metaSFFaudio – Page 3

Volume problems on podcasts, a comparison of two podcasts I listened to today

SFFaudio News

David Barr Kirtley, who puts together and hosts Geeks Guide To Galaxy is responding to my complaint about his podcast being too low in volume.

But his show isn’t the only one I’ve had this issue with. Our most recent podcast, #155, also featured two out of three of us complaining about the volume of the Clarkesworld podcast.

I’ve also complained, by email, to Tevi Troy of New Books In Public Policy about the same issue.

Most podcasts are ok for volume. But there are some that are consistently low.

But to get a sense of what I mean I’ll use the two latest shows as my example.

So, picking on David Barr Kirtley again, I listened to Geeks Guide To Galaxy on my walk home from work today (the episode with Morgan Spurlock) – I could barely hear it at maximum volume. It was raining and there were cars on the roadway and because I wasn’t in front of my amplified speaker system at home I just couldn’t hear everything that was being said, and to make it worse to hear anything I had to jam my earbuds down my ear canals. A podcast should physically hurt me.

Here’s the Geeks Guide To Galaxy file: http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/underwire/geeksguide57.mp3

Now, compare that experience to the one on my way in to work today. I listened to TVO’s Search Engine. And right away I had my iPhone set to half volume of full, and at that it was plenty loud, loud enough, in fact, so that even set at half volume and with my earbuds hanging loosely over my ears, I could hear everything.

Here’s the Search Engine file: http://feeds.tvo.org/~r/tvo/searchengine/~3/mZBN588091g/801144_48k.mp3

And, incidentally, at home now in another comparison I’ve just made again, I can hear Search Engine from across the room at 3/4 volume through my iPhone speaker. The Geek’s Guide is at full volume and is not loud enough.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Thank You: AdSense $$ for January and February 2012

SFFaudio News

Thank You For nine years SFFaudio has been giving and giving and giving – and all we’ve gotten from it is a fun hobby, some so-called “internet” friends, and the occasional regular stack of audiobooks.

What’s the point in that?

What’s the point of anything without actually getting the bills paid?

Huh?

Who’s gonna pay for it?

You?

Yeah, I didn’t think so.

Hang on …. what’s this, a letter in the mail?

Something in the mail

…. it’s from Google?

Google AdSense cheque for January and February 2012

…. Huh.

Ok, so … yeah … so like I was saying, thanks for nothing … except paying attention to us … and paying us compliments … and actually paying for the cost of running the site.

But, other than that…

Yeah.

Thanks.

No seriously, thank you.

I’m serious now.

Thank you.

Really.

But you best be keeping it up.

What?

Don’t look at me like that.

What?

Are you saying I’m supposed to buy coffee with my own money?

Inconceivable!

Posted by Jesse Willis

SFFaudio is 9 years old

SFFaudio News

SFFaudio is 9 years old today. Please return for another day of service tomorrow, and the following ninety-nine-thousand tomorrows.*

Birthday Zone - SFFaudio - Orbiting since March 31, 2003

Posted by Jesse Willis

*as noted at the local planning office, on Alpha Centauri, we will be moving shortly before Earth’s demolition in 2053. You may then find us at our new location on Leda, orbiting Cygnus.

Gregg Margarite of LibriVox, Iambik Audio, The Drama Pod, and SFFaudio has died

SFFaudio News

SFFaudio Meta I’ve just heard that Gregg Margarite, my good friend, and a friend to humanity, has died.

Here are the facts as I’ve been told them.

Gregg died of a sudden heart attack on Friday morning (March 23, 2012).

I’ve never used an emoticon in a post on SFFaudio. Emoticons, I thought, were for when words couldn’t be easily employed. And I figured that was never.

I was wrong.

If there ever was a day for a frowny face that day is this day.

I became a friend of Gregg’s after listening to his recordings on LibriVox. I said to him that I wanted to be his friend because he was narrating so many of the audiobooks that I wanted to listen to. I told him that meant we had to be friends. And he believed me. And so we were.

We did several podcasts with Gregg. All of them were really fun. And, we were planning more. My last communication with him was about Philip K. Dick’s The Short Happy Life Of The Brown Oxford – which he wanted to narrate. Gregg wrote:

“I have 3 holy grails when it comes to PKD short stories, Brown Oxford, Electric Ant (not gonna happen in my lifetime) and Not By Its Cover.”

I was also waiting to hear his thoughts on the first episode of Black Mirror. I know he got it, but I don’t know if he saw it. I guess I’ll never know.

I told Gregg I had started listening to his narration of the novel Couch by Benjamin Parzybok. He asked that I tell him about it after listening. I won’t get that chance now.

Gregg was also planning on narrating The Ganymede Takeover, a novel by Philip K. Dick and Ray Nelson. I don’t think he’d actually started it yet though as I hadn’t yet sent him my copy.

