2005 • February • 26

Stop. Quickie time.

Okay, so let me get this straight: The fact that Canada exercised it's sovereignty in refusing to join up with us on the brain-dead missile defence plan means that it's reliquished its sovereignty. Double-speak and bullies, hooray! Somehow, I think this sort of thing makes us the target of more missiles than Canada--and keeping US military assets out of your country seems like a better missile defense to me.

Just heard an awesome mashup on Adam Curry's Daily Source Code podcast, Seether by Veruca Salt VS. Don't Go by Yazoo.
Oh, and speaking of podcasts. My pet peeve:

For the love of Bob please watch your audio levels!!!

Is there anyway everyone could take some cues from radio and maybe try to agree on a decibel level common between podcasts? And maybe even within the same podcast? I mean, maybe this is where the thousands of dollars of equipment in a studio comes in handy, with compressors and such, but there's gotta be something to be done.

Stuart Langridge

2005-02-26T22:43:48

Audio levels are hard. On LugRadio (www.lugradio.org) we used to have all sorts of issues with the sound balancing. The reason it's now fixed is that we use the not-very-cheap Cubase SX for mixing. While I take your point entirely, saying "you've gotta pony up a lot of money for decent mixing software" raises the bar to podcasting enormously. It's be like only allowing weblogging with a paid-for TypePad subscription. I wish there was Free software to do this, but there isn't, really; I mean, we're a Linux radio show and we're not doing it...
fluffy

2005-02-27T12:42:16

Many free/cheap recording packages these days come with software compressors. It's just a matter of educating people on how to use them.
Matt Brubeck

2005-02-27T23:31:28

For normalizing sound levels between podcasts, ReplayGain (e.g. mp3gain, vorbisgain) would be a useful standard. I've been meaning to add that to Audacity someday.