Episode: 2503
Title: HPR2503: My journey into podcasting
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2503/hpr2503.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 04:16:50

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This is HPR Episode 2,503 entitled, My Journey Into Podcasting.
It is hosted by Ella Weber and is about 14 minutes long, and Karima Clean Flag.
The summer is, may take us on this journey into 10 years of podcasting.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge, by heading over to archive.org, forward slash donate.
Hi there and welcome to yet another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio.
My name is Dave, otherwise known as the Love Bug, and on this show I want to give you a
journey, or to even take you on a journey of how I got into podcasting.
So a bit of background, audio production has always been an interest of mine.
My late grandfather on my father's side was an audio file.
My dad, interesting factoid, my dad used to run an audio visual studio in Woking here
in the UK.
Actually, the studio where these spice girls were formed, and my dad actually got mentioned
in a couple of their autobiographies.
He now runs his own audio visual consultancy business, and also my cousin runs an audio
visual consultancy business.
So there's a definite family history in there.
I also dabble briefly with hospital radio, but more as a technician rather than a presenter
in the late 1980s.
And I was both technician and presenter on college radio in the early 1990s, where I hosted
a show called, please don't laugh, the Barry Manelow fan club on Friday lunchtime.
Yes, I am a huge fan of Barry Manelow.
He's given me a lot of inspiration as a musician, but no, I didn't play any Barry on the college
radio show.
I've also had a few people say that I have a good radio voice.
Others have said I have a good radio face, but I don't like those people anymore.
So the catalyst of me starting podcasting occurred in 2007.
I discovered podcasting through a couple of friends who had their own podcasts.
One was the random three, which was a personal musical journey where Mark, the host, would
play three seemingly random pieces of music from his own collection.
And as a result, it wasn't pod safe.
And then explain the reasons why he chose them.
Most of the times, these seemingly random tracks actually had a theme, but it didn't necessarily
become apparent until after the second track.
It was a great show, now sadly defunct, but I really miss it, and it's a real shame
it's not around anymore.
I even submitted some of my own music choices for Mark to present.
The other podcast that got me interested in podcasting was Dumb Down Life, which started
off as three chaps, just basically nettering about stuff, stuff that was kind of important
to them, and playing some music as well along with it.
Again, another great show, which although it does still exist, currently releases shows
every year or so.
And what drew me to the shows, apart from being friends of mine, was the fact that these
were not professionals, they were just regular guys.
And that led me to think that maybe I could do this.
So I said to proving, mostly to myself, that I could.
So one Thursday in early March 2008, when the wife had gone to the gym for a couple of
hours, I grabbed my trusty Logitech headset, my Linux laptop, a handful of tracks from
the PodSafe Music Network, which is no more, and a piece of software, which you may have
heard of, called IDJC, and I recorded the first ever episode of the Bugcast.
It was just over 22 minutes long, and quite frankly, it was dire, absolutely dire.
Every so often I go back to it and listen, and cringe, and marvel at how much better
the show is now.
I would recommend, and well, would I recommend it?
I'd recommend you don't, near a bit of a reverse psychology.
I recommend you don't go back and listen to the first episode of the Bugcast.
They'll be linking the show notes, but you can get there at the Bugcast.org-show-one.
The music, when I first started, wasn't exactly PodSafe.
The first track I played was Sing It Back by Maloko, but I didn't really worry about
the legality of playing music, because I had picked up the track from a source that had
given implicit permission for Podcast to play the music, the PodSafe music and work.
I did a show, Episode 20, which was a nostalgic, I can't speak today, tripped back to my
college years, where I played tracks by Chad Jackson, Japan, and the Dream Warriors.
Now this was a complete and intentional violation of copyright on my part, which admittedly
led me to pull the show only a few weeks later.
I did re-release the show, approximately two years after that, but with the offending
tracks removed.
But there is a backstory to the show, which is why I wanted to get it back into the
feed.
So, yeah, by all means go and listen to that.
There's not, I think there might be one piece of music in it, but the copyrighted music
has been pulled out of the show, and that's on Episode 20.
The back of any was just me, and a small disnabase of friends, their family, their family servants,
their family servants, tennis partners, and some chap I bumped into the mess the other
day called Bernard.
But as time went on and I got more experience, I was really enjoying what I was doing and
I started to experiment.
One thing I did discover by about Episode 16 is that I wasn't editing my shows after
they were recorded, aside from topping and tailing the silence.
This made it so much easier as I was recording the shows as live from the very beginning.
Up to that point, I was taking out the gaps in the middle, gaps, hums, ars, burps, farts,
all the rest of it.
But when I discovered that I wasn't doing that anymore, I wasn't needing to do that
anymore.
There really was only one place to go.
So in August of 2008, on Episode 24, to an audience of about 10 people, I streamed the
first live episode of The Bugcast.
That was a buzz.
It was so, so nerve-wracking.
But it was a major turning point in the show as I'd committed myself to do a regular show
at a set time each week, turning what started off as a fun hobby into something a little
step beyond amateur.
There were a couple of non-live shows I had to put together using the WIFES Windows
machine when my laptop went bang and how to go off and be repaired.
