My Other Passion Project - ENSIGN RED

This is about as indulgent as they come but I don't care. While this blog is mostly devoted to software testing, it also is the repository for many of my thoughts, ideas and half-baked schemes that I want to record and tell the world about in some way.

There's a running joke in the software testing world about the "rock star tester" and the fact that, at one point in my life, the first two words better described me than the third word did. In truth, I was never comfortable with the term "rock star", mainly because even at the most celebrated our material ever became, any "stardom" was a very local and niche kind of thing. I've actually been OK with that. I got to do all of the things I set out to do as a musician (well, most of them, in any event) without having to experience too many of the downsides. At the age of twenty-five, I chose to "retire" and live a more normal kind of life, one which involved a more standard kind of career and a family. Still, the desire to create, to write, to express my self in what is basically bad poetry, and to sing on a stage has never been far from my thoughts. Now, I'm actively enjoying that process once again and I'd like to tell you all about it.

I am the lead singer of a hard rock/heavy metal band called Ensign Red!

First, a disclaimer. I have no idea what any one person's definition of hard rock or heavy metal is. If you hear us and consider us metal, great. If you don't, that's fine too :).


Second, we are probably never going to win this battle of pronunciation but I'm going to state it anyway. Our name is "En-SIGN Red"! Think of a flag. An Ensign. Specifically, we are named after the red flag pirates would raise that meant "no quarter given" (more appropriately referred to as "The Red Ensign". We switched the words because we felt it sounded more interesting. We've also heard people refer to us as "EN-sin Red", as though it were a formal name of a person holding the military rank. The fact is, many people find it easier to say the latter so we're cool with either. It's all good :).

Third, this is a project that takes up a fairly large amount of my time and attention and I want a place to talk about it. I want to talk about the creative process of songwriting, of oddball source materials, of inspirations that make their way into our songs. Some things will be kept secret (so to speak) but otherwise, any thoughts or questions about being a later in life band member trying to exercise a bit of creativity are totally open.

I may even drop in some software testing relevant content with these posts from time to time. Who knows. In any event, here's to future days :).

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.

So You Want To Produce a Podcast? Part Three: A Space to Create

You have decided on a topic. You have decided on who will participate in creating your podcast. By yourself or with others, the next step is the same. You need a space to create, record and produce. They take many forms, and mine is not the be all and end all. In fact, it's very much in a state of flux at the moment, but that's perfect. It means I can show you bare bones techniques as well as hint at future enhancements.

Making the most of a loft bed's space.

Monitor, microphone, laptop, and always something to drink nearby.
Yes, that is Neville Longbottom's wand. Why do you ask ;)?

A motley assortment of pillows, blankets, towels, and a fold-out sleep pad.
Comfortable?
Yes.
Sound deadening?
Now you're catching on ;). 

For starters, here's a look at my "creative space". I have a small bedroom/office that's what we lovingly refer to as "the island of misfit toys room" in that it has an odd shape due to being over a stairwell. It's a small room, and space comes at a premium, so recently I invested in a simple loft bed with an under-the-bed desk. This particular version comes courtesy of Ikea (their Sväta Loft Bed and Desk). The bed is helpful for being a crash point during late nights or early mornings when I either need to be up very late or very early and don't want to disturb the rest of the house. The bed also offers another interesting benefit; the pillows, blankets, and towels on top of it are actively used when I record a show. Curious? I was hoping you might be :).

If you own a MacBookPro, you may be surprised to learn that it has a good quality built in microphone. You could record with it, but you'd need to be extra careful to isolate the laptop, and then invest in a separate wireless keyboard and mouse so as to not disturb it or make any sudden movements. For short work, such as recording intro and outro messages, or very short spoken clips, this is doable. I do it on occasion when I'm outside of my home setup and I don't want to drag everything with me. Likewise, at times like that, I use the microphone and voice recorder app on my iPhone, but that's way down there on my personal preference. To get the best sound, I prefer a dedicated microphone. More to the point, I prefer a microphone that I can move or reposition as I see fit. To that end I use a combination of the following:

