Lewies Blog

I’ve been podcasting with my dreamy audio blog for a little while now. I’ve been using a variety of software, hardware and services to get these audio files on the internetnet. I’ve been bouncing around so much that I’m started to break down. I would go ahead and develop the software myself, but the project is just too big for me.

Recording Audio

I used to record onto my digital voice recorder and upload those files directly to my podcasting publisher. I’ve recently invested in a headset and discovered that the quality surpasses the digital recorder like mad. The digital recorder is now used only for taking quick notes to remember what I should say later.

Now that I’m recording directly to my computer, I have a wide choice of software, but I just can’t seem to find anything that suits me. I found out about Audacity wich lets me edit files that I’ve already recorded. It’s cool, but I still needed more. I started using an old version of Acid that I purchased a few years ago and used some loops to make a nice intro. Well, that was nice.

Still, I can’t help but think that something is missing here. To throw many files together into one is a bit of a hassel using this software. Things like audio clips of bands, a few sound effects maybe, and perhaps some fading. Sure, I can do it with what I have, but it feels like a real hassel to get it done. It would be nice to add audio effects (such as a belch) as I am recording it.

Meta Data

Many audio files have the ability to store many kinds of information. To start off, you can save the title, author, copyrite notice, and even an image of the cover art. I would like to go as far as saving lyrics, comments, and tags that can help link the audio to similar files.

Building Feeds

An RSS feed builder should be able to parse all of the content that it needs for each item from the audio files. The only thing that really needs to be added is the title, description, and link to the website that the feed is related to. The feed builder should be able to look at a directory on my local machine and grab the 10 most recent podcasts based off of the date created. A handy utility could be available to change the date that the files were created.

Publishing

I would love to keep this simple. Just publish my audio files and podcast feeds over to my website using FTP. I’ve got some software that does this, but it is very limiting with what the RSS information contains. Also, the publishing tool should be able to delete old MP3 files. The reason being is that space can be quite limiting (as well as bandwidth). This could give a few folks a good reason to purchase a CD of the past years podcasts since they are no longer available.

Blogging

Along with publishing podcast feeds and audio files, it would be nice to have the comments, album art, etc. published to blogging services such as Blogger.com or LiveJournal. It would be easier to keep the feed and the blog synchronized with each other.

Expansion

In the end, the program should allow end-users to add there own plug-ins and such. Things like pinging seperate services, publishing to different blogs, how a particular audio file is parsed for metadata. Publishing over FTP, sFTP, Web Services, sending to email subscribers, etc. Perhaps it could build other feeds besides RSS.

Well, that is my little rant for the day. If anyone knows of some software that can pull some of these technologies together, I would be grateful to hear about it.

Tags: Podcasting, Wishlist, Ideas, Wish, Podcast, Podware, Software, Hardware, Services, Audio, Recording, Sounds, Digital Voice Recorder, Voice, Audacity, Acit, Sound Editing, Audio Clips, Sound Effects, Loops, Metadata, Parsing, Feeds, RSS, FTP, Blogging, Subscribers, CD, Synchronized, Rant, Idea

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 7th, 2005 at 8:24 pm and is filed under Blogging, Communications, Computers, Entertainment, Hobbies, Life, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.