It’s been a long time since I regularly put out the Shire Network News podcast. That was an enormous labour of love involving a huge amount of preparation, meticulous recording and then a ton of post processing. The results were spectacular but the work was too great.
Last week friends of Israellycool (including guest poster Hillel Fuld) launched their new app ZCast. This allows anyone to pick up their iPhone, add in a few other contributors and broadcast to the world. They’ve had a ton of press, here’s just one in TechCrunch.
Podcasting out sound from the iPhone is OK but I’m interested in a more professional setup so I was most excited to see that the app has a companion web version that works on Android phones and pretty much all laptops.
That led me to realise I could rig together a fully professional sound system and feed that into the browser version of ZCast. I put together this screencast to explain. This is just the earliest experimentation. I’m waiting for ZCast to add a recording and re-broadcast feature (it’s coming soon) and then I’ll be all set to get back into podcasting again.
I’m using the following apps: Audio Hijack and Loopback from Rogue Amoeba. In addition I’m looking for a good program to fire off sounds and jingles during a show. I’m testing Soundboard from Ambrosia Software but haven’t bought that one yet. These two apps cost a $125 dollars but taken together with the $100 Blue Yeti microphone, you’ve got a pretty amazing recording studio equipped with audio gear that used to costs thousands of dollars.
I put the screencast together with Camtasia 2 which I’ve been using for a while for many of the videos I’ve put on Israellycool.
Would love to hear feedback: I’m sure I’ve got a lot of tweaking to do: this is a very different style of dynamic recording to the heavily post-processed show I used to compile back in the Shire Network News days. For those who weren’t with me back then, here’s a rare peek into the archives with a show from July 2008.
Aussie Dave adds: I discontinued my Israellycool podcast over 8 years ago, primarily because of the production effort involved. Now with ZCast, I am also considering doing something. Stay tuned!
