Aug 30, 2007

Episode 4 of Eagles FanCast is online

I know, I skipped telling people about Episode 3, but at least I'm telling you about Episode 4! We've been so busy with things, I haven't had the time to post to this blog lately. Stinks, but it's the way it is. I'll try to post more things, more often, but getting this podcast off the ground took a lot of work, so I've been trying to spend more time on things around the house and especially with the family.
Well that's about it for now, another boring post, but a post regardless.

Aug 17, 2007

EFC Episode 2 is live

Just had to put it out there, that the second episode was recorded Tuesday night, and posted on Wednesday.
The family was hit with the monkey pox (our pet name for when some kind of heinous virus infiltrates our health), and hit hard. Days of high fevers and swampy fever-breaks, sore ears, throats, messed up sinuses and pink eyes galore. Sounds like fun, yes? Three of us were down, as Emma was recovered from the week before and finishing up her meds, so it seems like she survived the hard hit we all took.
Still cloudy and tired, and only back to work for three days... no more of this sickness, please!

Aug 8, 2007

EaglesFanCast Podcast is LIVE!


Well last night started the brand new podcast, EaglesFanCast.
For the past couple months, I've been learning things in an area that I know very little... audio.
People that know me know that I have absolutely no musical talent. Other than being forced in grade school by the music teacher, Mrs. Spisak, to sing in every "production" that was put on, I'm musically inept.
I've never played an instrument, have no idea how to read sheet music and you have to ask Maureen about my very interesting rhythmic dancing when we go out.
So in the past couple months, I've taught myself things like the audio waveform, compression, limiting, normalizing, the mixdown and who knew that "gain" is actually "volume"?
With that brand new knowledge, and learning RSS feeds, online syndication, etc. the thing finally came together. Eric, Todd and myself sat down and talked about the Eagles for almost an hour... it was casual and smooth, like we were doing it for 50 shows already. Great fun. Eric and Todd definitely know more of the ins and outs of the team and sports in general, so they were able to carry the conversation throughout, and I was thrilled.
We ended it, and that's where the rest of the show came in for me. I saved the file, then edited out a lot of the dead space (long pauses between topics, etc.), then did some of those things I learned about (compression, normalizing). Then I had to record and mix in the music for the intro and outro. Then I had to put it all into one file. Then I had to convert it to the MP3 format (like any songs you download through iTunes and such). Then I had to update the file's "tags" which are things inside the file like Title, Artist, Year, Comments, Track, etc. etc.
Then I uploaded the final file to the file server online, updated the show's settings, updated the show notes, and made it available for the various sites that list podcasts.
Once that was done, I updated our website / blog with the info on the new podcast, and listed the show notes in a post.

Then I went to bed.

Well the good thing is, half of those things ONLY have to happen on the first episode, and can just be mixed in for the rest of the shows, and a few settings updated with the new info. In theory, I won't have to go to bed at 2:00am on the night of a show anymore. :)

So the website is http://www.eaglesfancast.net
And if you know what RSS feeds are and want to subscribe to the shows, the feed is
http://eaglesfancast.libsyn.com/rss

It was fun, and I learned a lot... and there is a LOT of polishing to be done on my end for the post-production work. Plus I have a bunch of things to do on the website as well. I'm tired.

Aug 1, 2007

New project coming...

I'm working on something new, and will reveal it officially in the next week. It's just something that's been an interest of mine for a couple years, and now I'm jumping onto the other side of it after much "observation". A few buddies of mine will be helping me out as well, so that will make it work the way it's supposed to.
In the meantime, I just have to do some more learning, practicing and tweaking to make it come to fruition.