For an Electronic Publishing Overview course required for Emerson College’s Master’s in Publishing and Writing degree, students were required to record their own episode of a podcast for a fictional show of their own creation. My process to the final product was…tumultuous. Here’s what happened and why I think I’ll stick to the written word as opposed to audio.
The Road to ‘Dude Dish’
I’d be lying if I said the podcast I ended up producing had been my idea all along. Although I’m pleased with the final product and believe it would have an audience and the potential for monetization, I originally wanted to make a podcast about standup and attempted to do so. Let me take you on that journey first before I get into the process which ended up unfurling and becoming ‘Dude Dish.’
My cousin hosts his own podcast entitled ‘Whiskey Cinema’ where he and his co-host drink booze and talk about flicks that are associated with a particular demographic. But Danny is also a standup comedian (although goes by Dano in the standup game, but I’m allowed to call him Danny since I’ve known him my whole life and I think I could take him in a fist-fight). Therefore, I asked him if he’d be willing to talk about standup in Salt Lake City (his current residence) versus the California Bay area’s comedy scene where he cut his teeth.
After reading up on the workings of Zencastr, I decided it’d be the best way to record a decent quality of audio remotely. I did some test recordings, uploaded intro and outro music I wanted to use, and even made some practice segments of my own which I figured I could splice in to the final product later as background information on the subjects we were discussing.
I sent Danny the Zencastr link and we were ready to roll — except, we were having issues hearing each other via Zencastr’s website. No problem, I figured, since Zencastr was recording audio via our individual computers. We’d just mute our computers and have our conversation over telephone in order to hear each other, letting Zencastr record our separate tracks.
After a 42-minute conversation that spanned not only the process Danny went through progressing his career in two different locations but the changing trends in comedy and a unique look at the surprisingly LBGTQ+ accepting comedy community in Salt Lake, I listened back on Zencastr and was pleased with the audio quality of the two separate tracks. Feeling cocky and perhaps a bit too self-congratulatory, I texted Danny, “All good, I’ll send you a final mix when I finish.” Of course, this is when everything went wrong.
Using Zencastr’s auto post-production feature, I waited patiently for the finished product to export. When it did, I opened it on my computer and was alarmed to see it was…15 minutes long. The audio had not only synced improperly, it was impossible to discern what was being said as Danny and I animatedly spoke over one another before my audio abruptly cut off and Danny continued to respond to no one until he was cut off mid-sentence.
After visiting Zencastr’s help page, I was able to deduce the asynchronous quality of the recording was a result of audio drift. No problem, I decided, I just have to get the individual audio tracks and I’ll mix it myself. Inconvenient but not the end of the world. Instead of applying Zencastr’s auto post-production, I downloaded the individual tracks. This is when I knew something had gone terribly, terribly wrong — each individual audio file was only 10 and 15 minutes, respectively.
Needless to say, I wasn’t feeling as cocky anymore and I decided to message Zencastr. At first, the help desk sent me back a link to their audio drift write-up. Annoyed, I responded with this:
This is when Lori informed me (using different vernacular) that I was screwed.
Discouraged but acutely aware I still needed to record some type of podcast, I returned to the proverbial drawing board. The result was a fake podcast my roommates and I dubbed ‘Dude Dish.’ Since this post is already overwhelmingly long, you’ll have to find out about it in a soon-to-come post. Check back.