Well, not really. But I launched a podcast for a client this month and in the process, have learned more about what can go wrong with a podcast than I ever thought possible.
The good news is, we’ve got no trouble coming up with guests or topics for the podcast. What has been killing me is all sorts of little technical crap. My husband and the designer who coded the blog are both quite technical and I’m no slouch either, but we were all pulling our hair out last week and this over a series of little things that just kept going wrong.
So, in the hopes of sparing you our fate, here’s what we learned.
1. Don’t use Podpress with self-hosted WordPress to burn your feed. The code for the player in the post works fine, but I could NEVER get a feed out of it. I eventually purchased FeedForAll and am burning and uploading the feed manually. The Podpress support docs were not helpful. Quite frankly, you are probably better off using Libsyn or some other podcast publishing host, but we’ve got a hosting account for the blog and can serve the files from there as well, so we chose to not do so.
2. Wait until you’ve worked out all your feed issues before submitting to Apple iTunes. Unless of course you want to understand every frakking line in the feed so you can troubleshoot it. Like I do now. Of course, if you follow the advice in number one above, you won’t end up with weird directories that break your feed like we did. I’m sure some of this was operator error but man, it should be easier than this. The key thing to remember is: you can’t edit the directory submission to iTunes. Any changes have to be done in the feed itself.
3. Podpress and the Database Backup plugin for WordPress are incompatible. At least with my hosting set-up. They each require too much memory. So we have to do the backup manually right now. Luckily I only publish once per week. When I have time, we are going to research another player plug-in as that is all I am using Podpress for, and I’d prefer the automatic back-up.
4. When you record your podcast, if words drop out in the playback, it is due to the buffering of the sound data. If you don’t have enough memory, your podcast will sound like it was recorded by a drunk. Options: more memory, increase the page file size or record at a lower bit depth You do not want to know how long it took me to figure this out. Let’s just say the take of Marketing Tips now up on Business Forward was well-rehearsed.
5. How to do everything with podcasting by Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson is a terrific resource. On Amazon.
Finally, I still can’t figure out how to use the Noise Gate in Sound Forge. Anybody want to talk me through it? And please don’t tell me to RTFM. I’ve tried that and am still confused.
In other news, Battlestar Galactica returns with new episodes on April 4th and <spoiler alert> Carson Beckett is back on Stargate Atlantis tonight. These, my friends, are my silver linings.
Tags: podcasting
