Speaker 1: Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and I love all things tech. And today's episode is
Speaker 1: a little different from our typical episodes. And that's partly
Speaker 1: because as I'm recording this, I'm about to go on
Speaker 1: vacation and I wanted to make sure I had a
Speaker 1: new episode for you guys. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: I honestly just didn't have the time to do my
Speaker 1: full research dive and writing course for an episode of
Speaker 1: tech Stuff. So instead I thought we'd do a peek
Speaker 1: behind the curtain episode and I could talk about about
Speaker 1: how are podcasting has changed since the time of quarantine,
Speaker 1: like the idea of the stay at home stuff and
Speaker 1: how we at I Heart and the former stuff media
Speaker 1: crowd have had to pivot in order to continue to
Speaker 1: make podcasts and what that actually means and and uh,
Speaker 1: I think it's a pretty great story, just one example
Speaker 1: of how people all over the world are adapting in
Speaker 1: this time of coronavirus. And I don't mean to suggest
Speaker 1: that the way we adapted is in some way, you know,
Speaker 1: extraordinary compared to others, but rather just kind of give
Speaker 1: an insight into how things have changed for us. But
Speaker 1: to do that, you know, it wouldn't be a Tech
Speaker 1: Stuff episode if I didn't dive into history. And those
Speaker 1: of you who have listened to Tech Stuff for a
Speaker 1: long time, some of this might be familiar to you.
Speaker 1: I've covered it in some previous episodes of tech Stuff,
Speaker 1: but that was years ago, and I want to talk
Speaker 1: about how the show got started and what it was
Speaker 1: like recording at the beginning, and then eat into its evolution,
Speaker 1: into what it was like just before the coronavirus crisis happened,
Speaker 1: and what it's been like since. That has been part
Speaker 1: of our lives. So to begin, we go back to
Speaker 1: two thousand eight. Now that year, Uh, that was when
Speaker 1: I was working for How Stuff Works dot com. Technically
Speaker 1: I've been in the same job since two thousand seven,
Speaker 1: but the companies have changed. It's a weird kind of situation.
Speaker 1: It's like sitting in a car seat and the car
Speaker 1: around you keeps changing, but you've never gotten out of
Speaker 1: the chair. Well, back in those days when we were
Speaker 1: launching podcasts, the idea originally was that we were going
Speaker 1: to have a brand extension for how Stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: And but by that I mean every episode was supposed
Speaker 1: to tie back to an article on how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com. If any of you listen to stuff you
Speaker 1: should know, and you've been listening for a long time,
Speaker 1: you know that. That's how they built their episodes. They said,
Speaker 1: you know, you can read more at how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com at how such and such works. Well. Tech
Speaker 1: stuff was the same way. It was challenging because I
Speaker 1: don't know if you guys know this, but technology changes
Speaker 1: pretty darned fast. So we would have topics on the
Speaker 1: website that we're about tech, but they would get out
Speaker 1: of date pretty quickly. I mean, I remember doing a
Speaker 1: podcast about video gaming PCs, and at that time I
Speaker 1: had never even built a PC. I had worked with
Speaker 1: them quite a bit, but I hadn't built one, and
Speaker 1: I had not fully appreciated just how out of date
Speaker 1: some of the references were. But trust me, my listeners,
Speaker 1: let me know. Since then, I have gotten a little
Speaker 1: more education on the subject. But we would try and
Speaker 1: take these articles and then flesh out a podcast around them.
