So You Want To Produce a Podcast? Part Four: Connecting the Train Cars

You've sat down, set up your system, made a Skpye Call or an in-person recording and now you have recorded audio. Excellent! Now what?

Depending on what you plan to do with the show and how you did the recording, that answer can range from "absolutely nothing, I'm done" to "a beautifully orchestrated and conceptual program that flows from beginning to end." All right, that last part will definitely be subjective, but it points to a fact. The audio we have recorded is going to need some editing. There are many choices out there, ranging from simple WAV file editors all the way up to professional Digital Audio Workstations (DAW). I'm going to suggest a middle ground; it's flexible, doesn't cost anything, and has a lot of useful tools already included. Welcome to Audacity.

Hey, wait... don't go. Granted, it's been around a long time, and I'll admit it's not the sexiest of tools you could be using, and it has limitations as a real-time DAW (which can be overcome with some system tweaking, but that's out of scope for this post). Still, as a multi-track waveform management tool, Audacity has a lot going for it, and once you get used to working with it, it's remarkably fast, or at least, fast as audio editing tools go.

CAVEAT: There are a lot of wild and crazy things you could do with audio editing. There is an effects toolbox in the software that would make any gearhead musician of the 90's envious, and many of the tools require some advanced knowledge of audio editing to be useful, but I'm not going to cover those this go around. What I will talk about are the tools that a new podcaster would want to master quickly and become comfortable with.

First things first. I am a fan of independent tracks, as many as you can effectively manage. As I mentioned in my first post, if possible, I would like to get local source recordings from everyone participating in the podcast. Skype Call Recorder lets you save the call as a .MOV file, and when imported into Audacity, it will appear as one stereo track. One side will be the local speaker, and the other side will be the other caller(s). Even if you can only get one recording, I recommend this approach, and doing the following:

1. Import the MOV file into Audacity, and confirm your stereo track does have the separation between local and remote callers.
2. Split the stereo track into two mono tracks.
3. Select Sync-Lock tracks. This way, any edit you make that inserts or subtracts time from the one track will be reflected in the other track.
4. Look for what should be silent spots. In between people talking, there should be a thin flat bar. If you have that flat thin bar, great, it means there are little to no artifacts. Unfortunately, what you are more likely to see are little bumps here and there. Fortunately, they are easy to clean up. Just select the section of the track, highlight the area you wish to silence (you can also use the keyboard arrow keys to widen or narrow the selected area), and then press Command-L. Any audio that was in that region is now silenced.

By doing this, it is possible to clean up a lot of audio artifacts. Do make sure to look at them, though and ensure that they are just random audio captures and not your guest stepping away from the microphone but still speaking about something important. Granted, that's usually handled at the time of recording, and as the producer, you need to be alert to that. If you receive a recording where you weren't there, then you don't have that option, and really have to make sure you have listened to those in between spaces.

Before we get too deep into the editing of the main podcast audio, I want to step back and talk about the "atmosphere" you set for your show. Most podcasts have little elements that help set the mood for the show, in the form of intros and outros, messages, and what will likely be frequently mentioned items to each podcast. You may choose to do this differently each time, or create a standard set of "audio beds" that can be reused. For the Testing Show, I do exactly that. I have what I call an "Assembly Line" project. It contains my show's opener (theme music and opening words) as well as the show's closer (again, theme music and parting words). These sections, for most episodes, are exactly the same. Therefore, it makes sense to have them together and synchronized. It's possible that these could be mixed down into a single track, but that removes the ability to change the volume levels or make modifications. Unless I know something will always be used in the same way every time, I prefer not mixing them down into a single track. It's easier to move a volume control or mute something one week than have to recreate it.

GEEK TRICK: When you start getting multiple tracks on the same screen, it can be a pain to see what's in need of editing and adjusting, and what's already where it should be. Each track view can be collapsed so that just a sliver of the track view is visible. For me, anytime I collapse a track, that's a key that I don't need to worry about that area, at least for now. It's where it needs to be, both timing-wise and sequence-wise. It saves real estate, and frankly, you want as much visible real estate as possible when doing waveform editing.

A typical edit flow, showing tracks that are situated and ready versus what I am actively examining/editing.

In the first post in this series, I mentioned that I would silence audio first. Rather than delete sections outright, I'd highlight them and Silence Audio. I do this because it lets me do a rough shaping of the show quickly, and then I can handle removing all of the silence in one step. To do this, select "Truncate Silence" from the Effect Menu:

One of my favorite tools, it saves a lot of time.

The dialog box that appears will give you the option to set an audio level that Audacity will consider anything quieter than to be considered "silence". It will also give you a limit that it will consider anything beneath that value to be acceptable, and only look for silence longer than the value entered. In my experience, natural conversation flow allows anywhere from a half a second to a second for transitioning between speakers, so my default value is half a second (if it feels rushed, I can always generate silence to create extra space). The utility then takes any silence sections more than half a second and cuts out those sections. That will leave you with a continuous stream of audio where the longest silence is half a second.

GEEK TRICK: This comes from music, and specifically, it's looking for the "musicality" of speech patterns. Everyone talks a little differently. Some are faster, some are slower. Some speak in quick bursts and then pause to reflect. Others will be fairly steady but keep talking without noticeable breaks. Nevertheless, most people tend to stick to a pattern when they speak. Most people generally pause about 0.2 seconds for where a comma would appear, 0.3 seconds for a period, and 0.5 seconds for a new paragraph (or to catch their breath). A friend of mine who used to work in radio production taught me this technique of "breathless read through", which isn't really breathless, but rather silencing breaths, but allowing for the time it would take for the breath to occur. In short, speech, like music, needs "rest notes" and different values of rest notes are appropriate. Try it out and see if it makes for a more natural sound.

No matter how well you try to edit between a speaker's thoughts, you run the risk of cutting them off mid vocalizing. Left as is, they are noticeable clicks. They are distracting, so you want to smooth those out. Two utilities make that easy; Fade Out and Fade In. Simply highlight the end or beginning of the waveform, making sure to highlight right to the end or start of the section you want to perform the fade (these are in reality very short segments) and then apply the fade-out to the end of the previous word, and apply the fade-in to the start of the following word. This will take a little practice to get to sound natural, and sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you will not be able to get a seamless transition, but most of the time it is effective.