• Blue Snowball ice USB powered microphone
• Blue Ringer Shock Mount Ring for Snowball (helps a lot with not picking up movement vibrations)
• RODE PSA1 Swivel Mount Studio Microphone Boom Arm
• Round pop filter (takes the harshness off of percussive syllables and greatly reduces the capture of "mouth smack", or the recording of the movement of your flesh inside of your mouth that makes that crackly noise when you speak. Less than $20.00 US and wholly worth it, in my opinion)

Depending on the room that you are in, you may have a lot of natural reverb, or you may have carpet and drapes that help to muffle ambient sounds. I like to go a couple of steps further in that I take several pillows and a fold out sleeping pad to make a much more "acoustically dead" space for when I speak. I also take a large towel and I put it over my hands when I use the keyboard and mouse. It doesn't muffle all sound, but it quiets those movements down a lot. Remember, the fewer artifacts that you record, the less tinkering you will have to do later with silencing or trying to even out the sound recording.

A few strategically placed pillows, a sleeping pad and a towel, and we are off to the races!

Another very important piece of equipment to have, at least to me, is a good full ear set of studio monitors (or you can be normal and just call them headphones ;) ). I've been using the same pair for many years (Audio-Technica ATH-M40fs Studiophones), and I hope they never break. They cup the ear and they are great at preventing sound leakage. That's important when you get up close to a microphone, as you don't want other people's conversations to be invading your recording. I also like this particular model because it has a long cord, so if I need to get up to move something, I don't have to take them off mid recording.

Blue Snowball ice, Ringer Shock Mount, Audio-Technica Studiophones and a pop filter, all mounted to a Rode Swing Arm.

GEEK TRICK: There are two enhancements that are on the horizon for me. First is that, while the pillows and pad are effective and cheap options, they take up a fair amount of space and are not very customizable. To that end, a project I have in the works is to make a set of hanging "gobos", or pieces of sound deadening material that I can position exactly where I need them to provide optimum sound isolation. The second is to get something larger than my iPhone that I can use when doing on-air fact checks or reference checks. The keyboard works, as does the mouse, but again, noisy. What is much less so? An iPad or Android tablet. Plenty of room to see what I need to direct questions or comments, but very little noise to pick up on the microphone.

So there you have it. In case you have ever wondered what my current recording space looks like, at the moment, it looks like this. I hope to soon show some improvements and enhancements, but for a new podcaster, this method is effective, inexpensive, and takes up little space. Plus, you get to sleep on it later :). Three cheers for multitasking!

Do you like the approach? Do you think it's silly? Can you suggest improvements? If so, I'd love to hear from you. Please feel free to leave comments below. Next time, we'll talk about what you do after you've recorded your masterpiece.

So You Want to Produce A Podcast? Part Two: Topic and Control

For each of the areas in my introductory "5000-foot view" post, I will take some time and dig deeper into them and provide a little closer look at each region. Warning, this may get messy as we continue.

All successful podcasts tend to hang on a central theme. That theme can vary wildly and cover a  lot of different areas, but there should be some anchor point that you as a show producer can draw on. Some of my favorite "wide net" podcasts are "Stuff You Missed in History Class" and "Stuff You Should Know" both from HowStuffWorks.com. Their format allows them to cover a huge array of topics, and with that, there's the high probability that such a broad range will not hook every listener. By contrast, a focus on a very specific niche area, like Joe Colantonio's "Test Talks" Test Automation Podcast) or Ruby Rogues, means that you are likely to be hitting areas that you are familiar with and comfortable with, but also run the risk of hearing things you have heard before. In my opinion, the more niche the show, the less likely one or two people will be able to do it justice. Unless you are a genuine super-nerd on the area in question, and you can go into great depth on the topics you are covering, it's much harder to produce solid shows with only one or two people talking. Guest contributors make this kind of a podcast essential. By contrast, covering something broad or that changes week to week means that you can riff on it and provide your own thoughts and opinions and keep things fresh.

Regardless of the topic areas that you choose to cover, you will have to do your homework for any given show. If you invite a guest on the podcast, it's always a good idea to do some research on what they've done in the past, what their level of expertise is, how they acquired it, and get them to open up and share their journey to where they are today. Even if you are not appearing "on mic", if you have thoughts or ideas, or questions you would like to get covered, make sure the participants know about them. If you have the time to do so, compile a list of questions you'd like to ask your guest and send them to them in advance. You don't have to go by a set script, but by giving them heads up on the areas that you are interested in, they can answer back and either give you more areas to consider and broaden your questions or let you know ahead of time where there might be better resources for those questions. Either way, it helps you tailor what you ask your guests or, barring that, what you choose to ask yourself as you discuss those areas.