Speaker 1: We didn't want to just repeat the article. We wanted
Speaker 1: to kind of be supplemental to the article and direct
Speaker 1: people back to the website. Now, what we learned in
Speaker 1: those early days at first was that one the the
Speaker 1: limit we had put on ourselves, which I think originally
Speaker 1: was ten minute limit, was way too short. And you
Speaker 1: guys know me, I can barely introduce myself in less
Speaker 1: than seven minutes, which doesn't give you a whole lot
Speaker 1: of time to cover the actual topic at hand. So
Speaker 1: we learned quickly to expand that. Originally I think we
Speaker 1: pushed it to twenty minutes, and then thirty minutes. Then
Speaker 1: eventually we said this just needs to be as long
Speaker 1: as it needs to be, and text stuff gradually averaged
Speaker 1: out to around forty five to forty seven minutes per episode,
Speaker 1: sometimes going much longer, sometimes a little shorter, but that's
Speaker 1: about where we ended up. Well. We also didn't monetize
Speaker 1: our shows at that time. There was really no way
Speaker 1: to monetize them. Advertising on podcasts had not yet really
Speaker 1: become a big thing, didn't have any sponsors or anything
Speaker 1: like that, so really we were just trying to convince
Speaker 1: people to come over to the website and read the articles.
Speaker 1: But as I'm sure all of you have experienced, in
Speaker 1: one way or another. That's a big request to get
Speaker 1: somebody to stop doing what they're doing on one platform
Speaker 1: or device and go to a different platform or device
Speaker 1: to check something else out. Because back when we started
Speaker 1: doing podcasts, it was before you really used smartphones as
Speaker 1: your main method of listening to podcasts or you know,
Speaker 1: smart speakers or anything like that. You typically we're downloading
Speaker 1: podcasts to a computer and then transferring those to an
Speaker 1: MP three player. Yeah, this is back in the ancient
Speaker 1: days of two thousand eight. And with that it meant
Speaker 1: that by the time you were listening to it, you
Speaker 1: were listening typically unlike an iPod, and there was no
Speaker 1: way to navigate to a web page on the old iPods.
Speaker 1: This was really before you started seeing that kind of
Speaker 1: support built out on the iPhone. The iPhone had just
Speaker 1: come out the year before. As for the recording process,
Speaker 1: I can tell you what that was like, because it was.
Speaker 1: It was pretty jang ki in those early days. We
Speaker 1: had an office space in an area of Atlanta called Buckhead,
Speaker 1: which is a kind of a i'd say an upper
Speaker 1: class area of Atlanta, a lot of expensive stores and stuff.
Speaker 1: I can't stand Buckhead personally. That's just my own personal opinion,
Speaker 1: not a big fan of that part of town. Anyway,
Speaker 1: we had an office there and in that office actually
Speaker 1: it was it was an entire floor of an office building.
Speaker 1: But in that office space we had one medium sized
Speaker 1: room kind of in the middle of our office space
Speaker 1: that was closed off. It actually you know, had floor
Speaker 1: to ceiling walls and doors and everything, and it was
Speaker 1: an oddly shaped room. It wasn't like a perfect rectangle.
Speaker 1: It was had weird angles to it, and we usually
Speaker 1: used it to shoot video and stuff in there, although
Speaker 1: we didn't do very much of that. This was before
Speaker 1: how Stuff Works was producing very many videos. We were
Speaker 1: mostly focusing on writing articles for the site, but occasionally
Speaker 1: we would shoot stuff in that space. Well, that's where
Speaker 1: they decided to make our little recording studio. The room
Speaker 1: had this odd alcove in one corner where it was
Speaker 1: like a closet, but there was no door to it,
Speaker 1: so it's just an alcove and we were using it
Speaker 1: for storage, and that's what we decided to turn into
Speaker 1: an audio podcast recording studio. Not ideal, but we fit
Speaker 1: a table in there, a small table because there wasn't
Speaker 1: a whole lot of space. A couple of chairs, a
Speaker 1: couple of microphones, a couple of headphones, and then we
Speaker 1: hung a sound dampening curtain across the entrance of that
Speaker 1: alcove to shut it off from the rest of the room,
Speaker 1: and on the other side of the curtain, in the
Speaker 1: actual rooms space, we had a production computer, a Mac computer,
Speaker 1: where a producer would sit as we would record and
Speaker 1: monitor the recording to make sure that nothing was going wrong.
Speaker 1: And so back then, my co host and I, Chris
Speaker 1: Pallette and I would sit down and chat into the
Speaker 1: microphones and it would get recorded to this production computer.
