The Internet Monthly is a monthly podcast featuring 20 or so short Internet related articles, tips and tricks and a regular search engine of the month feature.

This month’s podcast features a new browser add-on from Google that tests your website’s performance, the cyber-squatter name checker that covers 120 social media sites and new domain names that will cost businesses £10,000 each.

There’s news about how Dell increased sales by Twittering and why Comet is publishing customer feedback. You can also find out how to automate your updates across 40 sites at once and make sure you’re found on Google, and where to get Windows 7 for free and Snow Leopard for only £20.

This podcast is derived from a monthly newsletter published by Zen Internet and recorded and produced by Silicon Bay. The podcast is reproduced by kind permission of Zen Internet.

This Month’s Podcast

The Internet Monthly – July 2009:

Download audio file (podcast_jul09.mp3)

Or, download: podcast_jul09.mp3 [17’ 55”, 8.2MB]

This Month’s Articles

This month’s edition of The Internet Monthly podcast contains the following articles. A list of links associated with each article are included for reference:

1. FREE BOOST FOR BROADBAND SPEEDS – Zen internet upgrades internet speeds for all customers for free
   • www.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2009/6/14/zen-internet-offers-20mbps-broadband-upgrades-bt-free
   • www.zen.co.uk/Broadband/zenbroadband.aspx?page=10872
2. BRAND NEW DOMAINS – Branded company domains becoming available
   • www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSTRE5576DM20090608
3. SOCIAL CYBERSQUATTING – Protect your brand names online
   • www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/technology/internet/18name.html
4. COMET ADDS WEB 2.0 TAIL – Customers answer each other’s questions
   • www.itpro.co.uk/611674/comet-unveils-web-2-0-q-a-tool
5. TWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS – Dell sell millions online via twitter
   • en.community.dell.com/blogs/direct2dell/archive/2009/06/11/delloutlet-surpasses-2-million-on-twitter.aspx
6. AUTOMATED TWITTERING – Schedule your twittering when you’re busy
   • futuretweets.com
7. ONE-STOP SOCIAL NETWORKING – Update all your social networking sites from one place
   • ping.fm
8. WAKOOPA – See what applications people are using
   • wakoopa.com
9. GOOGLE PROFILES – Control what Google says about you
   • www.google.com/profiles
10. GOOGLE SPEED SCORE – How fast does your webpage load?
    • code.google.com/speed/page-speed
    • code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/rules_intro.html
11. 5-SECOND WEB SITE TEST – Quick test of your website’s memorability
    • fivesecondtest.com
12. WINDOWS 7 – Get the new Microsoft operating system for free
    • www.pcadvisor.co.uk/reviews/index.cfm?reviewid=106237
13. WINDOWS DRIVESPACIO– See what’s filling up your hard discs
    • drivespacio.en.softonic.com
14. USB THREE – USB for the next generation
    • www.usb.org/developers/ssusb
15. YUUGUU IF YOU WANT TO – Remote control of PCs
    • www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/yourbusiness/businesstechnology
    • www.yuuguu.com
16. SNOW LEOPARD – Upgrade your Mac operating system
    • www.apple.com/macosx/uptodate
17. MAC MAIL – Convert windows mail messages to Mac format
    • www.restoroot.com
18. TURN OFF TIME-WASTING SITES – An anti-procrastination tool
    • www.proginosko.com/leechblock.html
19. SEARCH ENGINE OF THE MONTH – Microsoft’s new search engine
    • www.bing.co.uk
    • weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2009/06/initial_bing_stats.html
    • www.revolutionmagazine.com/News/MostDiscussed/912079/Eye-tracking-research-Bing-advertisers-sweetheart

This podcast is sponsored and reproduced by kind permission of Zen Internet Limited. The music on the podcast was provided courtesy of Will Tang.

Whenever you play a podcast on your portable MP3 player or PC, you will invariably see a host of information about the track on the player’s screen. This information typically includes the cover art for the track, the album, artist and track name, its genre and track number.

Such information is stored in the MP3 file itself using ID3 tags. However, in addition to the tag information in the example above, the ID3 tag standard can support over 80  different tags. So, out of this vast array of tags what are the key tags that you should consider using in your podcasts?

What are ID3 Tags?

ID3 tags are a simple and convenient way of embedding descriptive data about an MP3 track within the track itself. This descriptive data is sometimes referred to as metadata, which is data describing other data. The ID3 tag data describes the audio data of the MP3, e.g. the track title, artist name etc..

For a fuller and more in-depth description of ID3 tags, check out my previous post: What are ID3 Tags in MP3 Files?

Essential Tags

Downloaded podcasts will already have ID3 tag data buried within them, but if you produce your own podcasts, you have free reign to add whatever ID3 tags you wish. However, you could fill up your tracks with 50 different tags or more, but who is this really going to benefit? Not you for certain; it’ll probably take you longer to add all of these superfluous tags than it did to record the podcast in the first place.

Brevity is the key. Just include the bare minimum that users are likely to need, any more and you’re wasting your own time and wasting space in the MP3 file storing useless junk.

The tags serve two purposes. The first is to provide general information about the podcast that the user is likely to want to know, while the second is to enable the user to search through a large collection of tracks at a later date and hopefully filter out your podcast via its tags.

Track Title

This is undoubtedly the most important tag, being the title of your podcast episode and is a fundamental tag that should not be missed.

By way of example, the title I use for my monthly podcast, is the generic title of the podcast with the month and year appended:

The Internet Monthly – June 2009

Cover Art

Another important tag to consider is the cover art tag. As the saying goes; a picture speaks a  thousand words, and this tag gives you the option to brand your podcast in glorious colour, forever etching it in the user’s memory.