But I really didn't like that method of production because I don't like the whole piecemeal
sticky tape method of producing a show where you do all your recorded bits and then put
the music between it or rest of it.
There's no flow and the spoken bits between the music sounded very much like I was about
to be fired from Radio 4.
In late September of 2008, I was accepted as a member of the Now Defunct Association
of Music Podcasting.
Now this is another huge step for me.
All members of the association were peer-reviewed as part of the criteria for membership.
And this meant that my podcast was deemed as sufficiently good to be accepted and that
meant the world to me.
It really did.
And I suppose it was that that made me take things so much more seriously.
And in fact, that was the reason why I pulled episode 20 just prior to being accepted
into the association because they wouldn't have accepted me as a member if I had copyrighted
music in my show.
But it's also meant that the show was becoming a lot more music oriented, was something
I really didn't have a problem with, to be honest, particularly as I was starting
to strike up some good relationships with some of the artist I was featuring on the show.
This led me to a pre-recording interview with one of the bands in January of 2009 and
then again with another artist in March of the same year.
Now having then registered a proper domain for the podcast rather than picking back in
my own personal domain and then celebrated the first anniversary of the show, you could
say that the show was fueling its own progression.
And up to that point, I was enjoying the journey immensely.
Then over the next six months, I joined the Made in the UK show collective, interviewed
an artist live on the show and had the show syndicated on an internet radio station in
the UK and also launched a chatroom for the website so that people could come and join
us when we were sorry, when I was recording live.
And then in September of 2009, which was around about the 18 month anniversary, you can't
have a month anniversary, can you, but you know what I mean.
And two days before my birthday, in fact, something happened which turned the show upside
down.
I had decided that I wanted to improve the show.
Bearing in mind by this point, 18 months in, I was still using my trusty Logitech headset
in my Linux laptop, piece of software called IDJC, I felt it was time for a change.
So I invested some of my own money into buying a new mixer, some microphones, stands, cables
and such like, I did say microphones plural.
Up to this point, my wife Caroline had progressed from occasional listener to regular distraction
and I probably don't think it's appropriate for me to tell you how she was distracting
me what I was recording.
And then to researcher, so I asked her a question.
I said to her, if I bought two microphones, rather than just one, would you join the show
as a permanent co-host?
She said yes.
And that really changed things.
The dynamic of me talking to an imaginary audience bar, the activity that was in the chatroom,
judging to me bouncing off someone in the same room was utterly electric.
The show was completely transformed by what was a fairly simple change.
Our listener figures jumped up, the music on the show was more varied, existing listeners
enjoyed the show more.
It was absolutely amazing.
Since that happened, there have been occasions where Caroline hasn't been able to join
the show because of illness or the kids playing up or whatever.
And both the listeners and myself have really, really noticed our absence.
Now since then, we've made a number of small changes to the site, which we believe have
improved, I suppose, both the technical workflow and also the experience for the end listener.
We launched Nogfeed rather than just MP3.
And at the point of recording this, the Ogredown loads comprise approximately 20% of the
downloads we currently get from the site.
So that's not insignificant.
At one point, we were syndicating to four internet radio stations around the world.
Unfortunately, some of those, if at most of them have folded now, so we're not currently
getting syndication to other radio stations that I'm aware of, we started contributing music
to the CCHITS project, John Spriggs project for Creative Commons Music.
As of quite some time, in fact, we have been one of the most major contributors to CCHITS.
So if you're listening to any of the CCHITS regular shows daily, weekly or monthly, the
chances are you're listening to music that we have contributed to it, which we're quite
and I think justifiably proud of.
We're also incredibly proud of the fact that in 2013, we won the European Podcast Award
for UK personality, which was no small feat.
It was a peer reviewed and peer voted, and the winners were decided as a result of a voting
panel.
So, to be honest with you, that was one of our highest points of the podcast.
And the reason I'm doing this show now, and hopefully, if I hurry up, get my finger
on my backside, this will be HPR episode 2.503, which will be exactly to the day 10 years
since I started podcasting and having produced over 500 regular episodes of the Budcast.
So there it is.
That is a potted history of how I got into podcasting.
But my podcasting career, if you like, is more than just the Budcast.
The Budcast is still my primary podcast.
We still do it weekly.
We still stream it live.
But beyond that, I'm also a contributor to the CCJAM community podcast, which is a short
form community podcast, which focuses on just on music.
I'm one of the hosts of TuxJAM, Linux News with Creative Commons Music.
I'm one of the co-hosts of the Duffercast, which some of you may be familiar with, and
probably wondering where the hell we've gone, or we are still here.
We have at least one episode waiting to be published, but we will be back soon, I promise
you that.
I'm an irregular contributor to Hacker Public Radio, as you probably already know.
But I've also just become the producer of the Admin Admin podcast, which is my first
producer only gig.
I'm enjoying it immensely.
There are a couple of other podcasts that I have contributed to in the past there, currently
on hiatus.
I'm not going to mention those at the moment.
So there it is, I am always happy to answer any questions or provide any help with regard
to podcasting.
You can find various ways that you can contact me over at my contact page, which is the
lovebug.org slash contact.
So thank you very much indeed for listening, and join us again tomorrow for another exciting
episode of Hacker Public Radio, tada!
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