--- In podcasters@yahoogroups.com, Todd Cochrane <ceo@...> wrote:
>
> While it may be my opinion and what you do is your business, I
> personally think that a lot of people get wrapped around the post
> editing bit because they think they have to do it.
>
> While your way of editing your show is your business the point I am
> trying to make it clear that you do not necessarily have to do all this
> editing to have a successful show. I can say for a fact that if I
had to
> edit my show to the degree that you obviously do I would no longer be
> podcasting. People have busy lives, wives, families, jobs, social
> activities.
>
> The more people think they have to edit their show as it becomes a keep
> up with the Jones sort of thing the faster perfectly good show
producers
> will pod-fade. You do it the way you want but I am definitely in the
> camp of people that think less editing makes for a happier podcast
> producer. If you are of a personality type that like to stare at a
> computer screen for 5-6 hours after a recording editor more power to
> you. My personal time is more valuable to me then to sit and edit a
tiny
> segments of audio that have a small distortion that when listened to in
> a car traveling down a highway that probably rarely would be heard in
> the first place.
>
> Todd..
>
>
===============

I actually thought at one point of writing a style guide for newcomers
to this this forum on how to follow threads and the personalities
behind them. I came up with all kinds of stuff, but the main points I
remember were something like:

1. When Todd chimes in off topic with "You're doing it all wrong",
look out.
and
2. When Stephen Eley replies to Todd with something complicated,
snippy, arcane and very clever, stop reading the tread, because it's
about to jump the shark and die.

But I'll ignore my own advice and reply anyway.

Todd, you often reply with the "I've got a wife and kids and don't
have time to take time with things." That's fine and beautiful and
it's your choice, but why do you always try to make other people feel
bad about it?

My kid's dead, so I've got a lot of time on my hands. My wife is
involved in my podcasts, so she encourages me to spend as much time as
I'd like on them. This works beautifully in my life.

I'm not doing this to make money and I'm not doing this to be the most
popular and I'm not doing this to win accolades (if I were, I would
certainly never take to task the guy in charge of handing out the
awards when I see him being a tiny tiny bit of a bully. Though if
there ever were an award for "most improved sound" in a podcast, I'd
be the front runner. And I agree with most of your choices of people
who won the awards this year, except you handed out the "best
produced" to a show that is surly not, and anyone with even decent
amateur engineer ears can hear that.)

You don't claim to be a professional engineer, but you do claim to be
an electrical engineer, a UNIX programmer, an aviation electronics
technician, and a quality assurance inspector on your resume,
http://www.cochranefamily.net/resume.html
and I'm sure you would not have that resume if you cut corners in
those fields. If an aviation electronics technician cut corners,
people would die.

And any of those backgrounds individually, if not together, would
indicate someone who is highly detail oriented and happy with learning
new ways to solve problems. So why can you not understand if other
people don't want to cut corners in what we do?

And really, how the hell can someone with a podcast called "Geek News
Central" get snippy when other geeks gleefully geek out?

Steven Boyette and I came into podcasting from a background of music
production. The standards there are high. Steve is a DJ and I'm a
musician. I spent most of my 20s and 30s paying vast sums of money to
some of the most renown recording engineers and producers in the world
to capture my stuff. Now that I have some of my tools, I want to
figure out how they did it. Partly because I hated doling out all that
money, partly because it's fun.

Audio editing is one of my many hobbies, and it gives me one more
reason to get up in the morning. I'm constantly learning, and I love
to learn. I haven't let life derail my young-man demands of "I'll
ALWAYS be an artist, MAN."

I don't claim to be a recording engineer, I claim to be a self-taught
aspiring recording engineer. And I LOVE to stare at a computer screen
for 5-6 hours. And it's not just a hobby, and not just something that
gives me joy and calm, it's my living. I may not make money on that
particular recording, but I apply that knowledge later to recording
the wife doing voiceover. And I also make money by writing books about
all my computer experiences, and since I'm persnickety with detail, my
books aren't littered with typos. And I'm also producing podcasts for
pay now, (for the O'Reilly Digital Media site), and that's not a job
you can get if you just "record and upload." And it's a job I didn't
even apply for, they contacted me because they like my work.

You often pull out the popularity of your podcast in your posts. Of
course Geek News Central is popular. It's decent, it's quirky, it's
human and it was one of the first.

But it's about something very popular: geek stuff (exactly the stuff
I'm defending here.)

My two podcasts are not AIMED at a big audience. One is a personal
observational audio blog, and one is a couple cast about a subject 90%
of the world has no desire to hear about. And I like it that way.

"Computers for Dummies" sold more copies than most books ever will,
but it's not a work of great literature. The author (and Dummies
creator) Dan Gookin called it "chalk on the sidewalk", in an interview
I did with him in my book "$30 Writing School."

Tech stuff will always have a large audience compared to more
creative, personal and introspective works.

And I DO sometimes enjoy just "recording and uploading" a cast. I've
done that several times lately with the H2. Out-of-the-house
on-location H2 recordings are more suited to that, for my purposes.

But more often, I like to make something really tight, and our
listeners appreciate it, and often send us e-mail saying things like
"I love the content, I love you guys, and dig the production. Your
podcast sounds better than any of the casts I'm subscribed to."

And I honestly don't think I'm encouraging anyone to podfade by
talking about an audio editing tool.

And again, are we arguing about a damn pen tool?


-- Michael W. Dean

"Clone The Homeless"
Michael W. Dean's podcast that remembers when sex was safe and music
was dangerous. (Free, and no iPod is needed to listen.)
http://www.clonethehomeless.com

"SUBMISSION AND COFFEE WITH DOLLIE LLAMA" (free BDSM podcast. No iPod
needed):
http://www.askdollie.com