New Radio program live with new recording method
By Jason Meserve, NetworkWorld.com, 03/07/05
This week's Radio program, featuring Web designer turned full-time blogger Jason Kottke, is now live. This one was a bit of a technical challenge.
Since Jason does not get good cellphone reception in his New York City apartment, we decided to try to use the Apple iChat voice over IP functionality. I got a loner Mac from our IT department and followed this Engadget guide to making a recording of our online conversation.
Sounds easy enough but there where problems. First, I tried out the system the night before our scheduled called with a colleague. He was at home on a Mac and I was here at the World Wide Headquarters. It took a couple tries but bingo the system worked. Next day, Jason and I connect by iChat but can only text message, for some reason our firewall is blocking is incoming SIP signaling. (We think the previous evening's session worked because a PC on my colleague's network was running our corporate VPN software and somehow the packets piggybacked on that... or it was a perfect aligning of the planets). I put off the call with Jason until the next day, when I would be on a home broadband connection.
That worked, thankfully. The only real issue is the noted slight latency in the audio setup recommended by Engadget: I heard myself a fraction of second after speaking, which is really strange. It also makes me sound like I have hypothermia on the recording. My brain was trying to let my voice catch up or something.Also, I had my audio level adjusted a bit too high, so there's some clipping when I ask questions.
The final challenge was getting the QuickTime Broadcaster output into WAV format for editing. For some reason I could not get iTunes to do this as specified in the guide. Instead another colleague transcoded it using QuickTime Pro. Once I had the WAV, followed my normal path for editing (SoundForge) and encoding (Sorenson Squeeze) on my trusty Windows 2000 system.
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