Episode: 2367
Title: HPR2367: How I create and post a show to HPR
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2367/hpr2367.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 01:47:16

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This is an HBR episode 2,367 entitled How I Create and Boaster Showtor HBR.
It is posted by MrX and in about 20 minutes long and can rim a clean flag.
The summary is in this episode I describe the process I use to create and Boaster Showtor HBR.
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Hello and welcome hacker public radio audience.
My name is MrX and welcome to this podcast.
Let us start as usual by thanking the people HBR for providing this service.
It's really invaluable and they go to a great deal of effort to streamline the process.
It's really quite easy to record something and stick it up.
Just pick up a microphone and off you go.
In case you have not quite sure about how to go about it,
I thought in this episode I'd go through how I record a show.
I'm using audacity here.
I have a cheap gaming headset and microphone on the side.
Just pick up of eBay or something like that.
Amazon probably would have been, I find that works well.
The first thing is you want to make sure that you've got the microphone in a good position.
If you have it directly in front of your microphone,
if you have it directly in front of your mouth, you'll get lots of win noise.
I'm going to adjust this up a little bit so you can hear the difference.
That's a microphone right directly in front of my voice,
directly in front of my mouth.
You'll probably hear a lot of win noise.
It's really quite unpleasant.
That's a good tip.
I'm going to drop it down a bit.
It's actually below my lips.
That way you don't hear the win noise when talking.
The next thing is you want to make sure your levels are okay.
In this version of audacity,
there are meters that can tell you your audio level.
But to activate that, you've got to,
there's a weed drop down button below the meter,
which says input level, click to monitor.
When I click that,
the option says disable meter, start monitoring.
If you just click start monitoring,
when you're talking to your microphone,
you'll see the bar move up and down as you speak.
Now, you want to adjust such that
I tend to do a few loads of hello, hello, hello.
Speak really quite loud.
Loudest peak you'd expect to hear.
You shouldn't get any clipping.
If it goes to the top of the meter,
then you'll get a red bar appearing and staying at the top end.
That shows you've got clipping,
so it's too loud if you do that.
You don't want it to reach zero on the skill you want it below zero.
But it's close you can get to zero without actually touching.
So that's fine.
That seems to be OK.
I'm quite close to zero on voice peaks.
So that's another important thing,
because if you don't do that,
you'll sound very quiet.
And I give it quite annoying.
So that's pretty easy.
Now, obviously, you could use an MP3 player
or your phone or whatever, but that I use Audacity.
So my folder structure I use for my podcast,
I just number them.
This will probably end up being folder 28,
because it may be the next show that I post.
Last time was 27 tracking HPR shows in Q with a Blinkstick.
So I haven't actually created a folder yet for this show,
because I haven't saved the file down.
It'll be something like 28,
how I record a podcast for HPR or something like that.
And that's where I keep all the files.
I might have shown notes in various bits and pieces.
And maybe other audio files.
I want to add other audio files into the mix sort of thing.
So that's how I do that.
It's great.
It's straightforward, really.
So then I...
Before I start, I'll write down some rough notes
to get me going.
Depending on the content of it's really detailed.
It might be quite detailed notes,
but if it's quite simple like this,
and it's just like one liner sort of thing,
just points maybe bulleted sentences.
And so this one says,
there's something to write show notes.
If I don't know the subject well enough
or perhaps want to go into some detail,
Wikipedia can be very handy here.
So there's something I wrote there.
Next thing I want to point out is,
oh I record using a cheap gaming headset
with being makeful.
Yes, as I mentioned that.
And I record it by pushing the record button
and ducking.
Well, yes, that's kind of obvious, isn't it?
So once you've done that,
I saved that to my file folder structure.
That explained earlier on.
This one is here.
This folder we call 28,
however I record on HPR podcast,
I think I'll just save the file in there.
And then once I've done that,
I listen to it once,
I listen to it through once or twice
to make sure that there's not some strange noises.
Sometimes you get the word funny,
you make pause or order,
or there's strange noises that you make when you're talking.
You can take these out if you can be bothered.
I don't get it, it's not absolutely necessary.
