2014 Professional Podcast Studio

Welcome to the fourth and final installment of my podcast equipment buying guide. This guide breaks down the buying decisions for someone who wants to go from zero to podcasting superhero. Everything in this setup is pro-level and you’d be hard-pressed to find someone with a better setup that wasn’t just trying to show off.

This package was put together based on what the leaders of the podcasting world use. From the mixers to the mics to the headphones, everything here has been tested and proven to be top quality.

When building a studio you can of course spend as much money as you want. I could have designed a $100,000 audio-only podcasting setup but that isn’t the point here. This is a professional setup at a price that is approachable by really anyone that is serious about podcasting. Yeah it’s a few thousand dollars but these days with Kickstarter and other crowd-funding options, getting the funds would be cake for someone with the drive. Continue reading

2014 Podcast Equipment Guides

This idea of having my own podcast, or as I’m envisioning it, a podcast network, has me losing sleep at night. Seriously. I dream about this idea just about every night and find myself daydreaming ideas for shows and setups and when I move to including video and how I’ll setup my lights and green screen

It’s crazy. But, to your benefit, my craziness means I’ve researched the hell out of starting a podcast. In this post series I’ll break down four podcasting studio setups; Bare Bones, Budget, Premium and Professional. I won’t get into the room acoustics or types of tables and chairs but I’ve dug deep into the audio equipment side of things for this.

Click the images below to go to each podcasting setup.

Bare-BonesBudget PremiumProfessional

I’ll be sure to let you know what I ultimately sign up for between these. Whatever setup I get will probably be a mix of each of these, though I am aiming for the “Premium” option over everything else.

To me it is a fair balance of cost vs performance. It also plans for the future without getting too aspirational. I could go cheap or I could go crazy and mimic Leo Laporte and the TWiT network!

There Are Two Rules…

When I’m working with someone who wants to start a blog, there are typically two rules I suggest they follow because they are the rules everyone says people should follow.

  1. Be consistent by update regularly and chronologically.
  2. Stay on topic or follow established, rotating topics.

Ironically, on my blog I follow neither of these rules. I post about things that are going to happen next week, followed by a post of what happend last month. The next post might be a review of some gadget or perhaps a political rant. With me at the helm, there really is no rhyme or reason to my blog. Though I do sometimes post some of the photos I’ve taken that I’m actually proud of.

I love how disorienting this photo is. It’s like Escher himself created this room, or this blog post for that matter. Let the fun continue! Continue reading

Visiting the TWiT Studios

Today is probably the last day you will find people wandering around San Francisco in their black, mock-collar, WWDC jackets before their head off to their places of origin to share their knowledge. Well, share what wasn’t suffocated by one of Apple’s infamous non-disclosure agreements.

WWDC 2011This is the first year that I have lived in San Francisco for WWDC, Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference. It didn’t make a huge difference in my life as I was not in attendance at WWDC. At $1,500 for a ticket, I decided I’d be better off catching up via TUAW and MacRumors. I did benefit from some of the awesome people that came into my city for the week-long conference.

The first night of WWDC I had dinner with a fellow Mizzou alumni Geoff Pado and Tyten Teegarden as well as Twitter friend Luke Irvin. After a few drinks, Luke and I decided we should rent a car and drive up to Petaluma California for a visit to the TWiT Studios. There maybe, just maybe, we could meet one of our favorite nerds, Leo Laporte.

And that’s what we did. Thursday morning I picked up Luke and we made our voyage north. After we reached the TWiT studios, we nervously gathered our things and headed up the steps.

We were immediately greeted with the friendly smile of a TWiT staffer. She provided a quick tour of the operations and then lead us on set where we watched the making of Windows Weekly. If you look carefully during that episode, you’ll see the right side of my body enter the frame a few times. Oops!

One of the guests on the show was Aaron Hillegrass from Big Nerd Ranch. He was super interesting and fun to listen to, equally as congenial.

When the show was over, Leo talked a little tech, signed some autographs and posed for some photos. You always hope that the people you look up to are as cool in real life as you think they are from your side of the screen. In this case, Leo was even cooler. Just so down to Earth and genuinely interested.

Luke Irvin, Me and Leo Laporte

He asked us what we did, if we were from the area, did we go to WWDC, etc etc. Some how we got onto the topic that I am a blogger, I had brought up earlier that I once wrote about him winning an Emmy… Anyways, he pulled up my blog on the live stream and began reading my blog post about the mysterious iPhone I saw last week.

Leo Laporte checking out my blog

That was super cool, I must say. He even left my blog up on the live stream while everyone else went out for lunch. Though it didn’t have much affect on my blog traffic. :-\

Afterwards we checked out the new TWiT studios which look pretty awesome.

New TWiT Studios Panorama

We rounded out the trip with a jaunt a little further north to Healdsburg where Luke and I did a wine tasting at Seghesio Family Vineyards. Quick introductions to all of my friends there, tasted around eight wines from Arneis to Zinfandel to Omaggio.

Unfortunately we didn’t have time to hit up any other wineries or check out the amazing food in Healdsburg. Perhaps next time.

17 Hours for a Disqus Resolution

I hate that I might actually have to give up on Disqus.  It’s gotten so bad that even when @Disqus comments on my blog they don’t show up on their dashboard or the blog while somehow they show on my WordPress dashboard.