As a show producer, if you are appearing on air, one of your jobs is to be the show runner. With "The Testing Show", I usually defer to Matt Heusser when he's on to be the moderator of the discussions, but I take the lead to manage the topics and "watch the clock". This is an important part of topic and voice, and that's to make sure that all participants keep focused. That's not to say that a good conversation should be abruptly stopped, but as show runner, I need to make sure that I'm not going to have to be heavy handed about editing, so I tend to remind people of our timing.

Many podcasts are free-form, and they go as long as they feel like going. Some people do this better than others. One of my long time favorite podcasts is "Back to Work" with Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin. Suffice it to say, every episode is long, an hour plus, sometimes as much as two hours. There is a lot of banter in their shows like two old pals just talking about whatever comes to mind. They use a lot of inside jokes, and it takes awhile to get to the topics, but they do so, and they make it engaging. Other shows I have heard don't do this quite as well. It's important to decide on your tempo, and how you want to achieve it. The Testing Show has settled on a general format, and we reached this format after discussions with our sponsor, QualiTest. We decided that the average show length would be 30 minutes. Sometimes they are shorter, sometimes a little longer, but generally, we aim for that sweet spot of 30 minutes. We also tend to have a "news segment" at the start of each show, which allows us the opportunity to be open and casual discussing a current-ish topic. We post new episodes every two weeks. That makes what we think is topical sometimes seem like old news by the time it appears. With that in mind, we aim to cover news items that have broader messages and takeaways. That leaves us with twenty minutes to talk about the main topic. The advantage of a set times show is that we can keep the message tight and focused. The disadvantage, at times, is that it can sound shallow or not go into the depth that some listeners would want. We take these on a case by case basis, and if a topic is really deserving, or covers enough unique ground to warrant it, we will do a two-part episode. Generally, though, I prefer to keep the shows as standalone entities, so I try my best to help make sure that heavy editing is not required. Sometimes I succeed. Often, I don't, but that's its own post ;).

GEEK TRICK: I encourage anyone producing a show to keep a production schedule on hand. This is key as you go through recording episodes. Based on the queue of recordings, and your posting schedule, when will this current recording appear? We have had experiences where we have been very lean with guests. A recording we make might get turned around and uploaded to the feed within a week (definitely stressful, but the content is fresh and current). At other times, we have a backlog of recordings to work through. We have had shows recorded that didn't get posted as episodes until two months later. As a show producer looking at this schedule and being aware of the post dates for any potential recording can help you decide if it makes sense to record a show on a given date or wait until later. Sometimes, a guest has a really tight schedule and you will only get them for that time period. If that's the case, you may need to shuffle your backlog a little, so that that special guest can appear in your episode stream sooner rather than later. Additionally, when guests or panelists are talking about upcoming events, it really helps to have a clear window as to when the show will air. It makes no sense to talk about an appearance or an event that will have already happened. One exception to this is if the materials for presentations are going to be made public by the time the podcast appears. You can then make a note of their location in the show's transcription and show notes.

Another thing a producer should consider is if they will be willing to "correct" items "in post" (meaning as they are editing, they notice something that's either incorrect/outdated, or could use clarification). Personally, my preferred method is to use the show transcript and notes for this purpose, but occasionally, something will stick out. To avoid confusion, or add clarity, it will make sense to drop a comment into the show mid-stream. I recently did this with regards to a discussion that we were having about Socialtext current CI system. Though I wasn't on that show, there had been enough changes that I felt it warranted to drop a small voice recording in and clarify what we are doing currently.

It may take awhile for your show to "find its voice". It's tempting to think that you will go live immediately with your first recording as your first episode. I strongly encourage you to record a "Pilot" podcast first, to see if you like the format, and to see what you will have to do to produce the show you want to produce. We did this with "The Testing Show" and decided that the first recording was just too rough to go live with. We still have it, and at some point, we may post it as an example of "first steps" to show what we started with, and how we made changes over the subsequent episodes. I have heard several people make the recommendation to record five episodes, and then record episode six and label that one as the first episode, discarding the previous five. If you are a one or two-person podcast with the same people each time, that makes sense. If you are asking for guests to appear on your show, it's not cool to take up their time and then not post their contributions. Since we decided from the outset to be a guest driven show, we went live with episode two.

