I mentioned last week that I had been thinking about getting a new set of headphones for my birthday, but I managed to fix the cord on my old headphones in a spectacular sort of way, and came to the conclusion that I only have one head, and didn’t need two sets of headphones.

I have a similar sort of story from a few days ago…

The astute among you will notice that I’ve been at least a little interested in getting my act together to do a podcast for a while. I’ve done radio before, I’ve done some sound engineering, and it would be cool to bring these experiences together with my internet/blogging/reading fascination. I think it would let me interact with a larger/different audience, and it just seems like fun. I’ve also avoided doing a podcast for a long time because I’ve always felt that my poor old computer was too overburdened and the cheapish USB mics that been able to try out all sucked to my ear1 I’d and a litany of other excuses.

Anyway, I thought I’d solved my problems with the discovery of this a pretty nifty digital audio recorder, with good mics, which makes up for what it lacks in ruggedness with versatility, and economy. I figured that if I didn’t really need to do anything other than upload the file with my computer it could handle it.

I should interject that at the moment, I’m most interested in doing a podcast in the school of cory doctorow, which is “turn on a mic, and record for 20 to 40 minutes and then post it on the internet.” Anyway, I thought a portable recorder would be the ideal situation for this sort of problem…

On a whim I hooked up the USB mic--that I had tried and failed to use for years--to the computer and…. Hot damn. It worked. Really well. This my friends, is why accepting for wool, books and tea, I don’t really get much new stuff. I always manage to make the old stuff work. Even if I do like toys.

So nix the portable option, I’ll--when I have time--and it’ll be a few weeks, I’ll probably begin putting together a podcast… Nothing formal, and at the moment it’s a second string project, but it’s on my mind, maybe it could be on yours as well.

  1. In high school I was taught how to do sound engineering stuff at the local folk club, and I did it for a couple of years, and I haven’t really gotten back into it. But I do think in the end, it’s a bad idea to teach the people in front of the microphone what happens on the other side of the screen, because in most cases people who are talking or making music don’t know enough to notice a lot of really minor effects of the technology. And learning about these things just leads to neurotic behavior. For instance, I often think that fiddles sound wrong in concerts/dances and it makes my skin crawl. ↩︎