Stutters or umbs and ours and all this sort of thing as well,
if you feel you want to.
I guess it's not absolutely necessary.
It's content and not quality that matters.
So don't necessarily look for perfection.
I have a re-theme that I had at the beginning of my show.
So once I've once I've listened through the audio
and made sure that it's okay,
I then add the theme to the beginning of the recording.
And I think you just go to the file menu,
import and then audio.
And that allows you to import
my intro, which is my intro,
it's not the HPR intro just to make that clear.
If you don't have your own intro,
which I think most people don't,
HPR every episode has to have an intro now,
but they can provide it for you.
So you don't need to do any intros at all.
So you just need to have a single recording and that's it.
So once I've done that,
I then highlight the track,
the voice track.
So I highlight the track and then I go to effects.
Now in the past I've used a little bit of noise reduction.
It's a noise reduction and noise removal.
But in reality,
I find that it really isn't necessary.
Unless you've got a really noisy equipment or whatever.
The history of anything that's generated is so little.
And also I find it,
unless you're really careful,
it can make the gaps in between sound really unnatural
and you get burbling if it was too aggressive,
in between the silent pieces.
And it can kind of jarring to the ear.
So I really don't think it's necessary personally myself.
I guess your mileage may vary and everyone's got their own idea,
but I don't bother any of the anything like noise reduction anymore.
The only thing I do,
which I think is very useful,
is I compress audio.
So you go to effects and then a compressor.
And then I just let the default settings and hit OK.
There's a lot of complicated settings to that.
And I just picked the default and it seemed to work fine.
So what compression does is any quiet,
but say if you're audio, it boosts.
And any...
So the average torque power of your audio is louder.
That's why you find adverts and your television sounds so loud
and radio because you use lots of compression there.
It makes your audio sound nice and fooling.
It just helps a lot, I find.
And it's very easy to do.
So ad compression.
So the notes I was talking about,
it's just a LibreOffice document and a word document,
just write your notes into that.
And I've got rough notes for this show right now.
Once I'm happy with that, I then export the project.
I'm going to file and export.
And when you do that, I select, you select FLAQ.
That's FLAQ format.
That's the best format to use.
It's recommended if you go to the HPR site,
they give details about the settings for FLAQ.
Let's just see.
I'm going to go into the HPR site and see for the...
See what it says about...
So I go to give shows and then recording,
editing your shows.
Record your shows, recording editing using your computer.
So I click on that.
And they explain here, you record it using audacity.
And they've got the example of audacity.
And then once you've finished recording it, you export it.
And confirm that the project rate,
rate is set to 44100 Hz or 44144.1 kHz,
whatever.
44100, basically.
File export and select FLAQ file.
Click options to reveal FLAQ export setup.
And you set the level to 8, which is best.
Set the bit rate bit depth to 24.
And that's it.
That'll export your project on a FLAQ file
ready to upload, basically.
And of course, when you export it as FLAQ,
you don't need to add anything to the file.
You'll get a dialogue popping up saying about, you know,
artists and all this stuff.
And you can just ignore all that.
Because HPR adds up metadata and later,
so you can just ignore all that.
So if you go into the HPR calendar page,
what you do is, so you've got your project saved in FLAQ format.
And let's go back to the home page.
So HPR, I can probably do home page,
give shows, and then if you go down to requesting a slot
for your show, that's the next thing you need to do.
So you, in that first sentence, you'll find a word,
a highlighted link word called calendar.
That takes you to the calendar page.
Click on that and upload your show, it says.
So current schedule, it shows you how many days
to the next free slot, number of hosts in the queue,
and shows in the queue, there's a graph that shows all that.
Currently there are 11 days to wait until the next free slot.
Please consider recording a show for us.
So there you go.
So you just look for available upload now, link.
I click on one of these days when it suits you.
And that will then display a page.
I tell you what, I'm actually going to go ahead and do that,
because I'm not going to upload, I can just ignore it.
So I click on available upload now,
and you get a page that says requesting a slot for your show.
And below that it says slot, and it gives you your HPR,
the number is going to be this, it's going to be HPR 2361,
and it's going to be 2017 08 21 Monday.
