Podcasting?

[mfdu]

hiya there all.

got my Local Government web-developer hat on today. i'm researching podcasting here in the City of Port Phillip.

Podcasting for Local Goverment?
well, there's Council Meetings, there's accessibility issues of providing more than one file type for document download, there's Youth Services in my ear saying "we wanna do a youth 'zine, but in audio"

got some fun ahead of me. especially in the "autocasting" aspect - using Text-To-Speech synthesis to stripe a text file into spoken audio.

does anyone have any comments they would like to raise, or experiences they've had with podcasting? apart from reservations with the whole MP3 compression codec, of course.

well, let me know . . .

chris.

[Luke Garfield]

I'm thoroughly enjoying the world of podcasting atm.

My comments thus far are:

If you have a long podcast don't skimp on the conversion - listening to an hour of Bono (U2) with that lovely breaking glass effect when the conversion algorithm freaks out with a freq overload gets tiresome.

Cut podcasts into segments if this is the case.

From what I'm hearing the better podcasts are done with "industry" gear and are much more appealing to a listener who is used to radio. So I would say produce them as you would for radio in some ways.

All in all the best podcasts that I've listened to are loud & clear (no pun intended). Also remember what type of systems these casts will be played on speaker wise.

These are somewhat basic observations as I am yet to look into the technical aspects of podcasts.

Hope this helps.

[mfdu]

thanks luke.

i acknowledge what you're saying.

i'm also delighted to be able to access turtlerock during office hours with legitimate intent!

i do the monthly message-on-hold production here as well, so i certainly understand the issues raised in terms of expected playback environment / equipment. a bandwidth of 200hz > 8khz is not entirely conducive to high fidelity audio . . .

the majority of stuff that will be going up first will be straight voice - either council meetings (broken into agenda items) or similar. service reviews etc. very dull for those not affected by the issues . . .
the problem with these situations is that the public address mics in the council chamber cut in and out with low-freq thumps each time. not very polite.

the concept of casting audio-zines a la st kilda library/youth services etc has yet to traverse the whole beurocratic mine-field. . . council are excited, but has so much more to consider than "just do it"

and yes, conversion to the dreaded mp3 is a huge challenge.
certainly where the individual project budget extends far enough, i'll be able to use my studio equipment and production techniques, downsampling to mp3 for final delivery.

but equally, one of the great things about podcasting is the ability to totally punk it!
jam it onto a minidisc, pipe it through the internal soundcard of a laptop - whatever gets the right content at the right time. then it'll be up to me to sound-soap it or whatever.

well, if anyone else has comments, please jump on in. if you can manage to raise another curly one then it'll save me potential problems down the track . . .

chris.

[Kris]

I've been looking into the ins and outs of podcasting lately as well. If it's just speech as long as it doesn't have that "under water" sound of low quality mp3's it should be fine. You could even do it mono to save bandwidth if that's really an issue, although with most people on broadband and broadband 2 being rolled out it's going to become less of a problem.

You can get away with it if you consider the end listening environment which, most of the time, will be el cheapo ipod headphones or computer speakers, maybe the car. Either way the ambient noise surrounding the listener will more than cover any audiophile-type concerns, and to be honest - Joe Q. Punter thinks mp3's rock and won't notice the lower bandwidth unless it's really low or unless they have something to compare it to immediately like a full res cd.

[mfdu]

when i'm doing voice (message-on-hold) i generally stripe to mono mp3 already, so i reckon i'll keep up that habit. but i make no comment on the listening habits of joe Q punter!!!

you're bang on re. testing environment. i use laptop (internal speakers) and self-powered "multimedia" crap boxes with a dynamic range of about 1dB.
i also use a canabalized telephone handset for testing the message-on-hold (destined for the PABX system). i would use earbuds from my old minidisc, but they freak me out too much!

here in city of port phillip we have a high proportion of broadband takeup - our population are a bunch of early adaptors.
but in my role as accessibility officer i still have to assume the worst case scenario which is a dial-up at 28kbps. afterall, to assume is to make an ass of u and me!!! for the next few years i'm guessing that will mean mp3 conversions at 60kbps mono!

ow ow ow. my ethic muscle is cramping.

chris.

[Kurt]

You could offer a high and low bandwidth download. Also if you use variable bitrate encoding the files will end up quite managable, I'd imagine there is quite a bit of time with no useful information, eg papershuffling which could be gated to silence.

Also consider other offering other compression codecs, I know podcasting/mp3 is fashionable, but do the Ipose crew listen to council meetings or is it more likely to be some-one who will actually listen to it on their pc? In this case you could offer speex, wma, real audio or quicktime.

[mfdu]

i had to assess audio and video compression codecs for Accessibility.

mp3 came up trumps with the greatest native OS support.

real audio requires a download, and their site is totally inaccessable.

for video, windows media video came up the winner (native support in mac as well as pc) - beating the assorted mpegs and other contenders on the same grounds - native support, simplified access for the nuffies.

seems like no-one is getting into podcasting in the way we are proposing. especially the autocasting method and with Accessibility as the driver.

thats ok. i've got the server-side all sorted. it makes a good delivery method.

cheers.

chris.