After highlighting an area to silence, you can shorten the space to flow with the conversation.

Select the ending of a waveform segment, and then choose Fade Out from the Effect menu.

Same goes for fading into a new waveform, but choose Fade In for that.

This technique is often jokingly referred to as the "Pauper's Cross Fade".

GEEK TRICK: Use the running label track or as many as you need to remind you of things you have done that you feel may warrant follow-up or additional processing. Also, using multiple comment tracks can help you sync up sections later.

Sometimes you will have to amplify or quiet someone's recording. I have experimented with a number of approaches with this over the years, and I have decided that using the Leveling effect, while helpful, messes with the source audio too much. The transitions between speakers will be noticeably more "hissy". With separate tracks for each speaker, this isn't an issue. Increasing or decreasing the track volume is sufficient. However, if your guests are all on the same track or channel, that's not an option. My preferred method in these cases is to use "Normalization", in which I set a peak threshold (usually +/- 3dB) and then select a section of a waveform and apply the Normalization to it. That will either increase or decrease the volume of that section, but it will do so with a minimum of added noise. Again, this is one of those areas where your ears are your friend, so listen and get a feel for what you personally like to hear. Caveat: this will no work on clipped audio. Unlike analog recording where running a little hot can make a warm sound on tape, in digital recording, you have space, and then you clip. If you clip, you will get distorted audio. Normalization or lowering the volume will not help. In short, if you hear someone speaking loud and hot, and you suspect they may be clipping the recording, ask them to move back from the microphone and repeat what they said.

OK, so there it is. Not too big a set of tools to learn, is it? You will note that I have covered these areas as individual steps, and as manual active editing. Can you automate steps? You can, but I've found that there are only a few things that make it worthwhile, and they need to be steps you would perform in sequence for a section or whole file. In Audacity, these sequences are called "Chains" and you can create and edit them by selecting "Edit Chains" from the File menu. I have found that there are a lot of unpredictables with audio. Thus, I encourage active listening rather than relying on the machine to process the audio directly. One you get a handle on the things you know you will do a lot, and that you know will be effective with minimal chance of backfiring, go nuts!

Next time, I will talk about packaging your podcast, including tagging, formatting, art for episodes, show notes, transcripts and all the fun meta-data you may or may not want to keep track of with each episode.

Component vs. Convergence

Funny thing is, I think I owned every
one of those items at one point or another.

Over the years, I've had an ongoing debate. Which is better, having components that you can control the quality of and what you use or don't use, or all in one convergence, where everything is located in one device?

For years, I've been torn on this. I'm strongly a component man. I'd rather have the best gear to do the task I want to do for the effort, money and dedication I'm willing to give.

When I was a musician building my little MIDI studio, that meant I spent the coin and dedicated the space to having a synthesize, drum machine, and computer that ran a dedicated software application to do MIDI sequencing. The other alternative was to buy an all in one device that had everything in one. My logic always was that, if I decided I wanted to use a different sequencer, I could update just that piece. With an all in one device, if you didn't like an option, you were stuck with what you had, unless you were willing to sell off the whole unit and replace it with another, more powerful all in one device.

What's been interesting to see with devices like smart phones, tablets and ultralight portable computers, we're seeing a lot of these old technologies doing all of their actions in software. When I was looking at Audacity some years ago, I was amused and amazed at the fact that an entire bank of audio effects (a variety of rack mount effects processors with patch panels and MIDI connections for control) were represented as drop down selections and dialog boxes). I sniffed a little dismissively at first and said "well, that's cute and all, but it doesn't give me near the level of control or quality as my standalone tools". Back then, that was true. Now? Not so much. More to the point, the Digital Audio Workstation that I created twenty years ago, and spent a huge amount of money on for its time, is now completely replicated, and in many ways vastly advanced, by Garage Band, an app that's a freebie with OS X! Garage Band can now do things that were considered strictly the domain of high end tools like ProTools two decades ago. 

I'm finding myself still chuckling about some convergence habits. I think people holding their iPads to use them as cameras or video recorders is still a bit odd, but hey, it's working for a lot of people, and its working well. The fact is, the dedicated pieces of hardware will still be available for those who really want the fine level of control, but I am finally starting to think that, perhaps in the next decade or so, that many of the tools most of us have relied on in the past will probably continue on this convergence path. 

Will we reach the point where everything is done inside of some shiny tablet device that we talk to, intimate with, and get to do what we want? For many people, I think the answer will be yes, and it will be to a quality that's good enough that they'll be happy with it. Will I ever get excited about the quality of a picture taken with an iPhone compared to one taken with a top end DSLR? Probably not, but the truth is, for 99.9% of the photographic interactions most people have (candid snapshots of friends that they will share with others and receive comments on), good enough really is. Will I want to completely abandon all of my high end (well, it was at one time) music gear to interact with just a tablet? I don't see myself ever wanting to give up the tactile experience of my guitars or bass, or the physical dynamics of banging out a drum beat on the motley collection of drum pads I have hooked into my drum synthesizer, but I will admit that the idea of putting a podcast together with nothing but a tablet and prepared material is really appealing. 

Convergence is happening, and at a hugely advanced rate. More of our physical world is becoming zeros and ones. "May we live in interesting times" is proving to be true, and what makes me even more excited... is someone has to test these converging interactions. Testers, for the sake of our craft and the future of what we do, we do indeed live in interesting times :).

The Best Podcast We Are Going To Put Out This Week (By Some Definition Of Best)

Today marks a milestone. This morning, Episode 131 of This Week in Software Testing has been posted. In it, we conclude the series of Matt Heusser's keynote adress at the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference (Part 1 and Part 2 can be obtained here).

This also represents 125 episodes that I have personally produced (I came onto this project back in July of 2010, and my first show, Episode 6, was posted on Aug. 6, 2010).

It's been a lot of fun, I've learned a lot along the way... and you can probably tell with this buildup that there's a change in the air.

There is.

Matt and I have decided that, for now, we are going to put the TWiST podcast on hiatus. No, there's no bad blood between Matt and me (as a musician, I am very familiar with the first question asked whenever a project goes on hiatus; it's assumed that there must have been a fight of some kind). We decided to take stock of what we have covered, who we have talked to and areas that may yet to be covered, and decided that now was a good time to take a breather after two and a half years of weekly production work.

