Digital Podcast Features Goodnight Burbank See Details

Goodnight Burbank is…
GNB is a fictional newscast where the news is real – and everything else isn’t. We go behind the scenes and between the headlines to see not just how the news is presented but what reporters really think about the stuff they’re reporting. It’s what happens when anchors stop being pretty and start being pretty dysfunctional.

Hayden Black is…
I am a writer/producer and occasional performer who put together a collective of actors/performers/comics from LA who I met at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade.

If you like … you will like our podcast
If you like the Daily Show, the Office and/or Sportsnight you will like our vidcast. If you don’t like character driven, clever comedy then you’re probably better off watching something on YouTube.

We podcast …
We podcast because it’s a great way of being creative and not having to answer to anyone else. Goodnight Burbank in particular is a fantastic, carthartic way of discussing and laughing at the news we see on our TVs every day.

We podcast from …
We podcast from Los Angeles.

We will produce … podcasts this year
We will produce 32 podcasts this year, give or take. It’s an expensive venture – we use green screen technology, HD cameras, etc, and as we’re funding this ourselves we’re not in and out of the studio as often as we’d like. If you’d like to donate production expenses, PLEASE do. We’ll mention your name at least once.

We listen to podcasts on …
We listen to podcasts on…um, is this the bit where we plug the Digital Podcast site? If so, then it’s definitely right here. But also iTunes, our iPods and on show-specific sites.

To make our podcast, we use …
To make our podcast, we use blood, sweat, and Tums. We cut on Avid. And because our new Editor has a cat, I personally have to now make our show on Benedryl because I’m allergic.
By the end of 2006, we think…
By the end of 2006, I think we will have a much larger audience and a much better show. Each time we shoot I strive to make it better than the last time – from scripts to performances. We will never rest on our laurels. Even though I don’t think any of us owns any laurels.

Lost in the middle of the Pacific, we would have these three podcasts with us … Lost in the middle of the Pacific, I would have these three podcasts with us: French Maid TV (because producer Tim Street is a really hip cat – a cat I’m not allergic to), Spainful (because Conrad is England’s second coolest vidcaster) and a third one to be on rotation from within the LA Podcasters community

	Digital Podcast Features Never Not Funny with Jimmy Pardo See Details

TV personality and comedian Jimmy Pardo is bringing his razor-sharp wit and conversational skills to the world of podcasting. Each week he’ll sit down with comic Mike Schmidt and producer Matt Belknap to shoot the breeze, share some stories and laugh at life. Join him, won’t you?

Never Not Funny is…
Never Not Funny is a free-wheeling weekly conversation with one of the funniest comedians on the planet and his friends in show business

Jimmy Pardo is…
Nationally headlining comic and TV personality Jimmy Pardo (AMC’s Movies at Our House, National Lampoon’s Funny Money, The Tonight Show, Comedy Central, The Surreal Life) is the host and anchors the conversation. Joining him every week is producer Matt Belknap and fellow comic and writer Mike Schmidt. Every fourth episode, a fourth member will join the group — people like Paul Gilmartin (TBS’s Dinner and a Movie, The Adam Corolla Show), reality show producer Pat Francis and game show host Graham Elwood.

If you like … you will like our podcast
If you like what Ricky Gervais does on his podcast, you will love Never Not Funny: it’s the same basic approach (three funny guys talking about their lives), but with Jimmy’s distinctive comic sensibility and trademark improvisational quickness to set it apart. We challenge the listener to dispute our show title!

We podcast …
We podcast comedy content. Our sole purpose is to make you laugh and keep you entertained for 45 minutes a week.

We podcast from …
We podcast from Jimmy’s dining room in Los Angeles, California — he lives just south of movie star, just north of dicey. 

We will produce … podcasts this year
We will produce forty podcasts this year — one every week, having started in April.

We listen to podcasts on …
We listen to podcasts on our iPods and our computers using iTunes.

To make our podcast, we use …
o make our podcast, we use an Alesis MultiMix FireWire 12 mixer, an Apple iBook laptop, Cubase LE and Nady microphones. We use iTunes, iWeb and .Mac to compress, publish and host the show and FeedBurner to track stats.

By the end of 2006, we think…
By the end of 2006, we will take Adam Curry hostage to cement our place in the podcast hall of fame (and restock our V05 mousse supply).

Lost in the middle of the Pacific, we would have these three podcasts with us …
Lost in the middle of the Pacific, we would have these three podcasts with us: who can think of podcasts at a time like this! Besides, we have our desert island discs to keep us busy (Chicago 16, Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Paul Abdul’s Forever Your Girl).

I came across this neat little tool at Scripting News

It seems that these guys have built a little server that can create an RSS feed of your iTunes music allowing you to play it through a browser that supports this idea.

