Enjoy the rare episode of Podcast Idiot.

I didn’t test out anything prior to leaving. I just figured everything would work! Hahahaha. I was dead wrong. The equipment I brought was a Zoom F2 Field Recorder and my Microsoft Surface Go. I also had my Pixel 3 and the necessary cables to connect everything together. Little did I know the TRRS cable I have did absolutely nothing in getting audio from my phone into my Surface Go. Also, connecting the Zoom F2 to my Surface Go using the audio out from the Zoom F2 to the microphone/headphone jack in the Surface Go didn’t work. In essence I had no way to get audio from my devices into my computer unless I record and transfer over USB.

It was too much work. I had maybe two hours to record and I already spent a good 45 minutes finding out nothing worked. So, I recorded one podcast directly into the Zoom F2, uploaded that via USB to the Surface Go, then edited it together in Audacity. I hate editing so much and I wasn’t prepared to do it this way. It took forever to import the intro music and cut it all together. I don’t know how professional podcasters spend so much time editing when I can’t stand simple importation and insertion of clips before and after.

I always record “live to tape” so to speak. No edits all blemishes and mistakes for all to hear. I’m not a professional podcaster nor do I pretend to be. I’m doing this to learn about the medium, podcasting 2.0, and how streaming payments are going to work. I believe streaming payments for live and recorded content is the future of media consumption. It’s a great way to remove the middlemen from the transactions.

Next time around will I have to pack my PodMic and my Zoom Podtrak P4? I hope not. I like to travel light. I’m going to actually do some work this time to figure out how to mobile podcast with the equipment I want to bring. Hopefully I can make it work.

By the way, did you listen to the last episode of Podcasting 2.0? There’s a whole lot of stuff coming down the pipe. There was also a great episode of The New Media Show where Todd & Rob debate Tanner Campbell on RSS, its future, and the big platforms (namely Spotify). Personally I would like to see the continuation of RSS. What Adam Curry and Dave Jones, amongst others, are doing to extend the functionality of RSS and what the new podcast apps are doing to implement them is nothing short of magic. In just a year’s time they’ve implemented transcripts, location, chapters, etc. Making podcasting richer with a fuller experience inside the independent apps. When the value block is finished and implemented there will be nothing standing in between a creator of content, whatever that content may be, and the consumer of that content.

I said it was episode 8 but it’s actually episode 10. Ooooops! I guess I haven’t refined my workflow enough yet.

My two active podcasts are in their 9th episodes. Miracle that I have the attention span to keep that going for more than two months.

I’m terrible at promotion and asking for donations.

I’m starting to feel my way through a process that allows me to do show prep as I blog.

Came up with a file naming convention that is easy for me to remember and keeps episodes and assets organized.

Transcripts are easy and I do them regularly

Chapters take up some time and I haven’t been diligent about doing them.

I hate editing so I just DO IT LIVE and upload with all the poor production quality that goes along with that.

I figured out how to enable my podcasts to receive crypto currency by setting them up on Sphinx and enabling that on podcasterwallet.org. I can’t figure out how to move satoshis out of Sphinx and into Breez or some other lightning wallet so I can use these sats. The system of streaming money is still way too complicated for the average podcaster. The learning curve is way too steep still.

I find that I still whisper when I talk. I think it’s a by product of wearing headphones while I talk. It doesn’t come natural to me. I feel like I’m speaking normally but when I hear portions of it played back I still sound like I’ whispering. I don’t like that and I’m looking to fix it.

I may invest in a shock mount so the microphone doesn’t pick up so much of the noise from touching it.

I still haven’t found a good way to mount a microphone boom because the edge of my desk is tapered and I don’t want to drill a hole through the top. I can’t be the only one to run across this problem.

Transcripts

The simplest part is the transcript. I start on the transcript almost immediately after the episode has been recorded. I take my mp3 file, upload it to otter.ai, and they e-mail me when the file has been transcribed.