It won't be because I'm not actually going to post this one.
So that's what you'll get.
This is what I would get if I carried on with this.
And below that it says email.
So you've got to give your email address here.
Now that email address is private, it's not posted anywhere.
I don't think.
And when you click the next button,
what will happen is very shortly after that,
you'll get a link appearing in your inbox,
if you're email client or your email provider.
And you've got a short window to use that link.
Now, I don't know, maybe it's 15 minutes, 20 minutes or whatever.
I'm not quite sure.
I'm going to dig around and find out how long that will be.
And when you click on that link that is send you on your email,
it's a unique number generated for you,
because you've verified it because it's been sent to your email address.
When you click on that, you get a page appearing.
And you've got details to fill in.
Now, I find that it's easier to have show notes all of it not ready to go.
Because otherwise, you know, if you have,
I don't know about you, but it could take me more than 20 minutes to get together all the notes I want.
So, I do that.
But beforehand, I'm just cutting paste it in.
So, I've got a template I use for that.
And I don't know if all of these,
all of this information is relevant anymore.
Because you used to just,
I just showed notes to an FTP site.
And they did it for you.
But now, it simplifies the process for them and for you as well.
Getting this page that pops up.
So, my HPR notes have got, I've got hostname.
Of course, MrX, email address.
And I've got against that, MrX at hpr.googlemail.com.
Show title.
The example I've got here says follow on to HPR234O tracking the HPRQ in Python.
It desired slot.
I've got next intro and outro added.
No, in other words, I haven't added the HPR intro and outro.
I've just got one one and that doesn't count.
That's fine.
Is it a series?
No, it's not.
Tags.
Well, for this one, I just Python, comma, programming, comma, hardware.
Reasonable tags for it.
Explosive, clean, short summary.
Improved version of script to capture the number of HPR shows in the queue using Python.
And then we read a little bit below that.
This is a follow up to my previous show, HPR234O.
The improvement being I use available stats file.
You know, I just know that guff.
But there you go.
That's basically all you need.
And then, as I say, when you actually click that link and get that page from HPR,
you've got all that information to hand.
So it makes it a lot easier.
And then at the bottom of the page, there's some.
And this is from me, because I'm not actually posting it right.
There's very second, obviously.
There's a browse button to attach the upload file that you want to upload to HPR.
So you hit the browse button.
And look for the flat file, which you created when you exported the file.
And when you hit the file and when you complete the file dialog box,
it puts the path in the file.
But at that point, it doesn't submit it.
So you can always back out or change it.
So that's fine.
And then you scroll into the very bottom of the page.
There's a button from memory, I think, called submit.
And you push that button.
And certainly if you're using Firefox, I think you get a link.
What the page just says, you can see that it's sending.
But there's no other outward sign that anything's happening.
So you just got to go away and come back.
And depending on the size of the file,
I can take a few minutes or so to upload the show and also depending on your broadband speed or whatever.
So you're best to be patient.
And finally, when you come back, you'll see a page appearance here,
where they thank you for posting your show.
And that's all there is to it.
A bit of that said, it's really quite complicated.
But honestly, it's really that easy.
So why don't you give it a go?
We'd love to hear some content from you all out there.
And this great big world called InterTubes.
What on earth am I talking about?
I don't know, I'm living in a little bit of rubbish.
I guess it's about time I should just think of.
Oh, wait a minute.
A fine thing I'm going to have to do isn't it?
Is tell you how you can get in contact with me.
Should you be deaf and have to do that?
So if you want to contact me, I can be contacted at MrX at hpr at googlemail.com.
That's MRX ATHPR, the art symbol, googlemail.com.
So until next time, thank you and goodbye.
Just a wee note that if all this sounds a bit complicated,
it doesn't mean to be.
It can be very simple.
This is just how I record a show.
Instead, you could just record on your recording device.
Record on just about any of you format you like.
Click on the free slot link on the hpr calendar page.
And upload the show without even show notes.
hpr will do the rest.
Just record and post.
Simple as that.
So you've got no excuse.
Give us your content.
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