MyTunesRSS helps you create RSS feeds of the music in your iTunes music library. You can play the tracks in the feed with any device that has a browser and supports RSS feeds. One such device for example is the Sony Playstation Portable with an appropriate firmware version.

MyTunesRSS is an application to configure and start a server. Once the server is running, you can access a web application through a browser. With the browser you can search your iTunes music library and create the RSS feed from the results.

You can search your library by artist und album and create an RSS feed from the results. The application supports MP3 files and unprotected AAC files. You can create feeds directly from your playlists and restrict access to your library through the web application with a password.

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Want to podcast. Want to podcast for free.

You can podcast with a free website, free audio software, free hosting and free bandwidth. Free as in doesn’t cost you a penny, except for your computer and microphone.

Making a podcast is a five step process

1. Create your audio file
2. Upload your audio file
3. Create your show notes on your website
4. Create and publish your RSS feed
5. Tell everyone you know where to find your RSS feed

There are five free tools you can use to podcast for free.

1. Blogger (http://blogger.com) is free a blog based website where you can post information about your shows and blog about anything you want
2. Audacity with the Lame plug in (http://audacity.sourceforge.net) is free audio recording and editing software
3. Internet Archive (http://archive.org) provides free hosting and bandwidth
4. CC Publisher ( http://creativecommons.org/audio/publish-internetarchive ) is a free tool that does two things: it will help you tag your audio files with information about your license and it allows you to upload Creative Commons-licensed audio and video works to the Internet Archive for free hosting. You can now upload directly to the Internet Archive at http://www.archive.org/contribute.php
5. Feedburner (http://feedburner.com) is a free service for hosting your RSS feed

Step one – How to create your audio file?
Most Windows based computers come with sound recording software built into them. On a Windows XP box you can find it by going to start > all programs > accessories > entertainment > sound recorder. You can use this tool to play around with a microphone that comes with your computer or a plug in microphone. It’ a good way to check and see what kind of audio quality you can get. I found my cheap gamer Logitech mic worked, but the sound volume was kind of low.

Audacity was my solution. Audacity is a free open source software recording and editing tool that will take you a long way in podcasting without costing you anything, but the time to set it up and learn it.

You can download Audacity at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/

This is a screenshot of the Audacity download page

The most recent version at the time I’m writing this is Audacity 1.2.4b.

You need to download Audacity and install it on your computer. You then need to download one more piece of software called Lame. Lame is a plug-in to Audacity that allows you to export audio files in mp3 format. You can download this software from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/faq?s=install&item=lame-mp3

Lame cannot be included with the Audacity distribution automatically due to mp3 licensing issues. Installation is quite easy and involves copying one file from one folder to your Audacity folder.

Here are the specific instructions for installing Lame for Windows and for the Mac. If you need more information you can go to
http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~raa110/audacity/AudacityHelp.html#LAME for more tips on installing Lame.

Installing Lame in Audacity – Windows

• Download the archive file from the site above, and open it in a utility like winzip, 7-zip, or some versions of Windows Explorer
• Take the lameenc.dll file and extract (uncompress) it to a directory on your hard drive. The directory where you installed Audacity would be a good idea. This is probably C:\Program Files\Audacity or similar if you used the installer
• Open Audacity and go to File > Preferences.
  • Go to the ‘File Formats’ tab.
  • In the bottom of the window there is a section tabled ‘MP3 Export Setup’.
  • Click on the link tabled ‘Find Library’
  • This will ask you if you want to locate the lame encoder. Click ‘yes’.
  • In the dialogue box, go to the folder where you put the lame-enc.dll file earlier, and select it.
  • Click OK.
• You should now be able to export files to the mp3 format.

Installing Lame in Audacity – Mac (OS X and OS 9)

• Download the .sit file from the site above, and open it in Stuffit Expander
• Take the LibLame.so file and extract (uncompress) it to a directory on you hard drive. The directory in Applications where you installed Audacity would be a good idea.
• Open Audacity and go to File > Preferences.
  • Go to the ‘File Formats’ tab.
  • In the bottom of the window there is a section tabled ‘MP3 Export Setup’.
  • Click on the link tabled ‘Find Library’
  • This will ask you if you want to locate the lame encoder. Click ‘yes’.
  • In the dialogue box, go to the folder where you put the LibLame.so file earlier, and select it.
  • Click OK.
• You should now be able to export files to the mp3 format.

You are now ready to run Audacity and make your first audio file. When you open Audacity you will see a screen that is mostly a blank page. At the top will be a control bar like this:

To start recording, just hit the red record button and start talking into your microphone hooked up to your computer. It should start recording right away. You can stop the recording with the yellow button. There are all kinds of buttons to play with. I suggest your experiment with as many as possible to see what does what.