We both love producing this podcast, so for those thinking it's going to go away forever, rest assured, that is not our plan. We both, however, want to take the time to focus on some other opportunities for a bit, and give those projects a chance to get some atmosphere to breathe (there are, after all, only so many hours in a given week that we can devote to those opportunities).

To those who have helped make this a fantastic journey, my thanks. To Matt, first and foremost, for being willing to be in the hot seat week after week, in one way or another, either in interviewing, gathering talent for discussions, or recording "on location" events along with me.

Thanks to our recurring "panel guests" over the past year plus, who helped us make for some great conversations, with special thanks to Benjamin Yaroch and Wade Wachs for their frequent contributions and going above and beyond the call so many times.

Thanks to everyone we have interviewed over the past two and a half years. It's your stories and your experiences that make the show what it is.

Thanks to the people behind the scenes these past two and a half years who have helped with show production, editing, and distribution (Rick Baucom, Rich Hand, Thomas Ponnet, Justin Rohrman, Janette Rovansek, Mark Tomlinson and Farid Vaswani).

Most of all though, thanks go out to YOU, our listeners. You are the reason that we were able to put out "the best software podcast we were going to put out this week (by some definition of best)", week after week. We hope that you have enjoyed these presentations, and will continue to enjoy them well into the future. We look forward to coming back and following the pulse of the software testing world in the not too distant future.

Until then, thanks for listening, and keep discovering :).

Regards,
Michael and Matt

Moving Forward By Letting Go

Yesterday's post about how I spend my time actually came at an interesting juncture. As I'd said yesterday, to agree to do something, you have to be willing to not do something else. When Matt and I were sitting in the AST board meeting and the discussions about the Education SIG were happening, as I threw my hat in the ring to take on that responsibility, we both knew I'd have to free up bandwidth to do it.


Over the past fifteen months, I've edited 65 shows, plus several extra spots and other details that have helped to shape "This Week in Software Testing" into the format that it is today. By far the most time consuming aspect is the ongoing editing of the audio. Well, with next week's episode, I'm officially handing over a good chunk of the audio editing piece to Rick Baucom.


It's funny, this should be something that I should be totally happy to stop doing; it's not like I'm not going to be doing production for the show still (I'm going to be constructing the bumpers still and the final deliverable, at least for the foreseeable future, though it's possible I may pass that off too at some point). Still, part of me is resisting handing this off.


I think the reason is that, when we spend the time doing something, especially for a regular deliverable, we develop a lot of domain specific knowledge, and we just plain get good at doing it. When we feel we are good at doing something, we develop a bit of a pride in doing it. Anything that's truly onerous we should be happy to be rid of. In this case, while it was time consuming and meticulous stuff, I greatly enjoyed, and enjoy, doing it.


Having said that, I also know that I will have to, in due time, make commitments to focus on other areas, areas that will give me less time to do the day to day audio editing. I have help, and I'm grateful for it, but now I have to ask myself "am I willing to turn over the authority for doing something I've done for what seems like so long?" In all honestly, part of me isn't. What if the results are not the same as if I'd done them? Well, that's a risk... but so what? Do I have any belief that the podcast will suffer because of it. Well, it may. Or it may not. Fact is, I won't know until I let someone else try. They won't do things my way. They won't have my system down. They won't know the tricks I use to make things work the way that I do. And that's OK. They'll figure out their own ways of doing things. It may even (gasp!) change the flavor of the show, or they may discover some techniques or have access to gear that I don't, and that may even make the overall sound of the show even better, and frankly, that's cool, too.

The simple fact is, it's not my show. I don't own it. STP owns it, and from there, Matt owns it if any single person can say they do. I enjoy working on it, and I will stay connected to it as producer, but the daily engineering will go to someone else, and they'll make their own magic work. And it will be cool, it will be relevant, and it will be "the best software testing podcast... by some definition of best" :).

Here's to future days.

Twisto Changeo: TWiST is Changing :)!!!

As man of you know, one of my side things that I do is I produce the TWiST Podcast along with Matt Heusser. Tomorrow or Friday we will post the last of the "old format" shows. Wait, did he just say the "LAST"?!!

I did, but don't worry too much, TWiST is still active, in the works and Matt is still behind the microphone and I'm still behind the production board. We did, however, decide it was time for a change in the format and the approach we took. Rather than just having Matt talk with a single tester in an interview format, we decided to experiment with a panel format and a designated topic to guide the podcast.

So what does this mean? It means that there will be multiple guests on a typical show, usually four or five. It also means that I'm making a bit of a move out of the production booth and onto the microphone more. So far, we've recorded six shows in the new format, and I'm part of four of them, so I'm looking forward to this new approach. we hope you will, too.

Remember, TWiST is still going to be coming out on its usual schedule, which is weekly, either Thursday afternoon or Friday mornings. Our goal is to make the best software testing podcast out there. We hope you'll enjoy listening to the new format, and if you'd like to be a guest on the show, let me know and we can see about arranging a forum and topic to include you :).

Podcast Friday: Cakes, Transition, Salad and Mice, Oh My!

Hey everyone! It's been a few weeks since I've done a Podcast Friday entry, so please forgive me and let me help fix that situation.

First and foremost, let me draw your attention to the latest and greatest TWiST episode. This time around, Matt Heusser interviews Matt Kallman of Carnevale Interactive, and covers various topics such as what it's like to be a principal in a small company, how it feels to work with people who are maybe only interested in being testers for a short period or otherwise have other goals beyond just software testing, and what being a tester can do to help bolster a career as a product manager. It's all right here. Oh, and for those who follow my nerdy goings on with this podcast, this episode marks the beginning of my love affair with Blue Microphones. No, seriously, I bought a Blue Snowball USB mic and a shock ring for the capsule, and recorded the intro/outro, and really, this is probably the best "microphone" I've ever had the pleasure of using. Granted, this is nowhere near the caliber of their extremely awesome studio mic's (like the Bottle) but for a consumer grade, direct to PC microphone, the sound is awesome!!!

