Sew my name into my underwear, I’m going to Podcamp Boston with Bob Goyetche and Julien Smith. Together, we’ll be making the seven hour Montreal-Boston road trip, sharing a hotel room, partying, learning and then travelling home, again.

I have spent some time over the last few days catching up on blog reading and Podcast listening. In the process, I found another gem thanks to Mark Ramsey.

On August 23rd, Mark published an interview with marketing guru, Seth Godin. During the interview, Seth talked about having tried XM satellite radio for a year to “check it out” and remarked that “it doesn’t matter how many stations there are, sooner or later you end up with four.” The same can be said of Podcasting. There is so much to choose from, how can you ensure that your Podcast is one of four in a single subscriber’s aggregator?

Here are my three suggestions to give your Podcast the edge.

FILL A NICHE

There is a niche for everything. This is true of general, open topics to very specific ones. If you are interested in something, chances are good that someone else is, too.

FOCUS

When you plan an episode, be sure that the individual segments are connected in some way so that your listeners can follow the logic of the show. If you try to appeal to everyone through unrelated segments, the sum of the parts will end up turning listeners away.

ENJOY WHAT YOU DO

If you enjoy what you do, you will do it well. More importantly, your listeners will be able to pick up on your energy and are more likely to enjoy what they hear.

I was asked why I use Feedburner. Is it to take advantage of their stats services, explore monetizing opportunites, or perhaps have yet another online account?

The answer is “simplicity”. It’s far easier to explain and remember feeds.feedburner.com/electricsky than electricsky.net/?feeds=rss2 - and many RSS2 feeds are far more complicated than that… muchmusic.com/events/vjsearch06/podcast/podcast.xml. Also, it is far easier for the Podcast Producer to move his or her source feed to any location on the Internet and change their Feedburner URL to pick up the change, than it is to re-educate subscribers to change their subscriptions.

In part 2 of this series, I explained how I do my Clean Edits. In this installment I discuss how I do Blended Edits.

Blended editing is a way of mixing two pieces of audio in a way that creates an even transition from one section to the other. This type of editing is particularly useful when the two pieces of audio have background sound such as a coffee shop, street scene, or the ambience of a room.

Leading the cut

Leader is a piece of audio that precedes or follows the spot where a Clean Edit would normally be. Unlike the Clean Edit, which needs very little or no leader in the cut, Blended Edits require a measurable amount of leader. Ultimately, you’ll need enough leader on both ends to allow for overlap that can be “secretly” blended.

Why not cross fade?

I don’t like the term cross fade because it suggests that the overlapping leaders are faded-out and faded-in at the same rate so that the entire cross fade occurs within the overlap. My experience is that this method produces a noticeable dip in the audio signal where the fades intersect — a telltale sign of an edit. This may be desirable for creative reasons such as scene transitions or mixing two very different types of audio. When uniting two different pieces from the same audio source, you will need to use blending if you wish to disguise the edit.

The art of blending

Blending is an art, not a science. There’s no specific calculation to make it happen. There is a formula that I follow; the fade-in should occur in the first third of the fade-out, and then use your ears. What does that mean in English? Here it is in point form:

• Place the two pieces of audio on separate tracks of the audio-editing software;
• Overlap the leaders;
• Fade out the ending audio from the start of the overlap to the end of the track;
• Fade in the new audio source from the start of the overlap and end roughly 33% of overlap later (note, faster fade-in than fade-out);
• Listen carefully to the edit with your eyes closed (nod to Bruce); and,
• Adjust the blend as necessary, repeating until the blend is your secret.

How much overlap to use depends on how much space you want to have between the outgoing and incoming foreground audio, and how much (or how little) is necessary to hide the edit.

Adjusting the blend

Here are a few pointers for adjusting your blend (try one at a time to understand the results):

• Increase the duration of the fade-in from 33% in small increments;
• Decrease the duration of the fade-in from 33% in small increments; and,
• Increase the overlap, adjusting the initial fade-out/fade-in accordingly.

Practice

The first few of these that you attempt will require some time and patience. Eventually you will figure out how the subtle changes in the blend affect the overall sound and feel of the edit. With a little practice, you will be able to achieve a seamless blend with very few, if any, adjustments.

In part four, I will explore editing decisions for an interview.

Mark Ramsey has posted his view on how radio stations can use Podcasts to attract listeners their radio broadcasts (To Podcast or Not to Podcast).  The idea is to justify the on-air content and advertising dollars without erasing everything by giving it all away on the Internet.  He raised some great points.  However, he missed a key and critical approach.