The Audacity website even provides tutorials.

These articles give step-by-step instructions for common tasks using the free Audacity sound editor.

• Audacity 1.2 Tutorial by Dan Eliot – Learn how to open and edit a WAV file, and save the result in an MP3.
• How to Setup Audacity – Video of how to set up Audacity
• Editing tools in Audacity – Video introducing editing tools in Audacity
• Basic Editing with Audacity – Video showing basic editing
• Adjusting Sound Levels In Audacity – How to change the audio volume
• Importing and combining audio files – How to combine two or more audio files in Audacity
• How to save and export as MP3 – Video showing how to export in mp3 format for podcasting.

For additional help, see the Audacity documentation.
I suggest you record and save your file in wav format until you have done all the editing you want and then exporting it to mp3 format for distribution as a podcast. You will want to make sure you pay close attention to the settings on your podcast. If you a just doing talk, then mono should be fine. If you want to play music, you will need to set it up as a stereo file. Michael Geoghegan of Reel Reviews Radio posted a great blog article about the settings you might want to use for your podcast.

Step two: Upload your Audio file to the Web

For other people to get to your podcast it needs to be on a computer that is able to serve up files to other computers over the web. If you have your own website you can transfer the file up to your web site and serve it from there.

If you don’t have a web site you can use a free service called the Internet Archive http://archive.org . It’s free to create an account. Once you’e created your account you can go to http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-contribute.php?stage=upload_info to find out how to upload your audio file.

There you will find a link to a tool provided by Creative Commons that allows you to attach a license ( rules that say how you content can be used ) and provides free tool called ccPubilisher http://creativecommons.org/tools/ccpublisher to upload files to the Internet Archive.

Once you have installed ccPublisher, fire it up and walk through the steps to upload a file to the Internet Archive.

You can now upload directly to the Internet Archive at http://www.archive.org/contribute.php.

At the end of the process you will get a link to a page listing your audio files.
It will look something like this http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=opensource_audio&collectionid=AlexNesbittFreePodcast

Once your audio is approved by Archive.org (there can be a 24 hour delay) you can return to this link to find the address of your audio file. It will look something like
http://audio64.archive.org/2/audio/AlexNesbittFreePodcast/freepodcastsample.mp3

Make sure you get this link, because you will need it for your podcast feed.

Step three: Create Show Notes on Your Website.
If you don’t have a website, you can get one for free at Blogger http://blogger.com It takes three easy steps to set up your account, name your blog and choose your template.

Once you have set up your blog account and chosen your template you can enter your show notes and anything else you want to post about your podcast.

Make sure you set the show link field in “Settings-Formatting”

You will need to make sure that your website shows links so that you can add a link to your podcast on the web. To do this go the “Settings” tab at blogger and chose the “Formatting” sub-tab. Scroll down until you find the “Show link field”selector. Make sure to set this to yes. Make sure you save your settings.

Go to “Posting-Create”to add a title to your podcast. Add show notes and anything else you want to share about your podcast. Put the link to your audio file in the link field. Once you’re done publish your post.

The title of your post will be a link to your podcast.

Step four – Create and publish your RSS feed

Next go to the “Settings-Site Feed” tab and find your feed address as shown below:

The feed provided by Blogger is in a format called Atom which is not what you need for podcasting. For podcasting you need a feed that conforms to a standard called RSS 2.0, so we now have to convert your Atom feed into a RSS feed.

That’s where Feedburner comes in handy. Feedburner allows you to take your Atom feed and make it into an RSS feed.

Once you get to FeedBurner, give them your Atom feed address from Blogger and click on the I’m a podcaster check box. Click next and add some account detail. In return, Feedburner will give you an RSS feed with an address like http://feeds.feedburner.com/PodcastForFree

You can then add more information like the category you want for your podcast, a description of your podcast and other useful information for podcast directories. Feedburner will offer you all kinds of services for your podcast, but you don’t need to buy anything.

I like to have my podcast feed on my blog website so everyone can get to it. So back to Blogger we go. You will want to go to the Template tab and scroll down until you find and change this code in the window.
Before edit

Change to

(The lines with links to Digital Podcast and Castwiki are totally optional – you can have links going to any website you want)

This sets up new links for your blog allowing everyone to find your podcast feed. Just make sure you use your podcast feed, not the one used for this example. Once you’re done editing, save your changes and republish your blog to make the changes show up.

You should then click on your podcast feed link to make sure it works and make sure the podcast is included in the RSS file. It may not be there in the beginning if it has not yet been approved by Archive.org. Feedburner will only include a podcast enclosure when there is a valid mp3 that can be downloaded. Give it some time and it should show up.