Also on the testing front, I need to give another shout out to Trish Khoo and Bruce MacLeod for their latest edition of Testcast. In Episode #5, called "Pass Cakes and Fail Cakes" Bruce and Trish roam around a number of topics, such as the sheer number of blogs they both have (Trish really has six blogs?! Wow!), and when to use production data in tests (and of course, when not to, which really is most of the time).

Dan Benjamin and Merlin Mann are back in the mix again with Back to Work #26. In this episode titled "Spaghetti Guy Hits Close to Home". It's an all over the map run, and really, that's what makes it fun, but if podcasts about work, productivity, finding jobs, selling cars, putting your house on the market, leveraging enthusiasm and finding your position of strength. And really, gang, there just isn't a bad show in the bunch for these guys. It's an acquired taste, I know, but if you can get into the Dan and Merlin vibe, it's pretty much always golden.

My last recommendation for this week is strangely appropriate for a testing and QA crowd. I'm somewhat amazed that I have not listened to this podcast before this week, but I've found it now, and I love it. Freakonomics Radio, which is based on the book of the same name by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, emphasizes on what it refers to as "the hidden side of everything". Their most recent episode is called "Mouse in the Salad" and takes a look at the idea that, in a top end posh restaurant in New York, how in the world did a dead mouse make its way onto a diner's plate, what would such a situation do to your confidence in that organization, and what did they do about it? Additionally, seriously... how did the mouse get there?!

Oh, and here's a pending announcement, to be delivered as soon as I can humanly do it… the five candidates for the Association for Software Testing's Board of Directors (Matt Heusser, Cem Kaner, Michael Larsen, Catherine Powell and Peter Walen) sat down for a roundtable debate/interview session to discuss the upcoming elections and hopes and aspirations for the future of AST. We recorded two hours worth of audio and I am actively editing it, and want to get it out as soon as I can, so if I'm a little more quiet than normal, that's why. My goal is to try to get it out in time for the great Twitter debate which will be hosted on Monday, August 1, 2011 (more on that tomorrow :) ).

Happy listening :).

Simple Tweaks and Game Changers

This morning, I had the chance to sit down and play with my "new toy". As many of you know, one of the things I do each week is that I produce and edit the "This Week in Software Testing" podcast for Software Test Professionals. What you may not know is that I've worked with a portable and, for the most part, shoe-string environment, consisting of a simple USB microphone and a PC, using Audacity as the editing and production environment. This has been partly for necessity (I want to keep the environment portable) but also with the goal of keeping costs down (after all, when I started, I didn't know how long this would last or how many total episodes we would do). To this end, I've used a simple USB Logitech desktop microphone for the past year. For the record, it worked very well for very little money. I wouldn't call it a "studio grade" microphone by any means, but for what we've been doing, it got the job done :).

After producing a year's worth of shows, I decided it was time to make a jump up in microphone standards... actually, a slight mishap with the Logitech microphone necessitated the change.  By slight mishap, I mean I tipped over the mic stand I was using to hold it at a more natural level for me, and it sheared the plastic capsule. It still works, but the base now just dangles by the wire that leads to the microphone element. Could I fix it with some glue and some electrical tape? Sure, but with this happening, and looking at the future landscape for podcast recording and the time I invest in the process, I figured "oh what the heck, why not upgrade the microphone?!"

Sidereel does a fair amount of video production and also does some audio work that requires some "after the fact" voice over work. Since they are in the practice of doing daily recording and editing, I decided to ask what they use. It turns out they use a Blue Microphones Snowball, which is a mid priced USB microphone that plugs straight into a Mac or PC (or with an adapter can plug straight into a mixing board). It has three separate pickup patterns that can be selected and, in their estimation, is well suited for doing voice over work.

Due to the fact that I do a lot of keyboard checking and hand-level checking on my PC (i.e. my PC is my recording environment and my mixer, and I don't have the luxury of an isolated or quiet control room), I also decided to invest in a shock mount, which isolates the microphone from bounces and picking up transient noises or vibrations. Combined, this makes for a formidable tabletop microphone, stand and shock ring, with very near professional broadcast quality sound, and the whole rig cost less that $100.

It took me a little while to sit down with it and get its quirks worked out. It gives a much better sound pickup, which means my normal seating, projection, and delivery also had to be changed (lower quality mics have a certain charm in that they don't pick up all of the ambient noise or the little clicks and ticks of the movement of a speaker's mouth like this microphone does).

This reminded me that, often, when we add a new tool or a new piece of knowledge to our arsenal, we have the ability of really changing our game and doing things differently, and by necessity, we need do things differently. When I started using Cucumber to automate tests a couple of months ago, it by necessity required that I change my way of thinking about how to automate tests. The very nature of the tests I was responsible for (being able to make sure that our development environment and development changes capably made the transition from development machines out to the production environment, with two intermediate steps in between) also required that I look at my testing differently, and to realize that methods and approaches that worked for one group of developers and testers would, by necessity, require a different approach and level of thinking in this case. All it takes is one element, one change in our environment, and our adjustment to work with it can radically alter our approach and our every day efforts.

For the podcast recordings, I hope this will give me the opportunity to tackle more voice over options with better quality. In my day to day testing, it's my hope that I'll get to play with more that Cucumber, RSpec and Ruby can offer so I can be more effective in my active testing. New toys make for new ways of thinking. While the toy may be the catalyst, ultimately it's our brains and our reactions that make them work effectively... so go and do likewise :).

PODCAST FRIDAY: TWiST #48 w/ Eric Jacobson

So for those who are interested, I've set up a little tracker in RescueTime because I wanted to see just how much time I spent on a typical interview each week.

Part of this comes down to my own personal tick; I have tried and I just can't get past the idea of releasing a talk or an interview with "um's" or "uh's" or stammers in it. If I could, I could cut the time way down, but since I won't, well, it takes me on average four hours of editing to produce a 30 minute show each week. Yeah, that's super nerdy, I know, but I think it adds to what I hope is a "polished" podcast. I don't know about the rest of you, but I treat many of my favorite podcasts as reference material; I go back and listen to many of them over and over again. It's my hope that these podcasts are not seen as "throwaway" weekly blurbs, but as real meat and potatoes stuff that people will want to hold onto and listen to over and over again as well.

