43 posts tagged “podcasting”

Google has acquired FeedBurner! And my podcast is podhoster’s featured podcast. Wooheeee!!!!!!!!!!!!

Technorati Tags: google, feedburner, soundsgood, podcast

I’ve crafted a new promo for my podcast. Feel free to send it around, to other podcasters etc. Thanks for your promotional efforts! Hens
Download Sounds Good - promo 2

Matt Cuttle from the brand new Games Weasel podcast (executively produced by James Bedford, Moody Glasgow, Adam Curry and Ron Bloom) used a whole bunch of my music. Thanks and happy to be of service! I’m currently producing a new IDM-ish song in my attick studio in Zeist. Yesterday I also - finally! - finished and uploaded the 16th episode of my podcast Sounds Good. It’s once again a video episode, which explains the delay. As much fun as it is, it’s still a lot of work to time and editan entire video episode. Add to that my busy work schedule at Park Post and the fact that we’ve just moved to the beautiful city of Zeist, and you’ll probably understand why it took me longer than ever to produce this episode. Which, by the way, has already been downloaded a staggering 314 times as I type this, not even being online for 24 hours yet.

Technorati Tags: adamcurry, podcast, podshow, podsafe, music, zeist

Click to Play This is the video by an artist called 45Hz, using a song by an artist called 37Hz. The song is called “Less Than Seven”. The video demonstrates “Perplexing Poultry Philtre v1.0″ programmed on Quartz on the Mac by 45Hz. The PPP concept is invented by science-fiction writer Rudy Rucker (http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2007/04/07/amsterdam-van-gogh/) and is a popular public-domain filter in the future, that enhances reality to make it appear like Escher tilings (http://www.mcescher.com/). PPP v1.0 also puts in practise concepts developed by Finnish Computer Music Pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi (http://www.frif.com/new2004/fut.html). One of his ideas was “Personal Communicator” represented in 1985, special eye-ware that includes a powerful computer, local-area network, microphones and earplugs, and high-resolution cameras and eye-projectors, that allows real-time modification of reality. The concept of reality modification appears also in a recent sci-fi published by Charles Stross “Accelerando” (http://www.accelerando.org/reviews/), where the future superhero Mandfred Macs extends his intelligence with computer-spectacles. The starting scene curiously takes place in Amsterdam - the same place, where Rudy Rucker gave his speech on “Psipunk” - the next step of telephatic communication right in the quantum level. Original realtime capture of the speech was made by Luc Sala/Mindlift and can be viewed on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_bYYpiQNg4). PPP v1.0 generalizes a bit of the PPP concept to allow input from camera and files, and not focusing just on tiling patterns, since there are many other enhancements that yield aesthetic values, too. There are also many limitations one needs to take in account to realize PPP technology that will run on the nowadays computer platforms, and at the moment PPP Technology is more suitable for video postproduction usage than for personal reality enhancement.

My song “Stalker” was used not only once… but twice in Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code DSC-593-2007-05-02. Always a pleasure (Adam also played my song “Death of Democracy” many years ago in the DSC), especially because I listened to Adam Curry many times during my youth. Both when he deejayed as John Holdon for Radio Decibel in Amsterdam and when he presented “Curry and Van Inkel” with Jeroen van Inkel for Veronica Radio. Some of you may not know the influence of Adam on the podcasting phenomenon. Well, the whole idea of adding an audio enclosure to rss was coined by Tristan Louis, and then successfully implemented and used by Dave Winer and Adam Curry. Curry and Ron Bloom are the founders of podshow.com, of which the Podsafe Music Network is part. The PMN is probably the best thing that ever happened to my music. Curry is of course among the pioneers on Second Life. And last but not least, it was a personal email of Adam that convinced me to start my own podcast, which now has an average of over 500 rss subscribers according to FeedBurner and 1500+ downloads for the most popular episodes. Woohooo!!! PS: Those of you who’ve been following my ahem.. cough… “career” may recognize this song as the instrumental of a remix I did for Ellen ten Damme.