Are there any other questions or things you wonder about when it comes to developing the voice of your podcast, and how to "run the show" once it's recording time? If so, please leave questions below, and I will be happy to answer them, expand on them in this post, or write new posts to talk about them.

So You Want To Produce a Podcast? Part One: The 5,000 Foot View

I need to thank Saron Yitbarek. She posted a tweet that had me laughing last night, as she was talking about how she needed to edit a podcast, but that she was procrastinating the editing, and she wanted to write a blog post about podcasting instead.

Please forgive me misspelling #TheTestingShow in my reply. I was a little tired. Still, her Tweet has been rattling around in my head all day. What if someone who listens to The Testing Show wanted to start their own podcast. What would I tell them? How should they start? What should they do? How do you actually produce a show? Could I put this all into one post?

I decided the answer to that was "probably not", but I could do a series of posts about what I do as a quick and dirty tutorial about my approach as to how I edit and produce The Testing Show, so if you will indulge me, that is exactly what I am going to do.

First, you need a show, and to have a show, you need a topic. It helps if the topic is something you are nerdy about, has a direct connection to your professional life, or is otherwise something you would climb a mountain of people to do and, thus, talk about it with a passion. Hyperbole much? Maybe, but seriously, if you dig the topic in question, you will be motivated to make many installments, and that tends to encourage the commitment to keep making episodes.

Second, you need to decide how you want to present your show. Do you want to be a first person podcast, where you do all the talking? Don't dismiss this, as several of my favorite podcasts are exactly this. Dan Carlin's shows Hardcore History and Common Sense, Stephen West's Philosophize This, most of the podcasts on QuickandDirtyTips.com, and a new one that I am currently enjoying called The Ends, all of these shows have a single speaker/narrator and work well in this format. Upside: you can produce shows anytime you want to. Downside: it's all on you, and that means you have to provide all of the research, commentary, and thoughts. An interview or panel show add the elements of additional speakers and commentary. Upside: you get a variety of viewpoints. Downside: your ability to schedule everyone to record can be a logistical challenge, and the more people you want on the call, the greater the challenge. For The Testing Show, we have a rotating recurring cast. The general rule is that three of us together meet the minimum requirements to record a podcast on a topic, or two of us and a guest also meet that requirement. In a pinch, if we are remote or at an event, we will do a one on one interview with someone, but we strive to get three people into the conversation so there's some give and take.

Third, how do you want to capture your audio? For the time being, I will leave video out of the mix. I will also leave in person recording out (though the Voice Recorder apps on iPhone and Android are actually quite good, and I have used them in live settings to great effect). We're talking just an audio recording done with remote participants. If you'd like an inexpensive, but quite reliable, recording method, I recommend using Skype and the ecamm Skype Call Recorder. There are numerous recording options, but for now, focus on the voice-only option. The calls are saved as .mov files, and each file can be imported into your audio editor of choice.

Fourth, you need an audio editor. Which one you use is up to you. For the past seven years, I've used Audacity. It's got a lot going for it, and once you get a handle on how to use it, it can be very fast to work with. Truth be told, there's a lot of features that will feel like overkill, and if you want to record a podcast, 90% of the features will remain untouched, but I promise, the 10% that you do use you will use all the time, and they will become second nature to you (and as soon as they do, don't be surprised to find out that the number of "essential features" starts to creep up ;) ). Whatever you use, make sure that you can import the file types you save. Yes, I'm using a Mac, so I'm using Mac vernacular here. Once I've imported the Skype call as a .mov file, I am presented with a stereo track that has two channels. The first is the channel with just my dialog or the dialog of the person that recorded the call. The second channel is the dialog of everyone else on the call. If you want to go very clean and are willing to spend the time to do it, you can have everyone record their own version of the call, send you their .mov files, and you can import them all together.

