Episode: 3900
Title: HPR3900: Preparing Podcasts for Listening
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3900/hpr3900.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 07:41:52

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,900 for Friday the 14th of July 2023.
Today's show is entitled, Preparing Podcasts for Listening.
It is hosted by Ahukah and is about 12 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, I prepare my podcast files for listening in audacity.
Hello, this is Ahukah, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio in another exciting episode.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to talk about how I prepare my podcast files for listening.
This might be some information that will help one or two people out there in HPR land,
because if you listen to HPR, you, like me, are probably someone who listens to a lot of podcasts.
Now I do listen to a lot. I have from time to time reported on which ones I listen to,
such as a link I put a link in the show notes to a Hacker Public Radio episode.
Bear in mind when you listen to that, it's probably not even accurate anymore,
because it changes. Certain things I get tired of and I drop them. I find new ones that I'm
interested in. I add them. But let's just say my G-Potter right now has a couple of thousand
files in it. So that'll give you some sense. Now when you listen to a lot of shows,
it's important to be efficient. Now for me, that means I listen to them speed it up by approximately
80%. I could probably train myself to listen to them even faster, but this is comfortable for me
at the present. I suspect Mike Ray is probably a 2X or 3X at this point, but he spent years
developing that. But it's worth doing that if you listen to a lot of them because you can get
through them faster. Now there's a number of ways you could do this. If you listen to podcasts on
a smartphone, there are apps that will let you download your podcast episodes and then listen
to them speed it up. And that's probably good for most people, or certainly a lot of people,
I have two issues with that. The first is it will drain my battery even faster and I prefer not to
do that. Second, my phone is large enough to make this a bit unwieldy for how I like to listen.
I like to put on my headphones and listen while doing things around the house, doing yard work,
driving in my car, and so on. So what I like is a nice small MP3 player like a Sans Eclipse or
some similar ones. This is something that's about 1 inch by 2 inches and about a half inch thick,
and I can either put it in a shirt pocket, or it has a snap on feature I can attach it to a
T-shirt collar, and it doesn't get in my way. But those don't have a ton of features built in.
So one consequence of this is I have to have a software workflow to download and prepare my podcasts.
So, you know, there's preparation work. And for downloading, like I said, I use G-Potter.
I put a link in the show notes. It works fine. I'm like a Ubuntu box. Once I enter a subscription,
it checks automatically multiple times per day, downloads, new episodes as they appear, and so on.
So once I have finished listening to the episodes I have loaded on my MP3 player,
I connect it to the computer, delete all of the old shows, and see what new shows are now available.
Then I need to prepare them. Now, preparing the shows is where I use Audacity, which I have
done for years. Audacity can do anything I need done in preparing the shows, and it can do multiple
things in a script. Now, Audacity calls these scripts macros, and you can set one up by going to
tools macros and then clicking new. You give your macro a name, click OK, and then you will see
in the right-hand window steps that it has created a step called zero one end. Now, don't worry,
every macro has to have an end, and you can add other steps above it.
I start mind by doing the speed up step. Go to insert on the right, click that, and look for a
procedure called change tempo. Now, note that there is also a procedure called change speed,
but you don't want to use that because it will also change the pitch. This will be like changing
the speed on a tape deck. If you love listening to chipmunks, cool, but I don't. I just want to hear it
faster. So, change tempo will speed it up while keeping the pitch correct. Now, isn't digital editing
wonderful. Click on that, then click OK, and you will see it is now the very first step.
The one called end has now shifted down to zero two. Then click on the change tempo step,
click edit, and set the percentage of speed up you want. Now, mine is set for 80.
If you have never done this before, I recommend starting at a lower level like 30 or 40.
Once you get so that you never notice things being fast, you can increase it by another 10
until you get to the desired speed level. Like I said, you know, Mike Ray probably goes a whole
lot faster than I do, but he's been at it a lot longer than I have. Now, you could stop at this point,
but I don't. I'd like to do a few more things, and Audacity Macros let me change several procedures
together, so why not do more? The next procedure I like to use is called amplify, and as you might
think, it increases the volume. You know, some of the podcasts I listen to, most of them in fact,
are just a bit softer than I like, you know, at least played through my tiny little MP3 player.
So this lets me boost the volume just a little bit. You know, and my podcasts, you know,
they're all spoken word, you know, and many times the volume is just too, now, if I always listen
to professionally produced podcasts like the Twitch network, I probably wouldn't need to do this,
but to tell you the truth, I don't listen to the Twitch network anymore. I used to, but it just
stopped being interesting to me. Now, I click on amplify, okay, and now that is at the top
as step 01. I'd rather have it follow the speed up, so I just use move down to make it step 02,
then click on edit, and set the increase in decibels. Be careful here. Decibels are a logarithmic
scale in which an increase of one decibel means an increase of 10 times the power. That doesn't mean
it will come across as 10 times as loud for a variety of reasons, but I would start with maybe a
one or two decibel increase and see how that goes. Now, the next thing I do is add a normalized step.
I leave the default settings alone on this one. And finally, the last step I add is to export as an
MP3 file. You have to export your file as something, and this is the most practical for my MP3 player.
So, now I have a five step macro. Step one, change tempo. Step two, amplify. Step three, normalize.
Step four, export as MP3. Step five, end. Great. I can click on okay, and it is all saved.
Now, I have to use it. Now, to use the macro, you go to tools macros, and click on the macro you want to use.
I have about a half dozen macros I've created for various purposes. So, I can select the macro speed up
80, which speeds up my podcast by 80%. Then, at the bottom of the screen, I click on files,
and select the file or files I want to apply this macro to. You can apply the macro to any number of
files as long as they are in one directory. Since G-Potter puts each podcast in its own directory,
I leave them there. So, sometimes I'm applying this macro to only one file at a time. Other times,
I might be applying it to 100. All right, what will often happen is I come across a podcast that
really I love, and I discover that, you know, well, there's a hundred episodes of this out there.
I'll download the whole 100 in G-Potter, run the macro. It'll, you know, it might take me an hour or two
to go through all of them. But, you know, I have a computer just for all of that stuff that
is separate from my main workstation. Now, when this happens, Audacity will create a sub-directory
called macro-output in which it will place the modified files while leaving the original file
in its original directory. So, and what I mean by that, that sub, there will be a sub-directory
within each of those original directories. So, if I go to my hacker-public radio folder,
and I look inside, I will see inside of it another folder called macro-output, and whenever I
process an HPR episode, the processed version will show up in that sub-directory.
Now, I think leaving the original file alone is good. Sometimes I may want to refer back to the
original file for some reason. Now, as I run this macro on all of my new shows, what I do next is I
move all of the transformed files to a directory called podcast staging. I do this added step because
sometimes I want to see more information about the shows I have on my MP3 player. And as I've
mentioned, my MP3 player is pretty bare bones. So, now that I'm done, I probably have 15 or so MP3
MP3 files ready to go and copy them onto my MP3 player. I listen to those shows,
might, you know, depending on what else is going on in my life, might take me one, two, or three days
to go through that many episodes, and then start over by deleting the old shows, going back to G-Potter,
finding all of my new shows, running the macro, and wash, rinse, repeat. So, I hope this is helpful to some
people. And so, this is a hookah for Hacker Public Radio signing off, and as always encouraging
everyone to support FreeSoftware. Bye-bye!
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