However, while this tag will help to connect the user with your podcast, it’s unlikely to serve much use when trying to search for the podcast later on.

If you’d like to learn more about embedding images into your podcasts and what image types and sizes to use, then check out my previous post on: Embedding Album Art in MP3 Files.

Artist

This is the producer of the podcast. For example, I record a monthly podcast for Zen Internet to a script that they provide, so I add their name as the artist, as it’s essentially their creative work:

Zen Internet Limited

Album

While this tag is designed for use with music albums, where it refers to the album which an individual track belongs to, in podcast terms it is commonly used to refer to the series name of the podcast (assuming the podcast is not a one off, in which case this field would be left blank). For my monthly version of the Zen Internet podcast, I use the following album tag:

The Internet Monthly

Track

This isn’t often used in podcasts unless you have a concurrently running sequence of episodes, in which case you could use this field to denote the episode number.

Year

This is the year in which the podcast episode was first published. This field is probably not of much interest to the user under normal circumstances, but can prove useful later on when searching through an archive of tracks to narrow down the search:

2009

Genre

Again, this tag is not of much use other than for categorising the track for archiving and searching purposes. For podcasts, the de facto standard entry for this tag is unsurprisingly podcast, although sometimes you may come across alternatives of speech or vocal.

Interestingly podcast is not defined in the list of genres in the official ID3 tag specification, even though it is common practice to use this as the genre name for podcasts. Both speech and vocal are officially recognised as legitimate genres however.

I decided to go with the flow and hopefully the specifications will catch up with conventional wisdom:

Podcast

Comment

This field is often used for show notes and additional information pertaining to the podcast. Some people use this field for copyright notices, although if this is your intention, their is a specific copyright tag field dedicated to the purpose.

As my company (Silicon Bay Limited) produces the monthly podcast for Zen Internet, I use this field as a slight promotional opportunity:

Produced by Silicon Bay Limited

Copyright

Instead of using the comment field for your copyright information, this is the correct tag for the purpose:

Copyright (c) 2009 Zen Internet Limited

WWW

Invariably your podcast will be associated to your website, so why not embed your website’s URL into your podcast? This way if the podcast gets distributed via other means than your own website, you’ll have a way of driving traffic from interested listeners back to your site:

http://www.richardfarrar.com/

In Summary

The key ID3 tags that you should consider using in your podcasts, that will give the most benefits to your listeners without overloading them with information are:

• Title – The podcast title
• Cover Art – Thumbnail of the podcast art
• Artist – The artist that recorded the podcast
• Album – Which series the podcast belongs to (if applicable)
• Track – The track number from the podcast series (if applicable)
• Year – The year the podcast was published
• Genre – The type of track, e.g. podcast, speech, vocal
• Comment – General comments
• Copyright – Copyright notice by the copyright holder
• www – The website address for the podcast

The Internet Monthly is a monthly podcast featuring 20 or so short Internet related articles, tips and tricks and a regular search engine of the month feature.

This month’s podcast celebrates the 100th edition of Zen Internet’s free monthly newsletter, first published in March, 2001, when the top story was "the latest news about ADSL – affordable high-speed Internet connectivity that’s up to forty times faster than the fastest dial-up modem".

This month, a selection of stories from the Zen Monthly archive have been picked from the newsletter’s eight year history.

This podcast is derived from a monthly newsletter published by Zen Internet and recorded and produced by Silicon Bay. The podcast is reproduced by kind permission of Zen Internet.

This Month’s Podcast

The Internet Monthly – June 2009:

Download audio file (podcast_jun09.mp3)

Or, download: podcast_jun09.mp3 [19’ 06”, 8.8MB]

This Month’s Articles

This month’s edition of The Internet Monthly podcast contains the following articles. A list of links associated with each article are included for reference:

1. HITTING A CENTURY – Zen internet’s 100th newsletter
   • www.zen.co.uk/newsletter 
2. SURVIVING THE SLUR (May 2002) – The real SPAM (in a can)
   • www.spam.com 
3. NEIGHBOURHOOD NATIVES (January 2003) – Discover native plants to your area
   • www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/life/plants-fungi/postcode-plants
4. BROADSHEETS ABROAD (February 2004) – Read newspapers online
• www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/main.asp
• www.pressdisplay.com/pressdisplay/viewer.aspx
5. FREEVIEW (January 2005) – Watch any video format online 
• www.videolan.org/vlc
6. SNIPSHOTS (February 2005) – Cut and paste from websites
• www.netsnippets.com/basic/intro.htm
7. INSTANT PAGES (June 2006) – Websites at their simplest
   • www.shorttext.com
8. COPIED SEARCHES REVEALED (September 2006) – Google search information revealed 
   • blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-08-07-n22.html
9. LOOKING UP (March 2007) – British Library redesigns its website 
• www.bl.uk
10. FIGHT THE BULL (March 2007) – Filtering out bovine scatology
    • www.fightthebull.com/putinthering.asp
11. SEAT SIXTY-ONE (March 2007) – Eco friendly travelling  
    • www.seat61.com
12. WORDY WINNER (May 2007) – The YouTube for documents
    • www.scribd.com
13. STOP PRESS (August 2007)– The internet has crashed
• www.theonion.com/content/node/63609
14. BUSINESS WIKI (September 2007) – A British business listing site
    • www.bizwiki.co.uk/faq.htm
    • www.bizwiki.co.uk/businessoptions.htm 
15. KNOWING YOU (December 2007) – A personal profile website
    • www.zoominfo.com
16. WEB HISTORY (March 2008) – View old web pages
    • www.archive-it.org
    • web.archive.org 
17. ZAMZAR (April 2008) – A free file conversion website
    • www.zamzar.com
18. AGGREGATE THE POSITIVE (April 2008) – Top content from the web  
• popurls.com
19. FREE TUBE (January 2009) – A free alternative to satellite TV
    • freetube.110mb.com/index.php
20. RURAL RECEPTION (February 2009) – A Countryside TV channel
    • www.countrychannel.tv
21. FOCUS BEFORE SEARCH (April 2009) – A business oriented search engine
• www.newssift.com

This podcast is sponsored and reproduced by kind permission of Zen Internet Limited. The music on the podcast was provided courtesy of Will Tang.