Technorati Tags: adamcurry, dailysourcecode, dsc, podshow, podsafemusic, pmn, secondlife

…is not only a quote by Ghandi, but also the name of my latest song which I finished last night. You can play it below, or if you’re subscribing to this site’s feed with your podcatching software, you’ll find it there too of course. “Be the change you want to see in the world” took me over five years to complete (gasp!), which is kinda weird for me. I started programming those beats on March 20, 2002, in the middle of the night, a mere two days before my current relationship started. So this song has always been something special to me that I just had to finish. It’s 80 beats per minute and a bit on a dark tip, but hope you enjoy it!
Download Be the change you want to see in the world

Okay, I admit it, my previous experiment failed miserably. For two reasons: 1) It didn’t show up on my iPod and 2) it looked horrible with those horizontal lines. Let me first hark back to where this experiment started, which is a mail I got from Apple. Nothing personal, just because I’m registered in the iTunes store as a podcaster: Recommendations for Formatting Video Podcasts 1. If you’re encoding your video podcast at 320×240, please increase the resolution to either 640×480 or 640×360 (depending on the aspect ratio of your source files). Why? Because video podcasts at this resolution look great on Apple TV and still port to video iPods. Lower resolution podcasts might also work on both platforms, but they don’t look nearly as good on a widescreen TV. As always, make sure to test any encoding changes you make to ensure device compatibility. QuickTime 7.1’s “Export to iPod” function will ensure that a video file is encoded at a width of 640 and is iPod-compatible. 2. It’s best not to create two different podcast feeds for different resolutions. By doing so, you dilute the popularity of your podcast and reduce exposure in our charts. It’s better to have one feed high in the charts than two that are lower. 3. If your source files are 16:9, stick with that aspect ratio. Don’t add letterboxing to make them 4:3. By doing so, you prevent the video from expanding to fill a 16:9 widescreen TV and instead end up with black space on all four sides. Also, your original source files should be at least 640 pixels wide. Of course these are just recommendations. We understand that there are good reasons for 320×240 (bandwidth bills) and 720p (looks fantastic). Do whatever makes the most sense for your show. For more information on formatting video, see the recently updated spec: http://www.apple.com/itunes/store/podcaststechspecs.html To see a sample of excellent podcasts that also look great with Apple TV, check out the Apple TV Podcast Showcase. So with that out of the way, I was endeavouring to create my own 16:9 widescreen movie that would a) be a valid video podcast, b) play well on a video iPod, c) look good on an Apple TV too and d) contain elements of both real world video and animations. Making a valid video podcast is easy enough. Just add an enclosure to your blog posting. That part always works. To play on a video iPod, the bitrate shouldn’t be too high (I guess I went wrong there in my previous experiment). In such cases, where the bitrate is too high, you can only see your video podcast on the web in a player or in iTunes, but it won’t transfer to a video iPod. It is all described in detail in this article. To look good on an Apple TV, it should be 640 x 360 for widescreen, according to Apple. My biggest gripe though were the ugly horizontal lines that showed up in the clip when I exported it directly from iMovie HD to the iPod. It didn’t matter much whichever m4v or mp4 setting I tried… it always showed those lines. I’m not sure what the source of those is, probably my JVC MiniDV cam that isn’t HD? I don’t know. But what solved it was a two way export. First to DV stream progressive (that was the key), and then a QuickTime Pro export to iPod. In the latter case, there’s nothing you can adjust. But the net result is a clip that’s 640 x 360 widescreen which still looks awsum on my iPod. I don’t have an Apple TV (I don’t even have a tv right now, I just watch Joost and video podcasts!), so I can only hope it looks good there too. Below you can find the movie which describes the process a bit. I’ll set the PodPress player to 450 x 252 so it won’t mess up this blog posting, but rest assured the movie is 640 x 360.
Download Jelle the dog 2

Now that my podcast has an official sponsor, I should start taking my metrics more seriously! It’s interesting how there’s a ceiling around 1500 downloads right now, where episode 6 peaks for some reason (its quality, I dare wonder…?). People are still downloading all episodes, sure, but at the current rate it’ll take quite a few weeks for episodes to be downloaded over 1500 times. Addendum: episode 6is way over1500 downloads as of April 20, 2007. And this week the rss subscription count has crossed the mythical 500 threshold according to FeedBurner. Feeling a bit exhausted today. Worked until midnight yesterday and had to get up really early to import/mix/edit and dump-to-tape an item for “Klasgenoten” (a Dutch program), which incidentally takes place in the city of Groningen… where I will travel today to see F again and go to a horror party which is totally Evil Dead style. Like, a little shed in the middle of nowhere, chainsaws, the works.

Technorati Tags: metrics, podcast, blubrry

Just wondering what video podcast export format should work best for both Apple TVs and iPods. This first stab at it uses iMovie HD’s internal export to Apple TV option. My biggest worry is size. This 0′54″ clip is already 28 MB.
Download Jelle the dog

Hi! Just wanted to say that the last podcast about presets was one of the best shows so far. Thank you for making me enjoy working with Logic again. It’s a tricky program to learn and sometimesI feel likeI get a little bit stuck and not learning anything more. That’s where your podcast comes in and helps.

Technorati Tags: podcast, logic