Serious question, does the flow of the conversation feel normal and natural to you, the listener? I hear every click and pop, as wells every overly inflected point when I edit. Some of that is just not fixable without sounding really artificial, though I have joked with SideReel's resident audio editor that I have become the master of the "poor man's cross-fade", which is where you drop the volume on the last word and fade in on the first word where the edit takes place. Do you hear it? Is it enough to notice or comment on? If so, I'm genuinely curious.

So this week Matt sat down with Eric Jacobson. Eric works with Turner Broadcasting, and manages a team of testers. I liked this interview because he talked about what can be a challenging topic, and that's dealing with motivating testers. I know full well how it feels to be a tester who is just going through the motions, without any real purpose or focus, and I like what he has to say about helping testers get engaged and involved (it inspired an article I'm hoping will be published soon; I'll let you all know if it gets picked up). Eric also explains what it was like to be "invaded" by the Rebel Alliance at a conference last year, where he found out he didn't get the room he had hoped for, but they gave him a suite with a fold down bed, but a big space. This led to a meeting and talk session of the Rebel Alliance and a number of lightning talks by the participants (and video footage, too :) ). So anyway, if you're tired of my blathering, by all means go to and listen to Episode #48 for yourself :).

Standard disclaimer:


Each TWiST podcast is free for 30 days, but you have to be a basic member to access it. After 30 days, you have to have a Pro Membership to access it, so either head on over quickly (depending on when you see this) or consider upgrading to a Pro membership so that you can get to the podcasts and the entire library whenever you want to :). In addition, Pro membership allows you to access and download to the entire archive of Software Test and Quality Assurance Magazine, and its issues under its former name, Software Test and Performance.


TWiST-Plus is all extra material, and as such is not hosted behind STP’s site model. There is no limitation to accessing TWiST-Plus material, just click the link to download and listen.


Again, my thanks to STP for hosting the podcasts and storing the archive. We hope you enjoy listening to them as much as we enjoy making them :).

Podcast Friday: TWiST #45 w/ Grand Rapids Testers and Selenium Conference

I've been a little quieter this week than usual. the reason is because I've spent some quality time with Audacity, and you will be getting not just one, but *FIVE* podcasts from me this week.


The first, of course, is the TWiST podcast. This week we have Episode #45, and as a change of pace, we decided to record the Grand Rapids Testers Group as they discussed the ideas related to "Is Complete Testing Possible?" This is more than just a regular TWiST podcast. This is an experiment we are undertaking with the Association for Software Testing in which we use some podcasts that specifically relate to their material in their Black Box Software Testing courses. This is the first one that we have dedicated to a specific topic for that purpose.  We are looking to do more in the upcoming months.


In addition to TWiST, I also recorded about 30 hours of audio from the Selenium Conference that was held in SanFrancisco April 4-6, 2011. I have a number of pieces that I'll be presenting, but I will start out with the Keynote presentations first (Jason Huggins, Patrick Lightbody, Bret Pettichord and Simon Stewart).


All of the podcasts that I have presented (or at least an index for them) are listed on this site's Podcasts page. The Selenium Conference podcasts are currently being hosted on a temporary site, and will be moved to a permanent location as soon as we determine where that will be and when we can move them over. Like all material on TESTHEAD, these podcasts have been produced under Creative Commons copyright. If you want to embed them, comment on them, review them, spread them around, etc. go ahead, but please preserve the CC license details at the end (I'm not asking for money, I just want credit for the things I produce :) ).

Book Review: The Book of Audacity

There are times when a book reviewer reviews a book because it’s something they have a passing interest in, or it is something they know they should be doing and want to learn more. Then there are those books that relate to something so familiar and so every day, that it’s easy to build an expectation for the title. For me, audio editing on behalf of the TWiST podcast is a nearly daily thing (at least five days a week), and Audacity is my tool of choice for doing audio editing, partly by chance but more recently by familiarity. Is there a book out there that would keep my interest on the subject?


I’m happy to say that “The Book of Audacity”, written by Carla Schroeder, and published by No-Starch Press, is just such a book. You don’t have to be a computer aficionado, but it certainly helps. You don’t have to be a musician, but it certainly helps there, too. You don’t have to be someone who enjoys a witty and sometimes mildly sarcastic writing style, but again, it certainly helps. If you are the special geek that fits all three of these categories just mentioned, then this book is a gem!


The Book of Audacity is platform agnostic, but shows a number of approaches to using it on a number of platforms (with a special section specifically focusing on Linux). Audacity is free and cross platform, and the author spends plenty of time trying to make the users feel comfortable tackling the various topics.


Many books are written to describe the process of recording and producing music, but they often devolve into an impenetrable treatise on sound theory and issues of interest to professional audio and signal processing engineers, leaving many of us everyday folks interested in recording behind. Carla is careful to not do that here. Often her tone is irreverent, humorous, and at times downright snarky, proving this isn’t your typical audio recording book, and that’s all for the better.


The Book of Audacity uses multiple projects to help the user get the most out of the program and appreciate many of the finer details the application provides. Some of the projects will have varying amounts of interest, but the chapter long focus on many of these projects allows the reader to get in-depth enough if they want to focus on that particular aspect, or skip to the next chapter if they are not.


AUDACITY FROM START TO FINISH

This section gives a good overview of the program and how to get a quick understanding of many key features. It’s not an in-depth tutorial, but the first time user will feel comfortable after perusing this chapter.


BUILDING A GOOD DIGITAL SOUND STUDIO ON THE CHEAP

Think that you will have to break the bank to create a “recording rig”? In many cases, it’s as simple as using the hardware already in your computer. If you want to get more involved, there are additional items that can be used, and I appreciate the level of personal detail Carla provides in showing the equipment that she personally likes using, including audio interfaces, microphones and digital recording devices.


TRANSFERRING VINYL LPs (AND OTHER LEGACY MEDIA) TO CD

This chapter may be skipped if this project isn’t relevant to you, but there’s a lot of good information in here regarding how to get external audio into your computer and then work with the audio to create master CD’s. Topics like dynamic range, recording levels, fixing pops and clicks, dealing with clipping, dealing with separate tracks, creating fade-ins and fade-outs, and mixing down and creating the final audio CD are covered.