Manufacturers like to develop and retain technologies that gives them a commercial and technological advantage over their competitors. To this end we as consumers have ended up with a collection of competing, but unfortunately technically incompatible, solutions to the same problem; that of storing large amounts of audio on portable audio players.

Thankfully the majority of manufacturers (but by no means all) of these portable audio players have eased our potential incompatibility problems by making sure that their players can play the majority of compressed audio formats that are in common usage today.

So what are these common compressed audio formats, why do we need them and what are the associated problems with having so many different formats?

Why Compress?

Back in the dark ages of computing, not so long ago, computer memory was not so plentiful, or cheap as it is today. As such, storing large amounts of data, such as audio files, was very costly.

As necessity is the mother of invention, the limited quantities of computer memory available prompted the white coated technical boffins to develop fiendishly cunning ways of throwing away most of the audio data from these files, while still retaining a high level of perceived audio quality.

How they do this is rather complicated, but they essentially save space by not storing the bits of the music that we can’t hear. During compression of a 128 kbits/s MP3 file, typically 90% of the audio data is discarded, leaving a file size of one tenth of the original size. This in turn means that your MP3 player is able to store ten times the amount of songs compared to if it had to store the original uncompressed CD data.

MP3

MP3 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3) is by far the most well known out of all of the audio compression systems available today, and while it may not be as technologically advanced as some of the newer systems, it is the most widely used and provides perfectly adequate results for moderate bit rates for the majority of people’s requirements.

The major benefit of encoding your audio files in MP3 format is that you are pretty much guaranteed you’ll be able to play your resultant files on almost any modern media player or device. It is for this reason that most podcasts choose to adopt the MP3 format as their preferred compression system.

While most people think that MP3 is a free and open source format, it’s not! There are numerous patents owned by a host of different organisations that are applicable to the MP3 technology. This can make official licensing of MP3 technology for use in encoding software or playback devices quite tortuous. Out of all of the organisations that lay claim to the technology underlying MP3s, the German Fraunhofer Society is probably the most notable.

AAC

AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) is actually part of the MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 specifications and is designed to be a superior technological replacement for the older MP3 format. AAC is designed to provide improved sonic quality and transparency compared to MP3 files encoded at the same bit rate, although this advantage only becomes dominant for lower bit rates (below 128 kbits/s).

AAC is the default format that Apple have adopted for their iPods, iPhone and iTunes and for their iTunes online music store.  Sony has also adopted AAC as the standard audio encoding system for their PlayStation 3 and has been incorporated into their PlayStation Portable and recent Sony Walkman systems. Other companies adopting this format include Nokia and Nintendo (Wii and DSi).

WMA

WMA (Windows Media Audio) is Microsoft’s proprietary audio compression system built into its Windows operating system and is the default compression option used for ripping CDs to your computer using Windows Media Player.

Whilst WMA is a proprietary Microsoft system, the technology has been licensed by numerous third parties meaning that if you’ve ripped your entire CD collection onto your computer’s hard drive in WMA format (as I have), then you have a good chance of being able to play these WMA encoded audio files on a host of compatible devices.

I have a Creative Zen MP3 player, which plays WMA files without any problems and I also have two Netgear MP101 media players at home linked to my home network that can stream music from my server in WMA format.

ATRAC

ATRAC (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding) is another proprietary audio compression format, this time developed by Sony, originally for their MiniDisc systems in the early 1990s, but has since been used in the company’s range of portable audio players.

Since its inception, ATRAC’s compression algorithm has been improved over the intervening years, with the newer versions offering improved perceived audio quality over earlier versions for similar bit rates.

Unfortunately, ATRAC encoded files are not widely supported by other manufacturers and as such, if you have a Sony branded audio player and have ripped all of your CD selection into ATRAC files, you’ll be extremely limited as to where else you can play your audio files.

Licence Free

Ogg Vorbis

While the Ogg Vorbis audio compression format is not hugely popular outside of the geeky computer nerd circles, it is worth a brief mention as a number of commercial “MP3  players” support the format. More importantly though is the Ogg Vorbis system is FREE!

There are no patents or licence issues to worry about if you choose to adopt this system, although compatibility with other media playback devices may prove to be an issue.

FLAC

FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is another audio compression system worth a mention, partly because it’s free (as its name suggests) and partly because it’s lossless.

All of the above compression systems loose some audio quality in their compression process. FLAC does not, but the downside is that the same sort of compression levels are not achievable.

FLAC files tend to be between 40 to 50% the size of the original audio file, which is not that impressive compared to a typical 10% figure of an MP3 file.

Like anything in life, it’s a balancing act. If you can afford the additional storage space required and want original quality audio, then FLAC is the way to go. For the majority of people however, these tiny improvements in audio quality compared to the space saving benefits of any of the above compression formats will not be worth the penalty of compatibility issues.

Summary

While MP3 is the most common and well known of all the audio compression systems, it’s by no means the best. There are a multitude of different audio compression systems available, with just a handful of the most common ones mentioned above.

