Doug Kaye
From the Labs

Gigavox Media
one of the leaders in the podcasting space

DK – one of the older and oldest podcasters

podcaster before there was podcasting
IT COnversations in 2003

MP3s and RSS feeds and interviews
IT Con is owned by Gigavox Media
produced 2000 programs
60 programs a month
mult channels
podcast academy

Conversations Network
Social Innovation conversations

Very Informal thing
slapped together from other slides

some of the non profit and profit tools they are working on
anything we want to talk about
strong bg in audio
software development, radio

podcast and portable media expo – late sept – “Help, fix my audio”

showing how to edit, noise reduction, fileteiring editing

Which is Louder?

Interesting problem with videotaping something like this
when you want to record a spoken word event – put the camin the back of the room, put the cam into the soundboard

panel discussion
you get varying sound levels
mic variances, gain, lots of direct sound in the room
on a podcast it is awful
audio engineer – ok
by yourself – problem

Giga – produce a lot of interview programs
team of 55 people working oin the interviews
dont want to waste their time

Bruce Sharp and son – developed the levelator
free for all

can you assemble components automatically from components
ID at the top of the show
music
intro
promo
more intro
body
credits
assembled auto from components
trouble hearing most of those cuts

build a show and do it automatically – do it at the same loudness
what we did

Loudness
whats the standard
We asked
podcasters, audio engineers, radio engineers
answer – there isnt one – made up there own

Normalization
Peak Normalization (common – audacity)
takes any signal and brings the peaks up to what you want
needs RMS normalization
analyzes the density of the waveform
soundforge and expensive apps built in

Levelator – put it out for free

people used to think Giga was a content company – but really a tech company

Levelator – app, free – gigavox.com – runs on windows, mac (intel and power pc and linux) – take uncompressed sound file, drag and drop – will smooth out the peaks from one speaker to the next
designed for spoken word events
not compressor, or limiter – not the noise gate
not in a analog chain

Problem
uneven levels WITHIN a podcast
building mathematical models of speakers to figure out what to do with the audio
Time and skill intensive to solve
auto drag and drop
free to all

Does levelator only work with uncompressed (wav and aiff?)

doesnt work with mp3 files –
one thing it has to do is make sound no worse that what you give it
mp3 – decode to uncompresss, run, and reencode
no way you can make it sound as good as the original

if recording as mp3 – record as highest bitrate possible
sound file will not sound as good if you do that

do no harm

trying to avoid additional decode recode step

dont support bad habits

Gigavox Audio Lite
relatively new
give it a try
prodcast production system
webbased service
not downloadable
first of a series
for video, all sorts of things
opening up the itconversations platform
avail for free to the individual
save time in producing podcasts
inc automated show assembly
instert spots and promos
podcasts with long shelf life
still popular
longevity
programs from gladwell – tipping point
those sponsors dont want the spots from 3 years ago in the new shows
in a prog thats heard today
rebuild every show in the archive every night
produce show in components
audio or video components same from show to show
decoupling production tasks
editing audio – put credits in for website content
hasnt been done yet

Unintended Consequences

SHow assembly optioins
staic programs – burned in components
On the fly assembly – (expensvie)
Does On Demand (giga)
push new version 1x a night when content has changed or if there is demand

15 components in their stuff

typical IT script

build shows based on components
GVU uploader – client side app
Episode editor
most imp screen in the system
components made to dev this app
play components in real time
campaign manager
config campaigns

Infrastructure
massively scalable
poster child for amazon web services
S3
EC2
SQS

$64 on infrastructure

encourage to go to gigavox.com – get levelator – sign up to be in the beta program for audio lite
will like a lot

COnversations Network
exec dir = Doug Kaye
events all over the world b/c no one is recording them
reach 6k people
100/1 ratio for these conferences
capture produce and dist spoken word content for free
curated content
have an arrangement for producer
professional post production and publish it
vision – grassroots version of this

what is a media rockstar
content far from rockstar world
record debates from 2008 elections
not just presidential – local, school board, all that are going on
tech conferences, lectures, meetings
how to capture?
Podcorps.org
monday announced
simple idea
volunteer team
2k people in 6 months
people with ability to go out and record audio and video in the community
decent job of capturing
post production then
audio video writers and producers
go to podcorps.org – where located and what skills are
working with eventful.com – captures events data
events that want to be recorded – tagged podcorps –
sys looks for events and matches to people who record

all volunteer
give back to local community
would like opp to do something good
how can podcasting be something we give back
go to podcorps .org
no obligation
eveent popup – email message to let us know
challenges – audio feed from soundboard and stuff

very simple

Eventful.com, OurMedia.org, Internet Archive
building database of stringers first
will likely find none
events find you

audio and video

events contact – work out the agreement

gigavox audio lite – just production – no serving – not solving distro problem

smart delivery – cool
pub URL or a “c name”
goes to their redirectors
gathering stats at program level and individual component
sponsor wants 100k impressions
can give report on the number of times
things in archive 1yr old – why push to ftp
redirection to old show – havent put it on their server yet

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