CREATING AND EDITING LIVE TRACKS FOR CD

If you have an interest in recording live music, especially if you use a modern flash based digital recording device, then this section is for you. It covers the technical details of recording a live performance, whether that be using the digital recorder to record the live room or getting a feed from the board directly. It also covers such things as how to interact with the sound crew and generally be a net positive in the experience (these are the little things that set this book apart from many other audio books, in that it covers some of the finer personal interactions, not just using an audio tool). Methods for dealing with recordings made at different times and different places are covered so that the end result sounds as consistent as possible.


AUTHORING A COMPILATION CD

This section covers taking audio from multiple audio sources and creating a compilation CD (or for those of us of an older generation, a digital “mix tape”). Using multiple audio formats, ripping from CD’s and DVD’s are covered, converting MP3s to uncompressed WAV files, and covering the details needed to get the tracks to a consistent sound level, determining track order, and creating a seamless production so that the final product can be mixed down and burned to a Red Book format CD are discussed.


AUTHORING SUPER HIGH-FIDELITY AUDIO DVDs

DVD audio is a high end sound approach that takes advantage of the space a DVD allows to let the person doing the recording use even higher quality audio samples and audio formats (uncompressed WAV, AIFF, FLAC, etc.) This section walks the user through the process of producing an audio DVD and highlights tools that will help the process go smoothly.


CREATING PODCASTS

So far, most of the projects have been dealing with single track (mono or stereo) sequences. This is the first section that gets into multi-track recording and covers my bread-and-butter topic, podcasting. You’ll learn how to mix multiple parts together, including using intro music, creating a duck down track for theme music and having it drop when the announcer speaks, cleaning up verbal ticks (how to deal with “ums” and "ahs” and the like), as well as exporting to a format that is high enough quality for listening purposes but minimizes the size requirements for easier downloading.


BECOMING AN ONLINE STAR

So you have gone to great lengths to produce audio for various purposes. Now what do you want to do with it/. In this chapter, the topic of getting your work out into the public space is covered. Ever wondered what it would be like to be a signed musician, Do you even want to go that route? Do you need to? Can you forge your own path? This section answers those questions as well as how to go about developing an online presence, how to get your work out to those who want to listen to it, whether or not you should use Digital Rights Management on your files (personal choice, I generally say “don’t”, but your mileage may vary), and dealing with the issues surrounding copyright and fair use.


MULTITRACK RECORDING

While the section for podcasting goes into the basics of multi-track recordings, this is a deep dive into how Audacity allows for multiple channels to be recorded (and the equipment necessary if you want to do it “live”), dealing with and ordering multiple tracks, getting the levels right, using the internal mixer and equalization tools, labeling tracks to keep track of what’s happening and where, how to move various tracks around and group them together, as well as how to construct custom mix downs so that instruments are panned and ordered in the mix the way you want them to be.


MAKING YOUR OWN RINGTONES

If you are tired of paying for ring-tones for your cellular phone, or just want to know how to make them for the fun of it, this section is for you. It discusses creating a short recording, using dynamic range compression so that the recording can be optimized for the small speaker inside a phone, and then converted to the file format that your phone will support and allow you to upload it and use it as a ring tone. Again, it’s an example of a project that shows how Audacity can be used for a range of audio options.


AUDACITY PLUG-INS FOR SPECIAL EFFECTS

One of the great advances Audacity and other audio tools provides is the ability to use effects that used to require lots of outboard gear. Signal processing allows for very basic details such as dynamic range compression and signal leveling, but also lets the user go to town with interesting effects such as reverb, digital delay, tremolo, phase shifting, distortion, etc. Using these effects effectively is more challenging than just setting an effect and applying it. Many effects on a given track will cause additive effects and knowing how to deal with them is important. It’s also possible to use the effects to create electronic drum sounds and other approaches (there’s an entire effects language called NyQuist that is covered a bit in here as well).


FIX-ITS AND CLEANUPS

Ideally, we will do the best we can to get clean and focused audio recording, but sometimes the source material is not perfect or we have little control over some of the issues that arise in the recording process (live interviews, noisy rooms, sudden volume changes, etc). This section deals with the ways to handle the inevitable “clean-up” jobs we will face from time to time. Simple tasks like cutting out sections or trimming silence are covered, as well as more advanced topics like splitting audio tracks, performing noise removal (and dealing with the effects of that), how to effectively use leveling and normalization, waveform repair using the draw tool, modifying tempo and performing pitch correction, and using compression effectively are all covered here.


CONFIGURING LINUX FOR BEST AUDIO QUALITY

For those who are using Windows or a Mac, this section will probably not be relevant. For those using Linux distributions, though, there is a gold mine of information in here for maximizing your system’s abilities.


CONFIGURING WINDOWS FOR BEST AUDIO QUALITY

Windows also has a number of quirks and areas that can be adjusted so that the system performs smoothly and integrates that various options for sound input and output together. With the number of available devices that leverage USB 2.0, FireWire and other media formats, even laptop users with limited options for on-board configurability can branch out and experience high quality interfaces and how to tweak them for best use.


CUSTOMIZING AUDACITY

There are lots of preference options that will allow the user to tailor the experience to the things that they do best or wish to take advantage of, and this section covers all of them. This section also covers default file formats, setting up batch jobs (chains) that can be used for automating many of the routine tasks, exporting to a default file format, enabling or disabling effect, and other helpful options so that you can focus on your projects and not dealing with the system that supports it.


APPENDIX

The last section is a reference guide to audio recording equipment, topics and terms, recording myths and explanations that will help demystify the process of audio recording and help present the truth about such ideas as “equipment burn-in” (myth, it’s not needed), the superiority of tubes over solid state (99.9% of listeners won’t be able to tell the difference), and the need for specialty cables (in most cases, nope. You want properly made cables, yes, but gold plating is not necessary).


BOTTOM LINE

There is truly something in here for everybody that deals with audio recording of any stripe, and Audacity can be used for both simple and all-encompassing projects. The style of the book takes into account that not everyone has the same goals, and the book is structured in a way where a complete read-through is not necessary. The basic techniques are covered multiple times in the book so that mastery can be developed but also so that the project that interests the user can be the primary focus.