The choice of compression system can depend on many factors, but for most people, providing the audio quality is reasonably good and the file sizes acceptably small the overriding issue will probably be compatibility.

The Internet Monthly is a monthly podcast featuring 20 or so short Internet related articles, tips and tricks and a regular search engine of the month feature.

In this month’s podcast, you can find out about offers that include free international phone calls and an easy government draw that could win you a new car. There’s news of street protesters who blocked Google’s camera car on its way to photograph their houses and the tourist photographers threatened with jail for snapping London policemen.

You can find out how to check your PC for infection by the mysterious Conficker worm, a one-stop introduction to Twittering for business and an early warning system to spot the Internet’s next big business opportunity.

This podcast is derived from a monthly newsletter published by Zen Internet and recorded and produced by Silicon Bay. The podcast is reproduced by kind permission of Zen Internet.

This Month’s Podcast

The Internet Monthly – May 2009:

Download audio file (podcast_may09.mp3)

Or, download: podcast_may09.mp3 [17’ 40”, 8.1MB]

This Month’s Articles

This month’s edition of The Internet Monthly podcast contains the following articles. A list of links associated with each article are included for reference:

1. LONG DISTANCE INFORMATION – Free international phone calls
   • www.poketalk.com 
2. FREE CAR – Win a free environmentally friendly car
   • www.dvlaprizedraw.org 
3. WEB FREEBIES – Tips for getting free stuff
   • www.lovemoney.com/news/ways-to-save/my-favourite-website-freebies-3214.aspx
4. CROWDSOURCING – Businesses gleaning the wisdom of the crowd
   • www.gottaquirk.com/2008/12/19/crowdsourcing-websites/
   • www.dulcenegosyante.com/top-10-creative-crowdsourcing-marketplaces
   • www.guardian.co.uk/enterprisesupplement/crowdsourcing
5. YELP – Review website finally allows businesses the right to reply 
   • www.yelp.co.uk
   • features.csmonitor.com/innovation/2009/04/10/yelp-lets-business-owners-talk-back-dialogue-or-argument/
   • www.eastbayexpress.com/news/yelp_and_the_business_of_extortion_2_0/
6. CAMERA SHY – London tourists considered terrorist threat
   • www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/16/police-delete-tourist-photos
   • www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/6225/ 
7. NIMBY PROTEST HALTS GOOGLE CAM – Angry residents stop Google in their tracks
   • www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1166722/Watch-Broughton-Street-View-fans-plan-descend-privacy-village-photo-fest.html
8. ANONYMITY CRACKERS – How anonymous are you on social networks? 
   • www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=103467
9. FACEBOOK RIP-OFFS – Spammers target Facebook 
   • resources.zdnet.co.uk/articles/comment/0,1000002985,39618458,00.htm
10. PHISHING ON FACEBOOK – Facebook schemes that threaten your privacy
    • www.pcworld.com/article/159738/
11. CONFICKER EYE CHART – Simple Test for Conficker worm infection  
    • www.confickerworkinggroup.org/infection_test/cfeyechart.html
12. READABILITY – Browser add-on to de-clutter web pages
    • lab.arc90.com/2009/03/readability.php
13. BRITAIN REWIRED – Wired magazine comes to the UK
    • www.guardian.co.uk/media/organgrinder/2009/apr/09/wired-uk-magazine-review
    • www.wired.co.uk
14. DOWN THE TUBES – Google loosing millions on YouTube
    • www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=715&doc_id=175123&
15. YOUNOODLE – System to spot the next big businesses
    • younoodle.com
16. TRADING ON TWITTER – Using Twitter to expand your business
    • tweetbeep.com
17. TWITTER IS A SEARCH ENGINE – Twitter becomes a search engine
    • www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/05/its-time-to-start-thinking-of-twitter-as-a-search-engine/
18. ANSWERING ALPHA – Watch out for the new search engine  
    • www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/ai/wolframalpha-searching-truth
    • www.wolframalpha.com
19. JEEVES IS BACK – The butler’s back
    • uk.ask.com
20. SEARCH ENGINE OF THE MONTH – A dual pane search engine
    • www.melzoo.com

This podcast is sponsored and reproduced by kind permission of Zen Internet Limited. The music on the podcast was provided courtesy of Will Tang.

Thanks to the advent of digital audio and the power of modern PCs, it’s now well within the capabilities of virtually anyone to produce and publish their own radio play using the same technologies as used in podcasting.

As a small kid I remember producing plays with my toys, an upturned stool for a theatre, a few torches and the tales of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter as a script. Since then my interests graduated to music production; I played in numerous bands and have always been keen on recording bands as a hobby.

However, my recent visit to an audio post production film editing suite at Pinewood Studios, re-sparked my interest in plays (I’ve always been a fan of the BBC’s radio series: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) and got me to thinking about using the same equipment that I use for podcasting, but pushing it’s use a bit further.

All I needed was some creative inspiration, but in it’s absence, I did the next best thing and borrowed it from someone else…

Inspiration not Perspiration

In the beginning was the word and the word was written by John Davison; the word was Bananas.

John has grandchildren, five in fact, but it’s his two youngest grandchildren that were the catalyst for this radio play.

John would often tell his grandchildren bedtime stories, which he usually made up as he went along. However, after a while, John began to formalise his bedtime stories around a young gorilla named Bananas as the central character.

Having developed a few adventures of Bananas, test driving them on his grandchildren first, John published some of his stories on his personal blog, with the first story published being Just Another Happy Day At The Farm!

To accompany the stories on his blog, John flexed his creative muscles even further, drawing the main characters of his stories for visual enhancement.

