The confessions of a novice podcaster
The making of the Landlord Law podcasts
Having spent much of the past 10 years writing content to go online (eg for my blog and online service), I decided that 2011 was going to be the year when I went into audio. Podcasting was the thing, I decided. So I downloaded Audacity (very good free editing software), set up a Skype account, and bought Pamela which everyone said was the right software to record a Skype conversation.
My first guest was Kevin Firth, Director of the Deposit Protection Service, one of the three authorised tenancy deposit schemes.
I tested everything first of course, had trial runs with Kevin’s assistant recording conversations and it worked like a dream. Simple.
Come the day I had a great interview with Kevin. It lasted about an hour and we discussed everything I wanted. I went off to have a cup of tea afterwards tired but pleased with what I had done.
I came back about half an hour later ready to import the file into audacity and start editing.
It wasn’t there.
I could not believe it. I checked the folder again and again. I had definitely clicked the record button, indeed there was a record of this on the Skype window. But for some reason it had just not recorded. After searching the entire hard drive of my computer with no success, I went back to Kevin and his assistant and broke the news to them.
Press here
I was very lucky that my first interviewee was so nice. Kevin thought it was hugely funny and sent me a picture of a record button with the header ‘press here’. Thanks Kevin.
We arranged for me to do another interview the following week.
I was now paranoid about it happening again. The trouble with Pamela is that you cannot watch it recording, so I decided to buy some other software (happily fairly inexpensive), called Supertintin for Skype. This was much better as I could watch it count down the time recorded, so would know if it went off.
Just to be on the safe side I did a trial record with Kevins assistant. Good thing I did. Audacity did not recognise the files. Aaargh!
After a period of panicking, I pulled myself together and decided that there must be a solution. As indeed there was – I had to download some more software to make it work. Which it then did. Phew!
The day of the second interview came round. Kevin is such a star. He gave another brilliant interview giving lots of information to help anyone involved in tenancy deposit protection. Now I had to edit it.
You don’t realise until you do it, quite how long it takes to edit an audio file an hour long. Just listening to it takes forever. It took me the rest of that afternoon and practically the whole of the following day to get it in a reasonable condition for publication. This was partly because I was doing two versions. The shorter podcast version (35 minutes) and a longer ‘extended version’ for my Landlord Law members only.
The podcast went live on Thursday afternoon. Feedback so far as been good.
The next thing was setting up a feed so I could submit it to itunes. You can get the feed done via feedburner (part of the Google empire), but it took a while to get it right. Note to anyone wanting to do this, that if you use the wordpress audio play plugin, you also need to have a direct link to the audio file as well, otherwise feedburner will not be able to create a feed which ‘encloses’ it. Which is what you need to submit it to itunes. It took me some time to work that one out.
The submission has now been done and I will have to wait a bit while they review it. But in the meantime, if you want to listen to the podcast you will find it here.
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Other posts by Tessa Shepperson
January 28, 2011
Tags: news, solicitors Posted in: Property Law, Technology
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Tweets that mention The confessions of a novice podcaster | Law Brief Update -- Topsy.com - January 28, 2011
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Tessa Shepperson, The DPS. The DPS said: RT @TessaShepperson: Read the story behind the Landlord Law Podcasts http://ht.ly/3LZlz [...]
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