July 22, 2008 - Mixing a podcast in Ardour
Don’t worry, I’ll blog about LUG Radio Live as soon as I’ve recovered enough to do so. It was brilliant though.
Now, on to business.
One of the things we’ve been trying to do with the Ubuntu UK Podcast is make it a collaborative effort. Both in terms of where the content comes from (the UK Ubuntu and Linux community, not just four presenters) and how the podcast is produced. For the first few shows I ran the mixing desk, edited the segments and mixed the show, but this was never the long term plan. More recently, Ciemon and Alan have both been editing away on segments, meaning that I don’t have to spend the equivalent of two days editing the podcast segments for each episode.
The next step was to get other people mixing the show for release.* This involves inserting the music, fading, adding filters and generally trying to iron out the bumps which cause us to get so many e-mails in the first few releases.
This process is basically impossible to describe over a medium like IRC. We had talked about having some tutorial sessions after a recording session, but frankly at the end of a recording sessions we are all just about ready to collapse and it never happened. So I took a leaf out of Alan’s book and created some screencasts of how I mix the podcast. It was pretty easy to do, technically and Alan persuaded me to let him put them online for public consumption. Now, these screencasts were designed for internal consumption only, so I wasn’t worrying too much about fluidity and energy in the commentary. However, with that caveat stated, you can get the first part (of thirteen) of Mixing A Podcast In Ardour.
* Actually, I plan to do screencasts of the editing process too, it’s just that it’s a bit easier to play around and find out what works with editing than it is for mixing.