Some of the themes for his stories were actually suggested by his grandchildren, giving him a creative head start. The story that I used as the basis for my radio play was one of these; George Helps Bananas and Farmer Jones.

Story to Script

Having the story of Bananas was the starting point for the radio play. However, it was only after a few glasses of wine on a dark and damp winter’s day at John’s house that the reality of turning this story into a radio play began to take shape.

A few glasses of wine later and the story of Bananas and George had been turned into a script for our fledgling radio play.

Recording

The recording of the radio play was done in stages, depending on people’s availability, with the recording setup being essentially the same as I use for recording Zen Internet’s podcast every month.

Character Voices

The first voice to be recorded was Winnie’s. Winnie recorded the narration, but also recorded the voices of Bananas and Mrs Jones.

The second voice to be recorded a few weeks later was that of John himself, who played Farmer Jones. During this recording session, John and his wife Connie also assisted in recording a few sound effects for the play, namely the stirring and the drinking of the hot chocolate featured in the play and the pouring of the bird seed.

The final character voice for the play was provided by my son James, who played George.

The only other voice for the play was that of the announcer, provided by myself.

Technical Setup

To record all of the voices I used a Rode NT1-A low noise, wide diaphragm condenser studio microphone (shown left) with a pop shield to stop the microphone “popping” with loud sounds beginning with Ps and Bs.

The microphone was also mounted on a “cat’s cradle” shock mount to help prevent vibrations from the microphone stand passing to the microphone.

The voices were recorded into the PC via a Focusrite Saffire firewire interface. During this process a little gentle compression and equalisation was added to the voices via the Saffire’s on-board DSP.

For those of you NOT interested in the nerdy technical details, then please skip the next geeky bit:

Compression: A compression ratio of 2.5:1 was used with a 10ms attack time and 350ms release time. The threshold was set to -30dB to give a compression of up to 6dB during peaks.

Equalisation: A high-pass filter set to 90Hz was used to filter out low end bumps and pops. A –4dB high frequency shelf filter was used, set at 16kHz to take a slight harsh edge off the sound. 6dB of boost was added at 200Hz with a Q of 1.7 and 6dB of boost at 4kHz with a Q of 1.2.

All recordings were done at a sample rate of 44.1kHz (CD sample rate) and were recorded as uncompressed WAV files to retain their maximum quality.

Editing and Production

Recording the voices was only a small piece of the puzzle. Now the rest of the pieces had to be assembled; only they didn’t come with instructions!

To assemble all of the recorded pieces, a computer based Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) was used. My weapon of choice was Steinberg’s Cubase 4 LE that came bundled with my Focusrite Saffire audio interface; an amazingly powerful bit of software considering it was effectively given away free.

The picture below shows a screen shot of the main editing window in Cubase. Using this window I assembled the various audio pieces into their correct order and colour coded different groups of tracks for easy navigation. The intro and outro music pieces were coloured orange, voices were yellow, foley effects were pink, ambient and animal noises were purple and all other sound effects were in green.

With all of the tracks in place, additional audio processing was performed with some compression, equalisation, de-essing and noise gating.

The final mix was then created using the software’s powerful mix automation features to remember the fader (volume) positions, pan (left and right stereo positions) and reverb settings throughout the mix.

With the final mix completed, the resultant WAV file was converted into an MP3 file encoded at 128kbps, joint stereo to produce a fairly compact file for downloading, while retaining a reasonable level of quality.

The final tweaks to the MP3 file were the addition of various ID3 tags to include the track title, artist etc. and the embedding of the cover art of Bananas into the file itself.

The Play Itself

So, you’ve heard how it was produced, but what about the final result?

Well, judge for yourself, here it is:

Bananas Helps George:

Download audio file (bananas-helps-george.mp3)

Or, download: bananas-helps-george.mp3 [5’ 21”, 5MB]

By now you’ve probably heard of the term “bit rate” used in connection with MP3 tracks and podcasts, you may even know that higher bit rates give better quality audio. However, like most things in life, nothing is simple and we can further complicate the whole bit rate discussion with variable and constant bit rates. So, what are the pros and cons of these constant and variable bit rates?

Choosing a bit rate for a podcast, or an MP3 track, is a bit of a balancing act at the best of times. On the one hand, higher bit rates (variable or constant) give improved audio quality, whilst on the other they lead to bigger file sizes.

Introducing yet another variable into the equation, that of constant or variable bit rates, only serves to confuse the situation even further. What then are the relative pros and cons that may affect your choice of type of bit rate to use?

Balancing Bit Rates

If you’re not familiar with bit rates, then my previous post on What are bit rates? should point you in the right general direction and help to get you started.

In essence, higher bit rates give improved audio quality, no matter whether variable or constant bit rates are used. However, higher bit rates will always lead to larger file sizes, which in turn lead directly to longer download times and require more storage space.

When choosing which bit rate to use for your podcast or MP3 track, you really need to go for the highest bit rate possible, while retaining reasonable file sizes and practical download times.

Accepting the fact that you need to choose the highest practical bit rate you can, which option should you go for next (assuming your encoding software gives you the option) constant or variable bit rates?

Constant Bit Rates

Constant Bit Rates (CBR) are pretty much as their name suggests, where one fixed, or constant bit rate is used for the entire file or track.

However, constant bit rates are not optimal as they waste valuable data bits encoding simple sections of audio, and conversely may not use sufficient data bits on more complex audio passages, resulting in poorer audio quality during these sections.

The more complex audio sections of tracks encoded with a constant bit rate will be of a lower audio quality compared to the more simple sections of audio within the same track, so a suitable bit rate must be chosen that provides sufficient audio quality for the most demanding sections of the audio being encoded.

