to grips wth Apple’s Garage Band when I wake up from jet lag at 3am, but it just baffles me. Audacity is free, and I hate to knock it because it’s a noble effort, but its interface is horrible.

What makes Sound Forge so good? It’s the fact that you can place markers in your sound wave at the beginning at end of a region you want to select. You just double click between the markers to block that portion of the wave, and then cut or copy or transform or whatever. If you’ve ever tried scrolling back and forth along a sound wave you will know how easy it is to lose your place. Nobody else has made editing a wave as convenient as this.

My Sony Hi-MD (mini disc) kicked the bucket somewhat prematurely. It chews and chews on a disc without engaging. I suppose the mechanism got mangled on one of my trans-Atlantic flights. I had to drag myself into the modern recording age and invest 300 quid in a flash recorder, AND stump up another 25 for an SD memory card. And do you know what? It was worth it.

The Edirol R-09 by Roland of seventies synthesizer fame won’t win any prizes in a beauty contest. It looks more like an electric shaver than a digital recorder – but that hasn’t stopped me falling in love with it. I’m suspicious of in-built microphones, but those silver grills on the top are pretty good – fine for journalistic notes at any rate. The plastic record and play buttons are big and chunky, but they are dead easy to use without reference to the manual. Even someone like me who is all thumbs and struggles to send a text message can use them with ease. There are buttons on the back for mono or stereo, automatic recording levels, etc. Volume controls are on the side. In other words, you can do most things without scrolling through a menu on the LCD screen. Transfer of sound onto the laptop is a doddle. You plug it into the USB and it becomes an external disc. I just open up SoundForge on my computer and start editing away. I have a 2 Gig SD card so it holds several hours of audio.

And what about the quality? It records in mp3 or WAV, the latter being uncompressed and very high quality indeed. It’s 24 bit, which is ample. You might want more bits for recoding the Boston Philharmonic, but short of that it will do for most things. I find it works best with my microphone routed into the sound mixer via the Line In. When I plugged my Sure SM58 directly into the R-09 I got a certain amount of hiss. Not much, but discernible. Perhaps the impedance does not quite match (or some such technical guff). Edirol recommend buying one of their own external condenser mics, but they would say that, wouldn’t they. I might try a transformer. I would hate to buy yet another mic for out and about interviews, but it might come to that…