Speaker 1: And back in the day are our producer most frequently
Speaker 1: was Tyler who is now an executive producer over with
Speaker 1: I Heart. Occasionally we would get Matt Frederick, who you
Speaker 1: might know from stuff they don't want you to know, uh,
Speaker 1: And once in a blue moon, Jerry would sit in,
Speaker 1: but that's only if she really had no other options,
Speaker 1: because she was very important back then more so even now,
Speaker 1: and I didn't have a whole lot of extra time
Speaker 1: in her schedule. But occasionally she would fill in if
Speaker 1: if no one else was available, And so that's how
Speaker 1: we would record. We would sit down and do that
Speaker 1: and there were very few edits. Usually we would include
Speaker 1: our goofs and mistakes and we would just correct ourselves
Speaker 1: within the context of the actual episode. Um, we didn't
Speaker 1: do the beeps thing that some of us have since
Speaker 1: started to do, where we indicate it within the audio form,
Speaker 1: we make a beep noise because you can actually see
Speaker 1: it in the wave form. Uh, you see the the
Speaker 1: shape of the wave form, and says, oh, well, that's
Speaker 1: clearly where something's messed up and you can go and
Speaker 1: fix it. We just kept on going. So if you
Speaker 1: listen to those early tech stuffs, you will hear that
Speaker 1: we were using, I believe sure microphones, which we have
Speaker 1: stuck with for the most part, but that that studio
Speaker 1: space wasn't meant to be a studio space. There was
Speaker 1: hardly any baffling, baffling being sort of sound absorbing foam
Speaker 1: to help cut down on things like echo and and
Speaker 1: reverb and stuff. Uh, and it just was what we had.
Speaker 1: Eventually we had to move into a smaller office space
Speaker 1: within the same building. We no longer had the full floor.
Speaker 1: We had about maybe a third of a floor lower
Speaker 1: down in the building, and that really caused pain in
Speaker 1: our podcasts. We were still doing podcasting, and occasionally we're
Speaker 1: even monetizing them at this point. But now we had
Speaker 1: a different recording setup. Instead of being in an isolated
Speaker 1: room in the center of an office space, we had
Speaker 1: an actual office. It wasn't designed to be a studio
Speaker 1: at all. It was designed to be the office of
Speaker 1: somebody fairly important because it was a corner office with
Speaker 1: windows on two wall. Now, I'm sure any of you
Speaker 1: out there who have had any experience with sound recording
Speaker 1: no that it is not ideal to record in a
Speaker 1: room that shares a window to the outside world. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of noise that can come in. We were
Speaker 1: located just off of one of the many Peach Tree
Speaker 1: streets in Atlanta, but in this case, it's the Peach
Speaker 1: Tree Street, and you could often hear traffic noises and
Speaker 1: occasionally a whistle as a local character known as Baton
Speaker 1: Bob would march up and down the street whistling on
Speaker 1: a whistle and waving at people. So, yeah, if you want,
Speaker 1: if you want to smile, just search Baton Bob Atlanta
Speaker 1: and you'll get to see the the ambassador of smiles
Speaker 1: that I'm talking about. Not ideal, but that's what we
Speaker 1: had to work with then, so we would record again
Speaker 1: using sure microphones, using headphones, so decent hardware. We did
Speaker 1: eventually end up covering all the windows with materials like
Speaker 1: like foam, absorbing foam, baffling foam, which probably meant that
Speaker 1: from the outside we looked like there was some sort
Speaker 1: of highly disturbed individual who was occupying that particular office
Speaker 1: space because the windows were blacked out from that that
Speaker 1: space on both sides, and that helped cut down a
Speaker 1: little bit on noise. But even to this day, if
Speaker 1: you listen back to some of the podcasts that were
Speaker 1: recorded during that era, you might occasionally hear traffic noises.