Constant bit rates are easier and therefore faster to encode compared to variable bit rates and lead to consistent and predictable file sizes. Being an older format, constant bit rates are more compatible with older MP3 players.

Variable Bit Rates

Variable Bit Rates (VBR) are likewise pretty much as their name suggests, where the bit rate may change throughout the file or track being encoded.

Variable bit rate encoding analyses the audio file, adapting the bit rate as it goes to match the complexity of the audio it encounters.

For simple audio passages, the system automatically turn its bit rate down, saving valuable data bits, while retaining the perceived audio quality. Conversely, during more complex passages, the system automatically turns its bit rate up, using more data bits to retain the same level of audio quality.

Using this method, the average audio quality of a file can be increased as the available data bits are used more flexibly to encode the sound data with increased overall accuracy.

When encoding an MP3 track or podcast with the VBR method, the encoding software usually allows you to decide on the overall quality of the resulting track that you desire, after which the system encoder uses the bits required to achieve this defined quality level. Higher quality levels will require more bits.

Compared to constant bit rates, variable bit rates produce smaller file sizes for a given audio quality. However, as the bit rates are variable, it’s difficult to predict the size off these files in advance.

Variable bit rates are harder and therefore slower to encode compared to constant bit rates, as the adaptive encoding process is more complex an processor intensive.

Being a more recent encoding method, some older MP3 players or computer software may not be compatible with variable bit rate encoded MP3 tracks or podcasts.

Constrained Variable Bit Rates

A Constrained Variable Bit Rate (CVBR) is a flavour of variable bit rate, where the maximum bit rate allowed, or the Average Bit Rate (ABR) are predefined.

For example, encoding an audio track with the bit rate set to be an average of 128kbps should produce a resultant audio file of higher perceived quality than the same track of encoded at 128kbps CBR, as the ABR file can use data bits it saved during the simpler passages to add extra data bits (above the 128kbps average) to the more complex passages to improve the overall audio quality.

Which to Use and When

Compatibility

Generally speaking, encoding an MP3 track or podcast using a constant bit rate will be better for the sake of compatibility compared to using a variable bit rate, as some older MP3 players don’t support variable bit rates.

By way of example, in their guidelines for broadcast media, the BBC recommends the use of constant bit rates for their all of their podcasts and downloadable audio files.

Quality

If compatibility isn’t a significant issue for you, then you will probably be better off using a form of variable bit rate of encoding to squeeze the best audio quality that you can out of the available bits.

Whether you choose to use a constrained variable bit rate, so that you can keep a handle on the size of file you’re likely to get, or go for a fully variable bit rate, is entirely up to you.

However, before fixing which method you’re going to use, it may be best to do a few test recordings using different bit rates and bit rate types, before deciding on which suits your purposes best.

In Summary

The Internet Monthly is a monthly podcast featuring 20 or so short Internet related articles, tips and tricks and a regular search engine of the month feature.

In this month’s podcast, you can find out about the next generation of Super Fast Broadband that’s due out soon, a whole set of new top level domain names, a revolutionary business search engine from the Financial Times and another from British physicist Stephen Wolfram.

There’s news about a free trial of a new PPC sponsored search advertising service, a copywriting quiz for anyone with a Web site that has something to sell, a free online collaborative whiteboard, how to get answers from politicians online and the latest on Internet TV in your living room.

This podcast is derived from a monthly newsletter published by Zen Internet and recorded and produced by Silicon Bay. The podcast is reproduced by kind permission of Zen Internet.

This Month’s Podcast

The Internet Monthly – April 2009:

Download audio file (podcast_apr09.mp3)

Or, download: podcast_apr09.mp3 [18’ 50”, 8.7MB]

This Month’s Articles

This month’s edition of The Internet Monthly podcast contains the following articles. A list of links associated with each article are included for reference:

1. ZEN INTERNET AWARD – Zen Internet voted best buy broadband by Which? magazine
   • uk.webhostdir.com/news/showNews.aspx?ID=31291 
2. TODAY IN HISTORY – Happy Birthday to Apple and Gmail on 1st April 
   • www.thehistorychannel.co.uk/site/this_day_in_history/this_day_April_1.php 
3. WHERE WERE YOU IN 1996? – Not doing much web surfing apparently 
   • slate.com/id/2212108
4. NO APRIL FOOL – The Web is now 20 years old
   • www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/technologynews/
5. MANY TIMES FASTER BROADBAND – Ericsson reveals new super fast broadband technology 
   • news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/0,1000000085,39628886,00.htm
6. DOMAIN NAMES EXPAND – Generic top level domains to be made available
   • blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=14051 
7. FOCUS BEFORE YOU SEARCH – Beta version of a configurable business search engine for the Financial Times
   • www.newssift.com
8. WHAT ARE THEY UP TO NOW? – Online British interview magazine
   • www.yoosk.com
9. PEOPLE FINDER – A people search engine expands its geographical coverage 
   • www.123people.com
10. JOBSWORTH – Criminals using cloned career histories from social networking Web sites
    • www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/yourbusiness/4963833/Criminals-target-websites-to-copy-CVs.html
11. PERSONAL FILES – What Google knows about you
    • www.criminaljusticeusa.com/blog/2009/25-surprising-things-that-google-knows-about-you/
12. CROSSING THE POND – Brit to run Google’s American advertising division
    • business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/
13. HOW I SUED GOOGLE AND WON – A final resort with a happy outcome
    • www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/why-i-sued-google-and-won_b_172403.html
14. NATURAL SEARCH – A search engine that actually understands your questions
    • www.cio-today.com/news/Search-Engine-Uses-Natural-Language/story.xhtml?story_id=021001XHDW3R&full_skip=1
    • www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1160667/Revolutionary-British-search-engine-important-Google.html
    • blog.wolfram.com/2009/03/05/wolframalpha-is-coming/
15. PPC WITHOUT THE PAY – The UK’s newest search engine
    • www.oparla.com
16. MARX AND PPC – Do the theories of Karl Marx predict the downfall of PPC?
    • www.imediaconnection.com/content/22136.asp
17. AVOID SPENDING IN A VOID – Are you wasting your internet marketing spend?
    • www.alterian.com/news__events/press_releases/2009/
    • www.zenwebsolutions.com/news/why-your-website-visitors-are-leaving.html
18. COPYISTS QUIZ – Test your copywriting skills
    • www.grokdotcom.com/2009/03/09/how-persuasive-is-your-online-copywriting-quiz/
19. ONLINE WHITEBOARD – Share your doodlings online with friends and colleagues
    • www.dabbleboard.com/tour
20. KANGAROO SKIPS FORWARD – Web TV from the BBC and ITV
    • www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/consult/open_consultations/canvas.html
    • www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/
    • blogs.telegraph.co.uk/ian_douglas/blog/
    • www.zen.co.uk/about/newsletter-archive.aspx?issue=94
21. CATCH-UP TV ONLINE – How to catch up with TV that you missed
    • www.ofcom.org.uk/media/features/demtv2
22. SEARCH ENGINE OF THE MONTH – A new business-centric search engine
    • biznar.com