Most of all, the book gets out of the way to let you work on the projects you want to work on in the way you want to work. It also strikes a balance between technical discussion and everyday reality, with a tone that is both engaging and entertaining (yes, technical books can be entertaining, too, it is possible). For those looking to go beyond the basics, and want to use Audacity as their tool of choice, The Book of Audacity would be a good title to help get the most out of that decision.

TWiST #35 - with Richard Sheridan

So this was a pretty cool interview and a lot of great information this time around. The interview itself sounds more like a call-in show, in the sense that the connection with our guest sounds like a typical phone line by comparison to some of the other interviews.

Volume leveling was interesting this time around in that the call was rely hot on the interviewee side, but I've gotten to the point that the leveling is becoming more natural (doing too hard a leveling causes both voices to sound distorted, so I've abandoned that technique). The down side is that there are some slightly jumpy dynamics, but I think we're getting it to a more natural level each week (hoping I'll be able to cobble up a NyQuist command that will allow me to do a clean leveling without introducing distortion, but so far, I haven't figured out the magic formula for that yet.

This week we talk with Richard Sheridan. Richard is the CEO of Menlo Innovations, a company dedicated to putting Extreme Programming and Agile practices into, well practice. His take on developing joy in the work, making for a sustainable work pace, and developing what he terms as "Quality Advocates". In any event, to listen to Episode #35, go here :).

Standard disclaimer:

Each TWiST podcast is free for 30 days, but you have to be a basic member to access it. After 30 days, you have to have a Pro Membership to access it, so either head on over quickly (depending on when you see this) or consider upgrading to a Pro membership so that you can get to the podcasts and the entire library whenever you want to :). In addition, Pro membership allows you to access and download to the entire archive of Software Test and Quality Assurance Magazine, and its issues under its former name, Software Test and Performance.

TWiST-Plus is all extra material, and as such is not hosted behind STP’s site model. There is no limitation to accessing TWiST-Plus material, just click the link to download and listen.

Again, my thanks to STP for hosting the podcasts and storing the archive. We hope you enjoy listening to them as much as we enjoy making them :).

TWiST #34 - with Dawn Cannan

I’m trying to use a lighter hand on these interviews… as many of you know, I’m a bit OCD when it comes to Um’s and ah’s and other “stutters”, and usually, I work aggressively to edit them out.

While I feel that it makes for a more polished podcast recording, it also takes a lot of time to do it to that level, and in some ways, I think it may be too much work for too little benefit (a law of diminishing returns, so to speak). Thus, I’m experimenting with a more natural feel and focusing more on editing the flow of the show and the dialogue, and less on the ultra anal-retentive “speech police” attitude. BTW, this is not meant in any way to reflect on the speakers or their interview styles. Everyone does this to some level, myself included. More than anything else, I’d be interested in hearing back from some of you if you feel that the lighter hand is better, worse, or you really can’t tell the difference.

This week’s interview is with Dawn Cannan, who you can follow on Twitter as @dckismet and read her blog over at http://www.passionatetester.com/. Dawn focuses a lot of this interview on ideas related to writing about testing, why she chose to take the technical track rather than going the management route, the joys and challenges of working with distributred teams (specifically her role as a remote worker in that environment). She also spends some time talking about Selenesse, which is the blending ground and approach of using Selenium and Fitnesse together. In any event, if you’d like to listen to Episode, 34, by all means please do :).



Standard disclaimer:

Each TWiST podcast is free for 30 days, but you have to be a basic member to access it. After 30 days, you have to have a Pro Membership to access it, so either head on over quickly (depending on when you see this) or consider upgrading to a Pro membership so that you can get to the podcasts and the entire library whenever you want to :). In addition, Pro membership allows you to access and download to the entire archive of Software Test and Quality Assurance Magazine, and its issues under its former name, Software Test and Performance.

TWiST-Plus is all extra material, and as such is not hosted behind STP’s site model. There is no limitation to accessing TWiST-Plus material, just click the link to download and listen.

Again, my thanks to STP for hosting the podcasts and storing the archive. We hope you enjoy listening to them as much as we enjoy making them :).

TWiST #26: New Year's Eve Episode with Henrik Emilsson and PICT

This will be the last podcast back story for 2010 :).


I'm smiling because at the end of 2009, there wasn't even a podcast back story to be told. There wasn't a podcast. Heck, there wasn't a Software Test Professionals (well, not like we know it now, at least) and for that matter, there wasn't even a TESTHEAD! 2010 has been a big year for a lot of testing initiatives, and I'm happy that I'm part of this one.


During the holidays, it's easy to get off your game and watch time just get away from you. The metric that I told you all about last week, meaning ten minutes of editing for every minute of audio, is still holding to be true. This weeks episode is 20 minutes long, and true to form, it took me about 4 hours to edit it. Some of my friends who listen to the podcasts all wonder, what in the world could take that amount of time? Cleaning out dead air, removing repetitive words, sometimes resequencing flow when it makes sense, and leveling the audio between the members of the conversation... yep, it takes that much time.


Since I picked up the new microphone, I've decided to record the intro and outro in its entirety each time, rather than just have the canned audio, which I did for each show from Episode #6 through Eposide #21. I always record the show specific audio, and then I'd work to blend the two together, and that also took time to get the leveling right, make the flow feel natural... it took me more time to blend the two pieces than it did to record a new patch each week. Of course, the funny thing is, with each recording there's a little different vibe... this week I sounded very amped (LOL!).


So this week, Matt interviews "the other Henrik from Sweden". This has been a bit of a running gag w/ us, since back in TWiST #7 when Matt interviewed Jonathan Kohl, Jonathan mentioned "Henrik from Sweden." For TWiST #9 Matt interview Henrik Andersson, a well known and respected tetster in Sweden with a strong voice in the tester community. However, this wasn't the Henrik Jon was referring to. He meant Henrik "EMILSSON", senior consultant w/ Qamcom Research and Development. Henrik Emilsson is also one of the key writers for the "Thoughts From the Test Eye" blog. Whoops (LOL!). So we fixed that this week, and now you get to hear from the "Intended Henrik from Sweden" :).


Click on the link to listen to Episode #26.