GEEK TRICK: If you want to go this route, and you want to be a little cheap on the sync-up options, record a "beep series" at the start of the recording, and occasionally, during silences, insert the beep series again, as a standalone audio spot. Also, run the beep series at the end of the recording. Why? This series of beeps will be a visual cue when you import the audio files to help you line everything up. One you do that, split all of the stereo tracks into mono, then mute the secondary tracks that have multiple voices together. If you do this, you will get multiple first person recordings, made local to their systems, and the odds of removing drop outs and clicks/audio artifacts are much higher.

If you can't get a native recording from everyone, or if you are the only one able to do the recording (common if you ask a guest to be on the show; it's rude to ask them to shell out for software they may never use again), then you can import a single .mov file, split it into two mono tracks, and sync-lock the tracks together. This way you can select sections in each track to mute, and if you cut out sections of audio from one track, you will also be cutting the same time period in the other track.

GEEK TRICK: One of the easiest ways to do a fast condensing of a recording is to use the "Truncate Silence" feature. You enter in a minimal time limit that you want to search for (usually anything longer than a second), and you truncate all of that down to individual silences of one-half second. Why? This is a typical time space in average conversations. By reducing all silences to anything less than a second, you can take out several minutes from a podcast recording easily, with very little chance of cutting off something important. Along with this, if you listen to tracks and decide you want to cut sections, I suggest selecting the section and muting it first (meaning silence everything in that selected space, which on the Mac is Command-L, and Ctrl-L on the PC). By doing this, you can do a rough cut of your show, chop out the bits you know you're not going to use, then run Truncate Silence to squeeze everything together.

Another consideration; this is important when you decide to publish... do you want to have show notes? Do you want to have a Transcript? Do you want to have both? The Testing Show provides both show notes and a full transcript of the audio. I have tried a number of methods for this, and truth be told, I keep returning to this approach. Fire up whatever word processor you want to use in one window, and your editor in another. As you do your fine editing, type out your transcript in time with the second by second audio scrubbing you are doing. If you are not providing a full transcript, this will be overkill. If you are not doing what I refer to as "grammatical audio editing" (that's removing the "um's", ah's", like's", "you know's", and other vocal tics we all use when we speak) then again, this is overkill. If, however, you decide to provide both a grammatical audio edit and a full transcript, you might as well do them both simultaneously. You may incur a 15-20% overhead by doing both at the same time, but that's not bad, really.

GEEK TRICK: If you come across a comment that you think might need referencing in the show notes, either highlight it or insert an end-note and type a reminder text about that entry. Later, when you review the end notes, fill in the actual reference values or URL's to resource links. If you are online and can do it right then and there, all the better. Seriously, do this, and you will have produced 75% of your show notes. As to the pithy commentary to add as your "selling paragraph", that's an everyday struggle, but you will get better the more you do it. Seriously, though, I think I spend more time trying to get the introductory paragraph together at times as compiling all of the reference materials, and yes, I frequently feel like I'm an idiot as I review the text I've written, but over time, you just learn to roll with it. Sometimes, it works. Sometimes, it falls flat. So it goes.

Finally, you may want to spice up your podcast with music, inserted comments (bumpers) and some intro and outro comments. You may decide to do this differently each time, or you may want to standardize what I call "audio beds" that include these. For The Testing Show, our intro and outro music is provided by my band, Ensign Red. If you can make your own music, that will provide you with the ability to customize it as you need for your intros and outros or other uses. If you are not musically inclined, there are numerous sources of Creative Commons free use music samples that you can download and use. If you'd like to take the plunge, start with CreativeCommons.org and see what sounds interesting to you. It's good protocol to give credit to the artists whose music you choose to use in your podcast. Mention them in your show notes and in the podcast itself. It encourages discovery of their music and thus, makes them more willing to keep creating Creative Commons content.

So there you have it, a whirlwind look at creating a podcast. Have I left a lot of stuff out? Most certainly. Would you like to know more? I'm happy to share what I know and how I do it, partly because I know the challenges of getting started and how large a mountain that is. Also, I have a slightly selfish ulterior motive. My hope is that, by sharing these posts, and giving people a peek into my world of producing these shows, someone might comment back and say "you know, you could do this sequence of steps so much more efficiently if you just [fill in the blank]." Hey, it happens with code review all the time, so why not with podcast production review as well :)? 

Oh, and Saron, if you do publish that blog post, please let me know. I'd love to read it.