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Conference Podcasting
Over the last year, BIGWIG has been experimenting with conference podcasting. We were able to record several sessions at ALA Annual and the keynotes at LITA Forum. However, we've encountered some problems with recordings sessions. We purchase 2 simple audio recorders for Annual last year but the quality of the recordings produced with these was subpar. We also attempted recordings using laptops and snowball microphones of group members. This resulted in slightly higher quality recordings. At LITA Forum in the fall of 2007 we were able to plug a laptop directly into the sound system in order to make recordings. This seems to have resulted in the best quality of session recordings.
Given this, we are want discuss with the group our next steps. Would it be feasible to use a small inexpensive laptop ePC or CloudBook to make recordings of sessions using Audacity? Has anyone out there done this?
What kinds of cords do we think we need to connect to sound systems?
Would podcasters be willing to bring and use their own laptops to record sessions?
Get away from Audacity! Audacity is a pain in the butt with settings that are limited when dealing solely in MP3. If you record as WAV then re-encode later into MP3 you'll get better quality. That is what LISTen does but due to Drupal having some issues about upload limits we have to degrade file quality to get it below eight megabytes. What will you need to connect to a sound system? That depends upon the sound system. Will you need to do impedance matching? Will you need to figure out how to match up an XLR connector to what is usually an 1/8'' microphone plug on a laptop or UMPC? For as much as the production team has done live events filming and likewise we have a few bags of cables and adaptors that get brought along. I would more worry first about what you are tapping into than what sort of cables to get. If I could be there, I would. The only way I could get in would be with media accreditation. Unfortunately the ALA media folks have ignored me for many moons. We were planning at one time having me do reports from the floor but we could not justify it financially. If you have questions on this, please drop the production team a note. Our audio engineer has done sound at live events for somewhere around thirty years. He might have good advice for you perhaps. Considering that the audio profile you are working with at sessions is akin to worship services with even less music, our engineer has first-hand experience with such challenges. Stephen Michael Kellat, MSLS Writer/Presenter, LISTen: The LISNews.org Podcast http://lisnews.org/podcast
Cali Lewis from GeekBriefTV spoke at the Texas Library Association annual conference about podcasting. She was very friendly and offered to answer questions via email as we thought of them later. She might be someone to ask about practical issues.
What if we had camtasia and could create entire webcast sessions with audio/slide syncs?
There are lots of ways to do this. The software that was used at code4lib to capture slides this year was pretty nifty. I'll see if I can find a link to it. The main issues involve getting good recordings of the audio. People are used to giving their presentations to the conference. Once we had presentations and audio we could stitch them together somehow. There are a number of different solutions.