The clearer you talk and the higher quality of your recording makes a more accurate transcription. The time it takes to make the transcript is dependent on how long your episode is. Mine are all short right now so my transcript is usually ready less than a half hour. I go to their site, click on the relevant transcript, and export the text to an .srt file. That file then gets uploaded to my web server and because I’ve already set up the link in PowerPress when someone accesses the podcast the transcript just starts rolling.

Otter.ai has a free plan but I subscribed to their Pro plan which is only $99.00/year. For that price you can upload 6,000 minutes a month with a max length per recording of 4 hours. The free plan works too if you’re keeping your episodes under 40 minutes but you’re limited to 600 minutes a month.

Chapters

Chapters are a little more time consuming because they have to be created manually. But, I think I have a system that speeds things up a bit and starts with making the transcript first. I open the transcript .srt file in Notepad and keep that window off to one side. In the browser I go to JSON Editor Online and open a .json template I’ve created that contains the basic start of the chapter file. The template pre-loads the setup for 10 chapters. I can easily add more or delete the extras when I’m done using the editor.

I keep the template on the left side in code mode and copy that over to the right side and turn off code mode. It’s not necessary to do it this way but I like having the empty template on one side and the working chapters file on the other. The transcript file created from otter.ai is time stamped. This allows me to scroll through it and easily match up topics with the times that I start talking about them. A simple conversion from minutes to seconds gives me the number I need to enter into the chapter file. As you can see in the screenshot above each chapter section starts with “startTime”. Enter the seconds, put in a title, and if you have an image you place the URL to that image in the “img” field, and like wise if you have a link to something you can place that in the “url” field. Each field is easily edited by double clicking on the blank field. It’s easier than using code mode and trying to place your cursor in between the quotes every single time. When I’ve entered in all the chapters I need I simply save the file to disk, copy that over to my web server, and again because the file is pre-set up in PowerPress when someone accesses the podcast the chapters file just loads.

I use a simple naming convention for my episode, transcript, and chapter files. That way I can easily put links into the episode before the files are made. If the files don’t exist then the player just ignores them and plays the episode. Once they’re created and uploaded the podcast app pulls from that file. It’s pretty magical. My episode names start with the date, followed by the show acronym, and ends with the episode number. For example, the episode accompanying this blog post will have the file name 2021-05-15-PIP009.mp3. The transcript file will be 2021-05-15-PIP009.srt. The chapters file will be 2021-05-15-PIP009.json. I already know the location where I will place the file on my blog making it easy to place the URL in PowerPress.

I know there are other ways of doing this but for me, just starting out, this is a quick and easy solution that is virtually free. These features magically work on Podcasting 2.0 compatible apps.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay
Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay
Image by Joshua Eckstein from Pixabay

As I said in my post yesterday I haven’t been sitting still. I revamped the web site, moved my RSS feed again, added transcripts, and now chapters! Today I figured out the json file business as it pertains to chapters in the Podcast 2.0 namespace. It’s exciting to see them work in different podcast apps. Making chapters can be tedious but it is far easier than I thought and it can be done after the fact. You just need the entry in your RSS feed and when the file is created and put in the correct space the chapters magically appear.

The first thing I did was read the chapters spec on github. It’s not hard to understand. The problem is the pain in the ass of manually typing out all the code. It’s not even complicated code and you don’t really need anything more than a text editor. When you finish the code you save the text file with a .json file extension and it’s good to go. What I found to make the process easier is a json editor online. jsoneditoronline.org This free tool works in your browser and is open source. Here’s what it looks like.

The above image is what the code looks like. The attributes are empty. This is easy enough to use but it gets easier using the code in a tree format instead.

Using this interface completing the chapter information is as easy as filling in the blanks. You’re not going to have to worry about messing up the quotation marks or getting confused with brackets. This is stupid easy.

I upload this template, fill in the blanks for the attributes, save it as a .json file for that particular podcast, and include that in the RSS feed. If I have fewer chapters than I need I simply delete the extra chapters. By the same token if I need more I can just cut and paste empty chapters to the bottom and continue on.

Chapter functionality is on my last episode, Talking is Hard, and you can see it using any app that is chapter compliant. Check it out in Podfriend or the Breez app to see it work.

It’s barely audible because I didn’t have the levels set correctly in Audacity.