Also, during the show, Henrik mentions PICT, a free pairwise testing tool from Microsoft.


Standard disclaimer:


Each TWiST podcast is free for 30 days, but you have to be a basic member to access it. After 30 days, you have to have a Pro Membership to access it, so either head on over quickly (depending on when you see this) or consider upgrading to a Pro membership so that you can get to the podcasts and the entire library whenever you want to :). In addition, Pro membership allows you to access and download to the entire archive of Software Test and Quality Assurance Magazine, and its issues under its former name, Software Test and Performance.


TWiST-Plus is all extra material, and as such is not hosted behind STP’s site model. There is no limitation to accessing TWiST-Plus material, just click the link to download and listen.


Again, my thanks to STP for hosting the podcasts and storing the archive. We hope you enjoy listening to them as much as we enjoy making them :).

Wednesday Book Review: Getting Started with Audacity 1.3

OK, some of you will notice that I do not do many product specific reviews when it comes to my book choices. That’s because I don’t want to limit suggestions to a particular technology or have something I recommend only be relevant to a handful of people. For that reason, I tend to pick broad topics that any tester can use and can get in and take advantage of.


Still, there are times when I decide there’s something that really deserves its own spot and mention, especially when I find I’m using it all the time. There’s no question that, since I started producing TWiST, one program has become a constant friend and helper to me, and that’s Audacity. Since starting with the podcast, and up until now, I've decided to standardize on it and use it for all production aspects (I also like the fact that it’s completely open source and, well, free :) ).


Bethany Hiitola’s book “Getting Started with Audacity 1.3” is exactly that, it’s an introductory book, but it’s an introductory book that will help you easily understand how to do many things in Audacity ranging from simple to fairly complex. For this purpose, and quite conveniently, the book is formatted with one primary project… producing a podcast (see where I’m going with this, huh :)? ).


Chapter 1. Audacity and the World of Audio Editing

This chapter goes into explaining what the Audacity project is, and some specifics related to the most current version as to the book's printing (1.3 in April of 2010). Several common audio editing terms are covered and do not require a background in audio engineering or studio production to comprehend. The concept of an Audacity Project is explained, and also an understanding of the gear that is helpful to producing a podcast. You could go way overboard here, but really, a decent microphone and a pair of headphones attached to your built in sound card will do very well. If you decide to get really serious, a dedicated multi-input interface like a Roland U-30 would be awesome.


Chapter 2. The Basics: Setting Up a Project

This chapter helps the user understand how projects are set up and some of the common tasks and buttons/tools that will be used regularly.


Chapter 3. Ready and Action! Creating a Voice Track and Recording

Since this book is geared towards podcasting, it's no surprise that most of the coverage is aimed at recording voices, specifically using Skype as the medium to record interviews. The techniques described can also be used for in-person interviews.


Chapter 4. Making It Sound Better: Editing Your Podcast

The raw recording may have items that you want to modify, and that modification may be more than just cutting out a section. When editing an interview, there are some key tricks to making the edit sound as natural as possible (and sometimes even with the best editing, there are obvious jumps. Going in and understanding how to smooth those transitions out, as well as using the envelope tool for controlling volume within a track or the time shift tool to move audio around, will help the user make the most of the tracks that they modify.


Chapter 5. Advanced Editing: Fixing the Glitches and Removing the Noise

In most cases, the editing required will be minimal, but at times, to either fix problems or add a little excitement to the mix, you may want to play with some of the effects that are included. While there are a number of effects that will add all sorts of interesting sounds (like phaser and tremolo if you want to make it sound like a late 50's sci-fi radio serial :) ), many of the effects are actually simple tools that will allow you to even out the sound, or repair waveforms that were damaged or find "dropped" sections and allow the user to repair them (use this with care, as the resulting fix may be more unnatural than the original flaw). This section also shows how to set a noise floor and remove things like unwanted steady background noise (like tape hiss).


Chapter 6. Saving Projects and Exporting Podcasts

Each project, due to its tracking all edits and changes, can be very large collections of files. Usually, though, the final product is a (comparatively, small MP3 file or some other format. Understanding the export capability and how to manipulate the values (specifically for bit rate compression) can make a world of difference in the sound quality of the projects created.


Chapter 7. Beyond the Basics: Editing for Even Better Sound

There are a number of ways to edit the sound that go beyond simply cutting the waveform file and adding effects. It's possible to modify harsh sounds and soften them (sibilance), or shift the time in tracks and combine tracks together.


Chapter 8. Importing and Adding Background Music

It's easy to import audio into Audacity projects. want to have a background bed that plays at the beginning (or plays throughout the podcast)? Just import it and assign it to a track. This section explains how to set up the "auto-duck" tool, where background audio can be raised and lowered. You can also import audio directly from analog inputs, too, such as cassettes, vinyl records, CD's, etc. (though the easier way to get audio from a CD is just to rip it to MP3 or WAV and import it directly).


Chapter 9. Giving Your Audio Some Depth: Applying Effects

There are a lot of effects that can be used in audacity. As previously mentioned, some of them are really obvious when used (echo, reverb, delay, phaser, tremolo) and can add a lot of excitement to the sound of the waveforms. There are also a number of less obvious effects that can also be used for enhancing audio, such as amplification, leveling, normalizing, noise cancellation, compression and limiting, etc.). Many of the effects use the audio industry programming standard called NyQuist. NyQuist chains can be created to make your own processing procedures.


Chapter 10. Making Audacity Even Better With Plug-Ins and Libraries

Audacity is an open source tool, and as such, many of the enhancements for the application can be added as plug-ins to the application. Many of the effects are available as plug-ins and can be applied and used. Users can also create their own chains of commands using NyQuist and store these as a library (which you can share with others, too :) ).


The book ends with two appendices; an explanation of the toolbar, menu & keyboard shortcuts and a Glossary of commonly used terms.


Bottom Line:

This may be a bit of a specialty item, and if you are not interested in doing audio editing, then I can understand that this may be a little limited in its scope, but if you do find yourself making audio instructions, or decide you may want to get into podcasting yourself, and if you decide that Audacity is a tool you'd like to use, then "Getting Started with Audacity 1.3" will help make sense of it all in a format that's easy to follow and builds naturally.