Step five – Tell everyone about your podcast

Add it to the directories. PodcastCookbook.com has a great list of podcast directories at http://www.podcastcookbook.com/2008/05/23/promote-your-podcast-in-podcast-directories/

Tell you friends; tell everyone that you are now a podcaster!

UPDATE

Advanced Podacasting Tips

If you’re interested in advanced podcasting tips check out PodcastCookbook.com where I have been collecting some notes on ways to make your podcast better. I start with how to get your own website URL, inexpensive podcast hosting, how to set up your podcast website and much more.

Hope you enjoy the results.

If you

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Podcast feed addresses are just too long and too complicated. No one can remember really long URLs with lots of slashes and what not.

Listeners need simpler podcast URLs so they can remember them and pass them along.

I wanted a short simple podcast URL and I also wanted statistics like you get at feedburner, but I did not want to use a feedburner URL. So I figured out how to make it work so that I get to use a simple URL for the podcast. A simple URL like www.digitalpodcast.com/podcastfeed seems pretty easy to remember.

Here’s how I did it. First I started with my blog software. I use WordPress and there is a great little plugin called PodPress which generates a podcast RSS feed found at http://www.digitalpodcast.com/podcastnews/feed. I took that feed URL and went to Feedburner.com. I set up a Feedburner account and plugged in my long URL and got a feed URL of http://feeds.feedburner.com/DigitalPodcast.

Now, I needed some way of having my simple URL go to the feedburner URL seamlessly. My Apache webserver came to the rescue. Many hosting sites use Apache, so you most likely can use this too.

I set up a little file called .htaccess (note that there is a period at the beginning and that there is now file extension at the end). I set this up in a text editor like notepad and then put the following lines of code into the file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^podcastfeed http://feeds.feedburner.com/DigitalPodcast

The first line tells the webserver to turn on a feature to rewrite URLs. The second tells the webserver to send digitalpodcast.com/podcastfeed to feeds.feedburner.com/DigitalPodcast.

I then sent the .htaccess file up to the main directory for my website.

I like this set up because it means I can give out my URL and still get the benefit of Feedburners statistic services.

But I had to do one more thing to make sure that people didn’t click on my simple Podcast URL, open up a feedburner page and then end up using the feedburner URL in their podcatcher. I want my URL in that podcatcher. So I used a little bit of Javascript and CSS to set up my RSS button to open up a dialog box that told the person clicking on the button to use my simple URL in their podcatcher. Here’s what the pop up box looks like

And here’s the code I used on the webpage to make that box show instead of the feedburner page

This seems to work in iTunes – I was able to give them my simple URL and that’s what shows up in the iTunes music store. I got it to work with Google Home page and MSN’s MyMsn ( although I had to add a parameter ?format=xml to get MSN to read the feed), but not myYahoo.

So it’s not perfect, but I love having both a simple URL of my own and getting Feedburner stats – seems like the best of both worlds.
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Today, Digital Podcast hit a milestone.  We have now delivered over 1,000,000 visits to podcast websites.  Hope everyone enjoys the extra visitors.

Podcast Generator is an open source script written in PHP which allows to upload media files via a web form and automatically creates podcast w3c-compliant xml feeds. It also features web administration and dynamic page displaying new files.

The developers have just released a new version which makes the script much more useful.

Included in the new release

• The script now works with any type of media file: now you can easily create also a video podcast!
• Password protected administration.
• Detailed and highly customizable configuration file.
• Title and description fields shown in the “recent podcasts” and “all podcasts” pages.
• Easily customizable template pages via css.
• External template files; you can easily include Podcast Generator in existing websites.
• Xml feed improvements to meet w3c directives.
• Automatically add timestamp to the filename of uploaded files.
• Rename file on upload if already exists.
• Ask for confirmation on file removing.
• External script language file.

This seems like an excellent way for podcasters who are not using blog software to automatically generate a good RSS feed.

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If you like videos about cars, Steel City’s Finest is worth checking out. It has some fantastic videos. A Honda ad that resembles the mousetrap game and Toyota’s Bait advertisement along with dozens more. Well worth checking out.

Yahoo! Podcasts is the Webby Award winner and NPR took the People’s Choice award in the podcast category.  Other nominees included Youth Radio, Voices on Genocide Prevention and Podcast Pickle.

Congratulations to Yahoo! and NPR for winning the awards.

Nokia is planning to release a New Podcast Application
Stuff Magazine release this on April 25, 2006:

We were also shown a cool new podcasting feature that will be available to download from Nokia’s site for the latest Series 60 phones – which rules out the N70 – to let you browse and search for shows with keywords via Wi-Fi and download them.

And then s60.com released some pictures and if you look closely you can see the Digital Podcast Directory included in the application.  More on this after it’s released.

And Gizmodo has even more on this exciting new mobile application.