Positively 10th Street

We did a podcast today on my new MacBook Pro. As a result we went with new audio software - GarageBand instead of Adobe Audition. It was a frustrating experience as I was not able to get the recorded audio to work right and you'll hear that the sound quality on the talk portion of this podcast isn't great and is certainly not up to our standards. I think I need a tutorial on GarageBand. Maybe I'll attend one of those sessions at the Apple Store in Soho.

Anyway, it's too bad because the music on this podcast is terrific and is all stuff we've just heard in the past couple weeks.

Here is the song list:

• Penny On The Train Track - Ben Kweller - from his new record coming out this fall
• Annie, Let's Not Wait - Guillemots
• Smile Like You Mean It - David Gray - cover of the Killer's song
• Punks In The Beerlight - Silver Jews
• Wolf Like You - TV On The Radio

Listen Live Here

To listen in iTunes or on your iPod, get iTunes version 4.9 or above, then select Advanced, Subscribe to Podcast, and then enter this into the box:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Positively10thStreet

Comments

[Dave]

Re: Garageband podcast quality. Your export settings are possibly incorrect. Go to preferences, and click the export panel and select at least musical podcast for Audio Podcast settings.

Also read the Ducking Backing tracks section of the Creating podcasts help information. This will allow you to automatically lower the volume on your background tracks and hear narration more easliy.

[jackson]

It's your levels. You are either recording your audio too hot, or something isn't set right and you are getting digital distortion. It could be the clock, I should stop by with Chrispy. We'll set you straight.

[jackson]

The music all sounds fine - so it's something in the way your voices are being recorded or handled in the program.

The human voice has a huge range of possible volumes. If you disort a digital converter you get nasty square waves ('cause you've run out of numbers.)

Solutions: limit the range of volumes using a compressor (as I've recommended before). It would be before the signal gets digitized, since once you've created that square wave (where the machine just writes a flat wave) it's hard to recover.

If you're not disorting the input, then something else is distorted... again, digitally, which is horrible and evil (as you can hear).

Anyhow, this is why no computer program can guarantee good sound. We'll set up a template so you know the program ITSELF won't mess up your recordings, though. As long as you don't overload the input, yer golden.

[Raj Bala]

It appears that the item in the feed points to the last podcast rather than the one in the post. iTunes downloaded a file with an identical duration, but with a different date.