Selfcasting--What it is and How to do it.

Selfcasting (a term I believe that I have coined in this context) refers to using your iPod or mp3 player to collect and listen you shows you create or collect for yourself only. You are not sharing them although i suppose that if you wanted to you could although you would have to comply with copyright restrictions.

Don’t know what podcasting is?

Go here

Wikipedia on Podcasting

and then come back.

The ways to create these show are myriad but here are some of the ways I use to enhance my iPod experience.

First of all, I do not use the aggregator system called podcasting as I do not find it useful and it can create problems.

The aggregator system of collecting mp3 feeds from various weblogs is creating a buzz in the news lately but I believe that it suffers from the same problems that email lists or listserves (automatic email list sending a newsletter or discussion) suffered from in the early days of the internet. The problem was oversubscription and our email boxes filled up with more mail than we could read.

This problem will be repeated with podcasting but people will wise up much faster. Remember in the early days there were no weblogs and to keep up on a topic you had to use a listserve or haunt a bulletin board.

So I just go and get the shows I want manually thereby controlling what I receive.
Subscribing to a podcast feed can fill up your computer very fast and collect more shows than you could ever listen to and eventually more shows than your computer can hold. And believe me.....sound files can fill up you computer fast. Wait till videoblogger becomes popular. Large files.....very large files, be afraid but not too afraid, memory is getting cheaper and you can always get an external hard drive.

I currently use a 120gigabyte Iomega box.

What drove me to Selfcast?

In a word....Lack of Content (well three words)

So here is how I use Selfcasting.

The four major ways:

1. collect the mp3 files manually
2. create the sound files yourself using and audio recorder program directly onto your computer
3. use a text to speech converter and create your own sound files from writings that you are interested in
4. use your own voice to create sound files that you want to listen to.

To get the mp3 files manuall you go to the sites you are interested in and click on the mp3 logo and listen, see if you like it when it finished downloading you can save it as a mp3 file. and then drop it into you player.

If for some stupid reason they do not have an mp3 file available, click on the xml or rss feed and then look at the odd page of code and find the file that ends in .mp3 (it should be near the top) copy and paste into another window and voila! there it is.

Adam Curry is the prince of podcasting and maintains a site where you can view the last 100 pod casts and get some ideas about what podcasting is like currently.

in a word.... a vast wasteland

well... there is some interesting stuff in the new medium, I will grant you.

for example this site has terrific quality stuff, interviews from a future oriented radio show.

Massive Change Interview Site

i also grab a political site here

Ripnread political site has good stuff and short podcast and available as mp3

radio has joined with a good site here

On the Media's radio broadcast site

There are new podcast review sites springing up everyday to make sense of the madness.

Here are some......

PodcastAlley

Podcast Reviews

Podcasting News


I like to listen to This American Life, a show out of WBEZ in Chicago and syndicated on public radio.


However it is on at times I cannot listen to it so I timeshift it like a Tivo machine using some cheap utilities, my mac iBook and an internet connection

The give away the Real Audio stream for free but charge for grabbing the mp3 of the show. Since I don’t want to pay 13$ per show. And they have a delicious archive of the past 10 years. I obtained Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack. For $16 you can record anything from any program that processes sound. This program is for Mac OS X only but there are many free utilities for Windows that can record sound


It records it as an AIFF file which you can drop into iTunes directly into your iPod or mp3 player. Just make sure that you set the conversion on importing to mp3, that should be the default, but you never know.

I set the record bit rate in Audio Hijack to 16mhz instead of auto thereby obtaining good quality at the lowest file size (an hour show is about 200Mb)

Try it with auto, the hour show comes out to be about 400Mb, but I did not want to fill up my hard disk unnecessarily as I wanted the option to record multiple shows using there very handy timer function.

more in a moment.......

Text to Speech

You can read it yourself but that is….very slow and you just read it so why would you want to listen to it? Although you may want to hear the melifluous tones of your own voice.

Ultra Hal text to speech reader is available from Zabaware creates wav files in the background, that is for Windows machines and it is free.


they also have some other neat utilities and they are available here

Macs have a text to speech reader available in System preferences under the apple.

Then you just have to Hijack the sound that the reader is reading.

I downloaded a free program for the mac called, Audio Recorder which creates mp3 files, which are of good quality and small size.

Site one for Audio Recorder

or

Site two for Audio recorder

You can use it to record speech and music through your mic.

When you record a show of text to speech the speakers must produce the sounds for the mic to hear so extraneous sounds from the mike will be recorded. There also is no timer to stop it.

I have not figured out how to use Audio Hijack yet for this function which would be nice because it could do it in the background

anyone know? let me know by writing me at
hifromdavid -a - t- softhome then add a net after a dot
thanks

anyway..... i will put in hot links later

this is a work in progress

enjoy

ok....i figured out how to record a file that is being read to you by the mac apple speech engine.

it is a little complicated and you just might want to use you speakers talking into your mic with Audio Recorder, i love that free program

you need soundflower and a recording program, i am using Amadeus.

but you can also use Audio Recorder.

Soundflower is a MacOS X (10.2 and later) system extension that allows applications to pass audio to other applications. Soundflower is easy to use, it simply presents itself as an audio device, allowing any audio application to send and receive audio with no other support needed. Soundflower is free and open-source.

Soundflower is here and is free and open source

and Amadeus is here and costs 30$

or use the free audio recorder from above

and here is how to record a show of text you have in computer type and want to hear read to you using apple speech, soundflower and amadeus

(the apple speech will read pdf files too.)

first go to apple speech preferences located in system preferences

choose a voice under default voice that you can tolerate.

agnes or victoria are ok
there is some clipping on the voices.

then click on spoken user interface

and check selected text when key is pressed

then choose the key you use to activate the speech by clicking SET KEY

choose a key you dont use very often, i choose F7 click OK

now you need to tell the sound to go through soundflower and into amadeus

go back to system preferences click on SOUND

choose soundflower 2ch for input and output

note that this will cut off your speakers so you cannot monitor the sound, there is a program called soundflowerbed which supposedly will fix this but i can't figure it out yet.

now open your recording program

in mine, amadeus

when i click the recording tab

i can adjust the input by clicking the input tab

driver type should be CORE AUDIO
driver should be SOUNDFLOWER 2CH
source should be SOUNDFLOWER 2CH

in amadeus when you click OK the recording will start

then go to your document

highlight the part of the document you want read
click F7 or what key you choose to start the reading program
you should see levels on the recording program

in amadeus you can set a timer to shut it off but you will need to know how fast the program reads.

using the default settings the victoria voice reads about 100 words per min which is about 1 megabyte


here is a sample of what the sound is like.

i made this audio link using

audioblogger with automatically posts 5 minute audio files to a web page on blogger from any phone any where.

you designate one blog to receive the audio post but then i found out that you can copy and paste the links anywhere.

so i made a weblog of pure audio and cut and paste those links to other sites that i want sound on

want to know more go here and visit Audioblogger