Speaker 1: You might even hear a siren, although most of us
Speaker 1: would pause our recording whenever an emergency response vehicle was
Speaker 1: going down Peachtree Street, which happened at least three or
Speaker 1: four times per recording session, so that again was not ideal.
Speaker 1: But at the time we were not a podcasting company either.
Speaker 1: Podcasting was becoming more important and it was starting to
Speaker 1: generate more opportunities, both for the company as a whole
Speaker 1: and for some of the hosts in particular, and that
Speaker 1: was great, but at that point our focus was still
Speaker 1: on the website. At that stage, we were working with
Speaker 1: Discovery Communications that was our parent company at the time,
Speaker 1: and so things were different, like we were mostly working
Speaker 1: on to make sure that we were in alignment with
Speaker 1: our parent company, and that also explains why if you
Speaker 1: go back and look at those episodes, even across all
Speaker 1: the stuff channels, you'll start to see things like uh
Speaker 1: topics that maybe we wouldn't have chosen on our own,
Speaker 1: but they were in alignment with what the parent company wanted.
Speaker 1: The easiest example I can give of that is the
Speaker 1: Shark Week themed episodes. It was easier for maybe the
Speaker 1: History show to really focus on Shark Week or even
Speaker 1: stuff you should know, but for tech stuff, Shark Week
Speaker 1: proved to be a bit of a challenge figuring out
Speaker 1: how to talk about technology with sharks beyond things like
Speaker 1: it's a cage and it protects you from being bitten.
Speaker 1: That got that got to be pretty complicated. I think
Speaker 1: on our first attempt we ended up talking about Bruce,
Speaker 1: which was the nickname for the mechanical shark that was
Speaker 1: used during the filming of Jaws. That was the way
Speaker 1: we got around it. So that for a long time
Speaker 1: was how we recorded episodes. It was either in that
Speaker 1: one alcove or it was in a corner office where
Speaker 1: we were doing our best to try and isolate all
Speaker 1: the outside noise. But things would change dramatically when we
Speaker 1: ended up relocating from Buckhead to a different part of
Speaker 1: Atlanta and neighborhood called the Old Fourth Ward, and we
Speaker 1: ended up in a a space in the brand new
Speaker 1: Ponce City Market. I'll explain more about that in a second,
Speaker 1: but first let's take a quick break. So we ended
Speaker 1: up moving across town. For one thing, we got sold off.
Speaker 1: Discovery Communications sold how Stuff Works dot Com to a
Speaker 1: company called Blue Cora uh and then in turn, Blue
Speaker 1: Cora spun off uh info Seek along with how stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot Com, and we became part of a company
Speaker 1: that eventually became known as System One. And that's about
Speaker 1: the same time that we were relocating over to Old
Speaker 1: Fourth Ward into the Pont City Market space. When we
Speaker 1: did that, it was super cool, but it was also
Speaker 1: incredibly challenging. And it was challenging because we had to
Speaker 1: set up brand new studio space in this office and
Speaker 1: at the time, Pont City Market was still being built out,
Speaker 1: so our office space was complete, but there were entire
Speaker 1: floors of Pont City Market that we're being converted over,
Speaker 1: and to understand what Pont City Market is and and
Speaker 1: the enormity of that challenge takes a little more history.
