Episode: 819
Title: HPR0819: Editing Part Five Post and Packing
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0819/hpr0819.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 03:00:23

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The Full Circle Podcast on Hacker Public Radio
In this episode, editing the Full Circle Podcast, part five, post, and packing.
Hello World, and welcome to our show on Hacker Public Radio.
Now, part five on our series on producing the podcast.
We've prepped, recorded, edited, and assembled.
Now it's time to release the show on an unsuspecting world.
All the hard work done, not quite.
The Full Circle Podcast is the companion to Full Circle magazine,
the independent magazine for the Ubuntu community.
Find us at fullcirclemagazine.org forward slash podcast.
Hacker Public Radio
Editing the Full Circle Podcast, part five, post, and packing.
It's the final part of this series, packaging, exporting, and posting the show.
At some point, I have to decide that the episode is finished.
I'll apply the final filter of dynamic range compression to the edited voice tracks,
check the mix down, then it's time to export the episode for release.
In order to keep the download size manageable, we've already converted the
constituent tracks from stereo to mono audio that nearly halves the data.
The audio files themselves now have to be scrunched down for the release version.
In audacity, that means file, export, then choose my output options.
I create a quality 4-OG audio file and a low-fi MP3 audio file
in joint stereo at a bit rate of 65 to 96 kbps for those technically minded among you.
I'm not aiming for perfect audio reproduction on somebody's bang and olives and speakers,
but I reckon if I can get it to sound like FM radio, that's probably good enough.
I produce both MP3 for iTunes and the proprietary music players, like my phone,
and an org file for the open source evangelists and my desktop.
I also produce a high-quality, original flack file in case I need to drag it back in and
create any other file formats and quality settings at a later date, flack being the lossless audio format.
Metadata that's tags to you and me.
Before I do my first export, the extra dialog box prompts me for the track tags or metadata
that data about the track and not the audio track itself.
Clear? Good. In other words, this is artist, title, album, year, comment, copyrights and so on.
I fill those in, select the file name to export and then go do something else for a while.
Checking the output file. When I have my exported files, I import them back into Audacity
to perform a spot check and visually check the waveform, making sure I've got no embarrassing
silences, gaps, dropouts or leveling issues. I also go through the show, noting the time marks for
each section to include in the show notes. So you can jump straight to your favoured segments
or skip over the stuff you don't want to hear. Checking the tags in an audio player.
Audacity doesn't write perfect tags. I usually have to edit the MP3 as the year tag in Audacity
doesn't get populated but it does in the org file and flack file. However, it's the comment field
that doesn't get populated in the org file. Go figure. Upload. I will upload the org and MP3
files onto the full circle magazine server using FTP, that's file transfer protocol through file
zilla, which is my current favoured FTP program. Show notes. I think the show notes are almost
as important as the show. This is where the extra value is derived for the listener, additional
description and links to original sources or supplementary links for more detail, be it websites,
reviews, downloads or anything else that we've spotted. All the links are stashed into a text
file until it's time for me to post the show on the server, episode posts. Our main distribution
platform is the full circle magazine site. This means dealing with WordPress, creating the post
and remembering all the post tags, descriptions and runtimes. If you've been watching the comments
and the forum for the magazine, you will know that I've had problems with the podpress plugin.
In short, podpress has been modifying the WordPress posts and creating custom fields for some,
but not all, of our external music links. Putting those links into the RSS and Atom feeds,
usually at the expense of one or other of the org or MP3 file for the show itself. So when you
try and download from the RSS, you get the incidental music, but not the episode itself. However,
since we started using our own link shortener for external music links, podpress is left with just
the specified episode files in the media file section of the post and doesn't short changes
on the RSS feed. Entering the show notes is not quite as simple as I would like. You have to remember
the settings for the embedded org and MP3 players, include the links for the topics, news stories
and software discussed. The timings go in manually and I try to format the thing to look exactly
the same each time, linking the media into the show notes. I create the entries for media,
linking to the uploaded media files on the full circle server. The RSS and Atom feeds will
get updated by podpress from here. I'll also link in Dave's transcript for a game review if he
has one. Finally, letting the world know, WordPress builds the RSS and Atom feeds automatically,
so as long as I've entered the information correctly, the feeds should be good, except
some feed readers seem not to like the format that podpress applies and we're still working on that.
Subscribers get the notifications of new episodes as do sites such as iTunes, which I configured
early this year. Other notifications include the full circle forums where I add to an existing
post or sticky or starting new thread. I put a summary entry on the podcast team's working site
and also on my blog. And that's it, a complete episode of the full circle podcast.
Until the next episode, when it starts all over again.
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