## hpr3876 :: Recording An Episode For Hacker Public Radio

 Hello again, my name is André Jaenisch, also known as Ryuno-Ki.
Last week I recorded my first episode for Hacker Public Radio, the
podcast you are listening to right now. This one is recorded on 15th May
2023. Again I'm publishing it under a Creative Commons Attribution
Share-Alike 4.0 International License.
Getting contacted
I was surprised to get mentioned on the Fediverse after submitting my
show. You can find me there at RyunoKi@layer8.space (no dash, eight as
digit, link in the shownotes) in case you want to reach out to me.
I'm also delighted to have received an email even before my last
episode was airing. I was asked whether I am interested in recording an
episode on my experience with contributing to Hacker Public Radio for
the first time. So this is going to be the topic for today. As a warning
upfront: I have a reputation of overthinking stuff. I blame my
neurodiversity for it. That being said I'm positive that sharing my
thought process can help make the service better for everyone.
About recording software
I'm recording this episode again using Audacity. Now there is choice
about which software you can use for a podcast. Online based as well as
offline one. Audacity was in the news for sending analytics home.
However I couldn't find any indication in the settings for it (to
opt-out). The forks of the software weren't packaged up for Debian as
far as I could tell. Or perhaps they require an additional sources.list
entry, I don't know.
Before recording my very first podcast here I had only experience
with some video recording. Oftentimes done by the host but I also
prepared a few videos for an online course (which I couldn't publish
because life happened) and talks I gave during the pandemic years.
Learning about how to
podcast
As I often do when I enter a new subject, I went to the library and
grabbed some books to learn more. In particular I lended Podcasts by
Dirk Hildebrand. A small
book in German published at Haufe. I add a link in the
shownotes.
Reading through it I learned that I'm doing okay. It's really easy to
start a podcast as HPR promises! The thing I should spend some attention
on is keeping a consistent distance to the microphone, enable some level
of feedback during the recording so that I can listen to what is
recorded while speaking (using my gaming headset Logitech G230) and
prepare a script.
I don't have to think about designing images for the show or episode
because HPR will take care of that for me. It might be different if I
start my own podcast. Perhaps using Funkwhale or Castopod. Right now I'm not taking
steps towards that. Mainly because I need to rent some webspace first.
In my experience streaming media takes considerable amount of bandwidth.
Pair that with hosters that try hard to convince you to buy your domains
with them as well and the choice shrinks. I have my DNS provider
already, thank you very much.
Adapting lessons learned
I looked into how to do that in Audacity and I think the best I could
do for now is hitting on the microphone icon next to the meters in the
upper right of the interface and enable observation before I start
recording. Also leaving a little bit of time before and after the
recording allows me to cut keyboard clicks for starting and stopping the
recording. In HPR 3802 I also learned about skipping silences which is a
Effect in the Special category here. I hope I don't have pauses so long
that it warrants to truncate them.
My main thought about going with Audacity was post-processing
directly after the recording. I learned from my talks that I already
feel comfortable with a script in front of me. It gives me the security
I need to avoid too many ums.
What's missing on HPR
However, I feel like a few things are missing. Considering that this
is a podcast that is distributed through HPR and its partners I would
like to have chapter markers. I couldn't find a hint on how to add them
in the form I was presented. Using timestamps it allows to easily see
the outline of a recording which aids in the decision making process on
whether it's worth the time to listen to a particular episode. I hope
you consider the episodes here useful to make time for them :) Thank
you.
Another question mark I had when preparing the recording were the
settings. I'm used to have a guideline when recording videos for an
online talk. Things like preferred format and container, to technical
details like stereo or mono to the sampling rate (value and whether
static or variable). The only thing I found is a hint that submissions
will be transcoded to mono. I record in stereo with the default 44,1 kHz
sampling rate here. There was no recommendations on the format so I went
with OGG Vorbis instead of MP3 because of license freedom. Audacity
appear to not support FLAC so I have to use a lossy format. It's true
that MP3 enjoys wide support, but I want to encourage freedom when given
the choice. I could have chosen WAV files but those tend to become huge
really fast.
Adding metadata
Now I also add metadata to the recording. Vorbis offers comments for
that. You can compare it to ID3 tags for MP3 files. Given that I
couldn't find a way to enter these chapter information in HPR web forms
I'm experimenting with EasyTAG from the debian repository. From reading
the source code of my podcatcher of choice (AntennaPod for Android as
distributed in the F-Droid app store) I can tell that it parses these
comments at least. If that doesn't yield results I hope to see, there is
vorbiscomment of the vorbis-tools package for the command line. And Kid3
with a Qt or CLI interface. Expect some slightly different metadata by
me over the course of my contributions.
Writing shownotes
Last thing I want to highlight before ending this episode is
shownotes. Now I have more experience with blogging than recording a
podcast. When researching recommendations online there is all this SEO
fluff that goes into writing subtitles. Usually with catchy titles,
clickbait and all the rest. I have opinions here. However, I enjoy that
there is no „leave a rating and a review” part in the episodes I
listened to so far, because a podcast is a special RSS feed basically.
Why would I want to bind myself to a special platform? But then I also
want to be able to read up and search through the content of a podcast
episode. Right now I'm sharing my prepared script as a shownote. It
could come off as a wall of text. I'm open to feedback on this front.
You can find my Keyoxide profile below. Please do reach out to me.
Closing
And that's it for today. I thank you for listening to me. Looking
forward to hear from you. Be it in writing or as an episode on HPR.
Homepage: jaenis.ch
E-Mail: andre.jaenisch.wdc@posteo.net
Keyoxide: andre.jaenisch@posteo.de
Mastodon: @RyunoKi@layer8.space
