We went live at 5 p.m. ET, which meant I got on 4 p.m. ET to start setting up my equipment and going over the shownotes one more time. We use Skype to get everyone on the same call. I use Mixlr to broadcast our recording live and I use Audacity to record the show. My computer’s sound card has a “what you hear” recording feature which allows me to record the audio from my computer. Unfortunately, I can’t record that input and get the microphone on my computer so I conference into Skype via a laptop, with an ATR-2100 USB microphone.
During the hour I go over our show notes and pull up all the resources we’ll need to produce the show. For this particular special we had a spreadsheet of all the Astros prospects graded by our crew and statistical websites. Once I had all that up I pulled up the intro audio and made a few slight adjustments and pre-recorded an introduction to the special that lead into our music.
My co-hosts typically show up anywhere from 10-20 minutes before the show so that we can go over any feedback I had from the last podcast episode and make sure the quality of everyone’s microphone is at a reasonable level. we recorded over three hours of content in three hours and 45 minutes. We had 15 minute breaks built into each hour.
My three co-hosts were much more knowledgeable on the content we were discussing. For the most part my job was to keep the podcast moving so that we could get through 30+ Astros prospects in a three hour time period and start and stop recordings and the live broadcast. After the show I made sure all the edits to the live podcast thread were made. For this particular show we were sharing our top 30 prospect list, so I updated the post with all 30 player grades.
Often times, after recording, I feel like the episodes could have been better, so I typically edit the podcasts a day later to distance myself from those feelings. The next day I listened to the first hour and maybe some small edits, such as taking out people talking over each other, dead space, etc. After I’m done with my edits I export the file as wav file and put it through Levelator2, which is a program that levels out all the levels in the show. Once that’s complete I open the file and edit the meta data to the audio and export it again as a wav file. I then convert it to an MP3 file via iTunes and upload the file.
I ran into a bit of an issue with the upload, though. My hosting was moving to a different service and uploading was unavailable. The first hour doesn’t release until Tuesday so I have some time to work out that issue. I also created the post for the show to be distributed from on our site and made some adjustments to the graphics by adding Hour 1, Hour 2, and Hour 3 to the graphics I intend to use for the post and RSS Feed.