This podcast is sponsored and reproduced by kind permission of Zen Internet Limited. The music on the podcast was provided courtesy of Will Tang.

Attaching speakers to your Hi-Fi system usually only requires a few cables. You wouldn’t think that getting these cables mixed up would present much of a problem would you, providing your music plays back OK and no smoke comes out of the system?

Well, under most circumstances you’d be right, with a simple channel mix up being the most likely probable outcome, but if you have a real knack for getting things back to front, then you could have your speakers wired out-of-phase, which while it won’t do any damage, certainly won’t help you to get the best out of your system.

These potential problems are easy to spot with a few simple tests and luckily the corresponding remedies are equally simple.

Left and Right Tests

In the grand scale of things, getting your left and right speakers mixed up is not a major problem. If your left and right speakers are mixed up, your music will still come out in wonderful stereo (providing of course that you’re listening to a stereo track) it’s just that what should be coming out of the left-hand speaker is actually coming out of the right-hand speaker and vice versa.

Record producers and mix engineers spend weeks mixing and producing an album and as part of the process they will decide where in the mix to place certain instruments. So if you have a favourite track that has an instrument panned (music speak for stereo positioning of sounds) to one side, wouldn’t you prefer to listen to it as the artist intended rather than topsy turvey?

You would? Good.

Then try the following two fairly self explanatory tests on your music system. Listening to the left speaker test, you should hear Winnie’s voice coming out of the left hand speaker (or headphone) only and vice versa for the right speaker test.

Left Speaker Test:

Download audio file (left.mp3)

Right Speaker Test:

Download audio file (right.mp3)

If things don’t go according to plan, then you have either got your speakers wires mixed up (or headphones on the wrong way round), or the audio cabling (shown right) from your playback device to the amplifier crossed over.

Normally audio signal cables (as opposed to speaker cables)  are colour coded with the red plug going to the red socket and white to white at each end of the cable.

You will need to check the wiring of your system, rewiring where necessary and then repeat the two tests to make sure that both channels are working and in the correct order.

The following diagram shows how to wire your speakers to your amplifier:

Balance Test

Now that you’re happy that you have your left and rights sorted out, the next thing to check is your speaker balance.

When you listen to the following test, place your head as centrally as you can between your two speakers; you should hear Winnie coming from the dead centre of your speakers. In this case you are hearing equal amounts of Winnie from both speakers.

Centre Balance Test:

Download audio file (centre.mp3)

If Winnie sounds to be coming either to the left or right of the centre position, you may need to check to see if your amplifier or system has a balance control. If it does, ensure that the balance control is in the centre position.

If after checking the balance control, things still sounds one sided, you may have a more fundamental problem with your system that requires investigation or professional attention. This could be as simple as a dirty connection or a dodgy interconnecting cable, or if things are worse it could be a more ingrained electronic or speaker problem.

Alternatively, if you can’t pin point the sound as definitely coming from the centre, you may have a phasing problem…

Phasing Test

A phasing problem with speakers is very simple to fix, but can significantly degrade your system’s sonic performance.

Trying to describe how out of phase speakers sound is a little difficult unless you’ve experienced it first hand. You’re likely to hear significantly less bass and instead of producing a strong centre image, the sound appears to stay within the speakers, making things sound rather disconnected.

Listen to the following and you should be able to hear the difference for yourself:

Speaker Phase Test:

Download audio file (out-of-phase.mp3)

If the above test sounds perfectly fine, but the previous centre channel test sounded really odd, then your speakers are out of phase.

Fixing the Problem

Thankfully, while the effect can be quite strange, the fix is really simple.

Pick a speaker, but not both, this must only be done on one speaker. Now swap the two wires on the back of the speaker around. Usually the speaker will have two connections; one black (the negative or – connector) and one red (positive or + connector).

That should  be it, job done. Now listen to the centre/balance test and phase test again to confirm that you have everything working hunky dory.

Sit Back and Relax

Now that you have your speakers wired up correctly with your lefts and rights where they should be and no strange out of phase effects, you can lie back, put your feet up and listen to my latest podcast in knowledge of a job well done.

You had no problems; excellent, so there’s no reason not to listen to my latest podcast either! 