Mark failed to present the idea of Podcasting behind the scenes content, outtakes and discussions with the Production team.  This approach accomplishes several things.  First and foremost, it will help to build a sense of community between the audience and the team that creates the program - something that the best radio shows have always enjoyed and that the online community craves.  It also creates a two-way relationship between terrestrial and online delivery in which the audience is drawn to both formats since they complement, not compete, with each other.

Apple has decided that it owns the word Pod and it intends to use legal channels to formalize that claim.  For a company that was attempting to demonstrate leadership in the social media movement, it is going out of its way to prove otherwise.

I don’t know the legal system very well and I can’t begin to guess what Apple plans to do if it does win its claim on the word Pod.  I do have to wonder what will happen to everyone who has a Podcast, what kind of damages a dictionary publisher will be on the hook for, and if the RIAA will treat this as an attempt to reverse engineer the book and movie versions of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Source: Paul Colligan

It took two support requests, and, wow!? iTunes emailed me back within an hour of my second support request regarding the ES2 page.? It seems that the problem had to do with the source of the ES2 RSS feed as generated by PodPress, a tool that creates my RSS feeds and provides a media player on my website.? Apparently there is a problem with the way that it handles RSS feeds for category-based Podcasts.? I won’t bore you with the details.

Anyway, this issue is under control now.? If only they could resubscribe everyone they kicked off when they fixed my last problem.

I know that I moaned about iTunes a few weeks ago, so bear with me as I report yet two more problems with the iTunes Music Store and its handling of my Podcasts.

First…? ever since iTunes corrected the Music Store pages for Electric Sky and Just One More Book a few weeks ago, the pages have been updating properly.? However, if you were subscribed to those pages before the problems were corrected, you are no longer subscribed.? That’s right,? the fix killed all of the iTunes subscriptions to those pages.? This means that you have to unsubscribe then resubscribe in order to have a working subscription to the Podcast.

Second… last week I submitted a new iTunes Music Store page for an outtakes feed of Electric Sky called ES2.? Within hours, iTunes had approved the submission and within a few hours of that, page number 179911576 for the ES2 Podcast was live and accurate.? Inexplicably, the page started pointing at the Electric Sky feed a few days later.? I reported the problem to iTunes the day that I made that discovery - Sunday.? I have heard nothing from iTunes on this request so I submitted? a second request today.? I’ll keep you posted.

In part 1 of this series, I explained the two main types of edits that I typically use when producing audio. In this installment I present details about using a Clean Edit on a continuous stream of audio such as a sentence.

Back in the days of audiotape (with apologies to those still using it), editing was done by marking the location of the out and in cuts using a grease pencil on the “outside” of the tape, laying the tape on a cutting block, slicing the tape using a sharp razor and taping the two desired pieces together. To achieve the most seamless edits, the cuts were done at a 45-degree angle. In this way, any imperfection would be masked by the fact that the cut rolled over the playback heads of the tape machine rather than hitting the heads at the same time with a straight cut.

With audiotape, we used our ears to find the best place to make the edit. In the digital world, we can use our ears or our eyes (or both) to find the best place to make the cut.

All digital audio editing software displays a graphical representation of the audio waveform. As with audiotape, we must be similarly careful to not “hit the tape head too hard”. To achieve this I follow three basic steps.

1) Identify the window in which to make the cut

The window is the area of the audio in which a cut can be reasonably made. That window could be as large as several seconds of silence, or as tight as a fraction of a second between two words in a sentence. As long as there is enough space for the scissor tool to make the cut, you’re in good shape. Unlike audiotape, the cut will always be straight. I will talk about how I pick my window in a future installment of this series.

2) Make the cut at the appropriate place of the waveform

The safest place in which to make a cut is when the waveform crosses the zero line. Because audio occurs in a wavelength, it will always cross zero on both the way up and the way down. If waveform is not visible in your window then you can make the cut anywhere because there is no signal. That is, the waveform is flat on zero. Otherwise, find the place in your window where the waveform intersects with zero and make the cut at that spot.

A GOTCHA! If you make one cut at zero as the waveform is going up, make the other cut at zero as the waveform is going down. In this way, when you mate the two sections you wish to keep, the waveform is fluid. This is particularly important when you are making the cut inside a sentence and especially if you are making the cut in the middle of a word.

3) Line up the two ends to complete the edit

Once you’ve made the cuts, remove the section you no longer need and bring together the two pieces you wish to keep. Make sure you don’t leave any space between the two pieces or you will notice the audio dropout.

In part three, I will explain how I do my Blended Edits.

As has been my routine for the last week, I checked the iTunes Music Store pages for Electric Sky and Just One More Book this morning and discovered that the problems I have been experiencing on those pages for the last ten days have been resolved!