Not sure what’s more upsetting. My Disqus not working, over 1,600 comments missing or the fact that my blog has become a review of Disqus.  I typically only review products I adore, of course with few acceptions.  This time I feel disenchanted by a service I was so optimistic about.  And I’m honestly not sure what else I can do. I’ve exported my blog to @Giannii or @Disqus four times in three different formats.  What more can I do?

Oh and Disqus, why make a comment requiring a followup on a blog where the PROBLEM  is comments not showing up on the blog? You have my email address.

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Why I’m Quitting Disqus in 48 Hours

I tried Disqus a few years ago.  Didn’t work out for me.  So when @LeoLaporte talked it up on This Week in Tech while discussing blogs vs Twitter I decided to give it another try, even though he was actually recommending JS-Kit Echo.

A few weeks earlier I tried out IntenseDebate, which was buggy as all hell so the idea of a fresh start with a more established system was a great feeling.

The switch wasn’t so easy.  ZERO of my comments imported into Disqus, despite increasing my MySQL memory.  Disqus is pretty good about checking on things through Twitter however.  I tweeted my frustration and posted a formal complaint on their customer service system and within a few hours I had a response.

But over a week passed and nothing was resolved.  Eventually, @giannii was able to take my emailed WordPress database and upload it to Disqus for whatever they had to do at that point.

But only a handful of nearly 1,700 comments actually imported! All added up over the past year or two, only 14 comments made it in!  And that is still the case (beyond what have been added since October 21 by way of new comments to the blog).

I got a tweet from @Giannii that @Disqus would take a look at the problem last week. But another problem sprung up!  Missing old comments was one thing but missing comments that were new?

Unacceptable.  One person commented on my blog about being blacklisted by Disqus.  Hello, what?! I’m sorry but did I hear that someone can be permanently blacklisted? I can understand this for robot spammers but this was a human with a cogent argument. Their comment can show up in my WordPress comments through the dashboard but not actually on my site?  Even if what he/she is posting is relavent, which in this case it certainly was?

What about someone that posted a comment earlier in the day, which was given the “thumbs up”, and when he comes back to post a reply his comment disappears?  This was the case for @Vortex_Bits.  He left a reply to my reply on his comment.  I value his opinion greatly and considering the fact that this was a sort of debate between the two of us, not posting his comment makes ME appear as childish, sending his comment to the abyss.

On my WordPress Dashboard his comment shows up, I can even view the comment in WordPress’s editor.

So WordPress says it’s approved.  It shows up in the dashboard but it’s missing from Disqus and the blog entirely?! Doesn’t Disqus advertise the sociability of their service to create conversation within your site and the internet?  A conversation that permeates through what we typically understand as individual networks?

Unless Disqus can actually fix this by this time Saturday I’m quitting Disqus, recommending to all my friends, readers and followers that they do the same and trying out the third player in the game, JS-Kit Echo.  I love the idea of Disqus.  They have been really nice and helpful and even as late as early this week promised to look into fixing my problems. However, in the end, it is the results that matter.  You can be super nice over email, twitter and the like but if your service can’t deliver the results, I’ve gotta say see-ya-later.

If Disqus is able to fix this, and I have my nearly 1,700 old comments imported into the service and the ignored new comments published, I will sing their worthy praises.  I’m one of those people who is actually willing to pay for a service.  I’d pay for Disqus but not if it is this buggy, as bad or worse than IntenseDebate.  At least ID managed to show all my comments.  JS-Kit Echo is only $12/year, that’s looking awfully tempting.

I’d love to get your thoughts on this.  Horror stories or success stories.  Though, good luck getting them to actually post.  :-\

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Leo Laporte Won an Emmy for This?!

Ok, so you might know that @LeoLaporte is a hero of mine. I know @ZackLuye knows that, he just LOVES to point out his affiliations to my technology heroes haha.  I even went as far as moving to the area of California where Leo lives and even worked at the Starbucks he always goes to for his coffee in Petaluma!

Stalker much? Meh, maybe.  Never did meet him though.

This morning Leo mentioned something that popped up on the web about him in the latest This Week in Google, one of Leo’s podcasts.  There was something on the internet that said, “Leo Laporte makes $1″

I looked it up. Turns out Leo Laporte makes $1.5 million a year doing his TWiT network, not $1 haha.  While reading more about him, I stumbled onto this video where he talks his rise from radio to broadcast TV and then to where he is today, self-distributed internet podcasting.

Click here to view the video (can’t embed…)

It’s a great video if you have the time to watch all forty minutes.  But the point of this blog post is his Dev Null character on his MSNBC show, The Site.  Leo makes fun of this character, so I don’t feel so bad doing the same.  Because the producers, of his own show, didn’t think he’d be good for video across Soledad O’Brien, they made him a horrible looking 3D character.

Cheesetastic!

And what’s more? I found another video of Devnull where he gets a $29.95 upgrade, the character doesn’t hide the fact that he is computer based.  The cheap upgrade doesn’t work so well, and Devnull get’s even more messed up looking.  Why does this interest me?  Mostly cause I’m a nerd.  When Snow Leopard came out, Leo went on and on about how it wasn’t a REAL upgrade to Leopard for the Mac.  Making the point that it wasn’t a totally new operating system, but more of an expansive service pack.  What Leo stressed the most though? How for $29.95, this was a fantastic value adding upgrade.  So if you’re a total nerd, it might be funny/interesting.  Probably just to me though…

So there you go.  Oh and Leo.  If Pure Media & Marketing doesn’t hire me, hows about you make a move? hehe

Time to run downtown to pay my rent and then get to class. Catch you later!