Speaker 1: Pont City Market started off as sort of a store
Speaker 1: and distribution center for Sears in Atlanta. It was located
Speaker 1: right next to railroad tracks. In fact, the tracks are
Speaker 1: still there, they're no longer active tracks. And there was
Speaker 1: even a section of track that split off from the
Speaker 1: main track and became a little section just in front
Speaker 1: of Pont City Market, so that a train car loaded
Speaker 1: down with stuff for Sears could detach, move down this
Speaker 1: section of track, be unloaded, and then moved back to
Speaker 1: join up with a train. So it's a really important
Speaker 1: building and it's enormous. It's a couple of million square
Speaker 1: feet of space, as I recall, and there's like nine
Speaker 1: floors of it. It's huge. But Sears left that building
Speaker 1: unoccupied for a long time. The Atlanta City government had
Speaker 1: a small amount of space something like ten of the building,
Speaker 1: but it remained vacant, and then eventually it was bought
Speaker 1: by a development company that decided to turn it into
Speaker 1: office and retail and loft space. So if you want
Speaker 1: an extremely expensive loft in Atlanta, you could get one
Speaker 1: at Pond City Markets, outside my price range, to be honest,
Speaker 1: but that's where our office moved to. We built out
Speaker 1: two studios originally, and we eventually named them Bowie after
Speaker 1: David Bowie and Eno, so they're named after musicians. We
Speaker 1: would later add two more studios. Originally they were both
Speaker 1: video studio was one was a video studio for sets
Speaker 1: and one was a video studio for backdrops like a
Speaker 1: white psych or a green screen. Uh, those became prints
Speaker 1: and buyork. And so if you've ever watched any of
Speaker 1: the How Stuff Works videos where there was like a
Speaker 1: little kind of study sort of look to it, like
Speaker 1: like you're sitting in a study, that was that was
Speaker 1: in one of those studios. And all the old forward
Speaker 1: thinking videos where I was in front of like a
Speaker 1: white background, at least the later ones, those were shot
Speaker 1: in the other studio, but we converted those into audio
Speaker 1: studios eventually. Because Stuff Media, the podcasting arm, split off
Speaker 1: from how stuff works dot com. How stuff works dot
Speaker 1: Com remained with System one and the Stuff Media group
Speaker 1: we split off, we stayed in the same office space.
Speaker 1: In fact, we cohabitated that office space for a while
Speaker 1: with the how Stuff Works people. They eventually moved out
Speaker 1: and got a different space, but Stuff Media remained there
Speaker 1: and we ended up getting what are called whisper rooms
Speaker 1: for those audio podcast rooms. Now these are like recording
Speaker 1: booths um and so it's a recording booth sitting inside
Speaker 1: a larger room. And on the outside of the whisper rooms,
Speaker 1: we've set up desks where we have the production computers.
Speaker 1: Those are Mac computers where we record to those those
Speaker 1: computer systems. Inside the whispering rooms, we've got tables, chairs,
Speaker 1: the microphones still using sure microphones and headphones um and
Speaker 1: we have uh, individual little volume controls for our our
Speaker 1: headphones so that we can arrange that to our hearts content.
Speaker 1: I'm slightly hard of hearing, so I turned mine up,
Speaker 1: but that would blast the ears off someone like Lauren.
Speaker 1: So luckily we all have our own individual controls. We
Speaker 1: don't have to, you know, have one master control for
Speaker 1: all the headphones. Uh. We close off those doors we
Speaker 1: record our episodes. The audio goes through a mixer in
Speaker 1: a couple of studios. There's actually a physical console mixer
Speaker 1: and then a couple of studios use a virtual mixer.
Speaker 1: But in either case they're doing the same general job.
Speaker 1: That is, they allow the producer to set audio levels,
Speaker 1: so if one person is just naturally louder than another,
Speaker 1: you can drop their level down a little bit so
Speaker 1: that way you don't have a big jump between the
Speaker 1: loud person and the quiet person. I tend to be
Speaker 1: a little quiet, so they boost me up a little bit,
Speaker 1: so that's odd. I'm not used to being quiet. But
Speaker 1: my voice gets you can hear it now. My voice
Speaker 1: is getting worn out the more I talk. Of course,
Speaker 1: this is the third episode of tech Stuff that I'm
Speaker 1: recording today that explains that. And like the studios that
Speaker 1: we had back in the Buckhead space, which were again
Speaker 1: just you know, kind of a rigged studios, these we
Speaker 1: ended up using a lot more phone baffling. We were
Speaker 1: able to have a lot more control over the space.