The last update on Gregg’s site says that he’d recorded 205 hours, 58 minutes, and 30 seconds of audiobooks. Most of that was for LibriVox. I figure that’s one hell of a legacy.

In the many times we spoke I learned many surprising things about Gregg. He said he used to build “surrogate penises for Ronald Regan”, he was a musician, he was an artist and he was a fiction writer too (but under pseudonyms). I never learned his pseudonyms.

Gregg’s website, Acoustic Pulp, offers no comments section. So I invite anybody wishing to communicate any kind thoughts with Janine, Gregg’s wife, to comment below.

Update:
Mark Nelson has started a LibriVox forum thread.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Commentary: How I made my iPhone camera mount (for YouTube videos)

SFFaudio Commentary

SFFaudio Meta A few months ago I designed and built an iPhone camera mount for making YouTube videos for SFFaudio.

I actually started off wanting a tripod, but I couldn’t find a reasonably priced adaptor for my iPhone. As I tried to find one I realized that a tripod wasn’t exactly the best way to film the objects on my desktop anyway. So I thought about it for a bit, took some measurements, and went down to Rona (a local hardware store) to buy the parts.

Here’s what it looks like:

iPhone Desk Mount

I really like showing it off!

HERE is the kind of vid I make with it.

To make it cost me just over fifty dollars and the build time was about an hour. Now that I have it I find that the assembly time is less than a minute.

If you have access to tools and a workshop you can make one for yourself for less than I did. I bought too much PVC piping, and I had to invest in a hacksaw. The hacksaw cost about $10. The other tool that I bought was the spring-loaded hand clamp with a range up to two inches – this is essential for making my mount portable and preventing the whole thing from falling over.

A friend* gave me the wooden base.

Here’s how it all fits together. Permanently attached to the wooden base (7 x 10 x 0.75 inches) with four Robertson screws, is an iron floor flange with a 1 inch female pipe receiver with four countersunk screw holes.

This is the only part that I don’t regularly disassemble.

I then screw into the flange a 1 inch diameter pipe measuring 3 inches long (see images below). Atop that fits the rest of the assembly which is all PVC plastic tubing measuring 1.25 inches in diameter. The first PVC piece is the biggest, a straight tube that fits over the 3″ long X 1″ diameter iron pipe. It rises up about 12 inches from the base (though I suggest you add another 7 inches to that if you’re planning to attach it to a table as I have done in the image above). Atop that I fit one of two 90° PVC fittings of the same 1.25 inch diameter. That attaches to another straight pipe of the same diameter running horizontally about 11 inches. I then pop in the other 90° fitting. To which I attach a 4.5 inch long tube running vertically downward. This last pipe has had a notch cut into it approximately three quarters of an inch from the bottom. The notch is about half an inch thick (as that’s how thick my iPhone 3GS is).

I mentioned earlier that you probably want to add about 7 inches to the first vertical tube. This is because when showing objects on my desk I actually have my mount atop the monitor riser, pictured at the back at the back of my desk, and it is 7 inches higher than the desktop itself.

All the pieces are held together by friction which allows me to swap in and out different pieces of differing lengths. It also makes it portable. I took the mount to my classroom and showed it to my students the other day.

Assembly pictures:
iPhone Desk Mount Base
3 inch iron pipe

iPhone Desk Mount with flange and iron pipe
PVC piping

PVC piping atop the iron pipe
two 90 degree fittings
90 degree fitting attached
nearing full assembly
The final peice

[*thanks Andy!]

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast download numbers in Google Docs

SFFaudio News

SFFaudio Meta Dude! We’ve had some serious download numbers for The SFFaudio Podcast. Here’s my accounting from the last 14 Months tracking our podcast downloads as best I’ve been able.

The way our tracking system works I can only see the top 10 URLs downloaded per month (in KBytes). I’ve taken those numbers and plugged them all into a Google Docs spreadsheet. Most months we get numbers on just 9 podcasts (the site itself counts as one URL and of course it takes the lion’s share of the bandwidth). Here are the results.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ap2T2ozxUHzHdDJXemp0YXNlcERHRU51VW5hU203QkE

As you can see our most popular download is still SFFaudio Podcast #105 which has been downloaded a staggering 36,392 times so far!

Our second most popular episode is SFFaudio Podcast #140. It came out in late December 2011 and has garnered 11,206 downloads!

And I think SFFaudio Podcast #122 is the third most popular, with 7,404.

In most cases the actual download numbers are higher than what I’ve recorded, but I don’t know how much higher as I don’t get to see the 10th, 11th or 12th most popular podcast downloaded in a month, nor anything beyond that – so we can just assume they are somewhere below the lowest number recorded and zero.

I’m pretty impressed with the numbers I’m seeing. Good work people!

And Thanks!

Posted by Jesse Willis