It’s been exactly one year to the day since I re-launched my website as a BLOG and published my first blog post. So perhaps it’s an appropriate time to look back at what I’ve achieved on the blogging front in the past year, what I’ve learnt and what  plans I have for the blog .

When I launched my blog, I planned on writing a post  once a week. This didn’t seem to be a too onerous schedule and I managed to maintain it for the first few months, but of late my posting frequency has slipped a little. I now seem to average 3 posts a month.

With each of my posts, I try to aim for a post length of 1,000 words or so. Due to the technical nature of most of my posts, I don’t just hammer them out and click publish. I like to research the post, checking my facts and then spend a little time after writing to re-read and edit the post to make sure it all makes sense and flows correctly; it’s surprising how much time this takes, hence my slip in posting frequency.

Design Change

After the first few months of blogging, the first significant change that I made was to redesign the theme for my blog. The original theme was taken from my static website that was the predecessor of my blog. This theme was a 760 pixel wide  design, designed to work on older computer monitors that are only 800 pixels wide.

My new blog design/theme is based on the wider design format of 980 pixels that has become more prevalent in the industry, with bigger monitors being more commonplace.

Currently, approximately 2% of the visitors to my blog have 800 pixel wide screens or less, all the rest have 1024 pixels or wider, which render the new design without any problems.

Because the text on the new blog theme is left justified within the design, even monitors with a 800 pixel resolution will be able to display the main body of the text in a readable form. This provides a graceful and controlled degradation of performance for the few visitors with lower resolution monitors.

Updates and Tweaks

Over the year there have been a few updates to the WordPress system that I use to power the blog. These updates have been included on my site to make use of new features and improve security.

I added Gravatars to post comments so that commentators can leave a thumbnail image of themselves alongside their comments and recently enabled nested comments to make it easier to follow comment threads.

I have added various plugins to my WordPress system along the way to enhance its functionality and improve security. At the time of writing, I presently use 16 plugins.

While I wouldn’t claim to be an expert at WordPress, I’ve certainly learnt a lot about it and can usually force it to succumb to my will, with the theme for the site being my own design.

Statistics

Since the conversion of my old website to its present blog format, I have seen a steady growth in traffic to my site. This is obviously due to the fact that the website has had a lot of content added to it over the last 12 months, 42 posts/articles in total:

WordPress Statistics

• New Posts: 42
• Visitor Comments: 81 (17 of which are my replies)
• Spam Comments: 2,849

Spam

Unfortunately, with the steady growth in traffic to my site, there has also been a steady and corresponding growth in spam comments.

The following graph shows the spam comments that my blog has received in the last 6 months. Fortunately, all of this spam has been automatically trapped by the Askimet plugin built into the WordPress system:

Google Analytics

To monitor the traffic on my website, I use Google’s free analytics service, which provides an incredible array of in-depth statistics about the pages viewed on my site and the visitors that visit.

I am now regularly receiving over 2,000 visitors each month with over 3,000 pages being viewed. Last month’s visitor and page view statistics are:

• Visits: 2,515
• Pages Viewed: 3,258

Over the past year I’ve had nearly 15,000 visits to my site with over 20,000 page views. The graphs below clearly show a steady rise in visits and page views to my blog over the past 12 months:

The huge spike in traffic on 09 September of last year corresponds to 300 visits in a single day being driven to my website from the social bookmaking site StumbleUpon, all of which were to the same post on my blog: Embedding Album Art in MP3 Files.

Traffic Sources:

The majority of my website’s traffic (76%) was brought in from search engines, with Google accounting for 97% of this search traffic!

Countries of Visitors:

My blog has attracted visitors from all over the globe, from 134 countries/territories in total.

However, the United States and the United Kingdom account for 60% of the traffic, with 37% of visitors coming from the US and 23% from the UK.

RSS FeedBurner Statistics

The RSS feed on my blog is provided through Google’s FeedBurner service. While this may initially seem like an extra unnecessary layer of complication compared to just offering the basic RSS feed, FeedBurner actually records a lot of useful statistics about subscribers to my blog, as well as also allowing me to offer subscription to my blog via e-mail.

I currently have 25 subscribers, 13 of which subscribe by e-mail:

What Next?

The most popular article on my blog by far is Embedding Album Art in MP3 Files, receiving 50% of the blog’s entire traffic.

The top 5 posts on my blog are:

1. Embedding Album Art in MP3 Files (10,542 views)
2. Song Capacity Calculator for MP3 Players (1,337 views)
3. What is Joint Stereo? (1,046 views)
4. Choosing Bit Rates for Podcasts (891 views)
5. What are ID3 Tags in MP3 Files? (826 views)

The recurring theme amongst all of my top posts is MP3 files and podcasting.

Looking at the blog’s categories, the one that I seem to have written the most for is the podcasting category. I think this points to the general direction that I would like to take the blog over the coming year.

I’ve always been interested in audio production and recording since a young age, so I guess this also reflects my passion. Although since my accident, it has taken a while for me to find my way back into this field and to find a way to actively contribute as opposed to just sitting on the sidelines watching (or listening as the case may be).

Technological advances have also helped me in this respect. MP3 players and iPods are now common place, which in turn has given rise to the success of the podcast format.

Recording audio is thankfully no longer constrained to the analogue domain and multi-track tape machines, with virtually any home PC now being capable of running advanced music production software (Digital Audio Workstations).

With even modest home equipment, it’s possible to produce professional sounding results with a little effort and attention to detail. This is where I find the challenge and the enjoyment and can hopefully share some of my experiences with others in future posts on this blog.

If you’ve stayed along for the ride so far, thanks very much for your support. Hopefully there’ll be more of the same to follow.