Speaker 1: We made sure that the windows and doors that we
Speaker 1: used in those spaces kept the noise nice and isolated,
Speaker 1: so you don't have a lot of bleed over. People
Speaker 1: can actually chat outside the rooms, and it's not terrible
Speaker 1: if they start getting into a really animated conversation that
Speaker 1: can sometimes bleed over into the audio. That we are
Speaker 1: hearing as we record, and in that case I have
Speaker 1: been known to jump outside and gently suggest people take
Speaker 1: their conversation elsewhere. I'm very um genteel about such things.
Speaker 1: We record into Audition. That is the software we use
Speaker 1: at the office. It's a Mac based and so that
Speaker 1: allows people to do things like isolate microphones. Uh. And Tari,
Speaker 1: when she's recording me live at the office, use this
Speaker 1: audition to put little markers down. Whenever I make a
Speaker 1: mistake or have a terrible sound come out of me,
Speaker 1: like if I have to sniff or cough or something,
Speaker 1: she can put a little time marker on the recording
Speaker 1: so that later on she can very quickly navigate to
Speaker 1: those markers and make those edits um. And it just
Speaker 1: makes things a lot easier. That's why she likes to
Speaker 1: listen live while I actually record. And then if Tari
Speaker 1: has to say something to me, she has a microphone
Speaker 1: on her side and can communicate to me. It doesn't
Speaker 1: get sent to the audition file. It's it's not going
Speaker 1: through to recording, but I can hear it in my
Speaker 1: headphones and then I can respond to it. Um. So
Speaker 1: that's generally how things worked at Pont City Market. Oh,
Speaker 1: I should also mention, so we have Bowie, Eno, Prince
Speaker 1: and York text stuff almost always recorded in Eno, at
Speaker 1: least over the last couple of years. Stuff you should know,
Speaker 1: records in Bowie and sometimes I would record in Bowie
Speaker 1: two occasionally. If you watched back in the day when
Speaker 1: I used to stream live on Twitch. Um, that was
Speaker 1: when we were using the Bowie studio. And that one
Speaker 1: is unique among the different studios and all the other studios.
Speaker 1: The producer sits at a table or desk that's outside
Speaker 1: the actual recording studio and so they communicate over a
Speaker 1: microphone to the people inside the studio. You know, Bowie
Speaker 1: rather is the only one that's different that one. Uh
Speaker 1: The producer actually sits inside the recording studio along with
Speaker 1: the talent. So when Josh and Chuck were recording in
Speaker 1: the office, Jerry was also in that same room with them,
Speaker 1: so all three of them would be right there. And
Speaker 1: that is the the one difference to all the other studios.
Speaker 1: They have the producer isolated from the people inside the booth.
Speaker 1: And uh, I just thought that was interesting. I don't know,
Speaker 1: you know how that came about, but that's how it works. Uh.
Speaker 1: In the case of Eno, there is a big window
Speaker 1: on the side of the studio where the producer's desk is,
Speaker 1: so I can look out the window and star, although
Speaker 1: usually there's a giant display that's you know, eclipsing most
Speaker 1: of her. And that's generally how it worked in the office.
Speaker 1: We would sit down inside those studios and record. The
Speaker 1: whisper rooms have a little bit more space in them
Speaker 1: than either Eno or Bowie do, and so podcasts that
Speaker 1: have more hosts in them tend to record in one
Speaker 1: of those. Like when I would go into record with
Speaker 1: Ridiculous History, Uh, it was usually in the Buyork studio
Speaker 1: for example. But that's that's how things worked pre coronavirus,
Speaker 1: and then everything would change. Oh, I should also add
Speaker 1: that was also when we started to see a more
Speaker 1: regular use of ads, when we were able to actually
Speaker 1: monetize podcasts. In fact, that's the only reason stuff Media
Speaker 1: was able to exist in the first place. We had
Speaker 1: reached a point where the podcasts could be monetized and
Speaker 1: make money that was on a level that was, you know,
Speaker 1: comparable to what the website How Stuff Works was making,
Speaker 1: and that's what made it possible to spend Stuff Media
Speaker 1: off into its separate company, And part of the reason
Speaker 1: we were able to do that is because we have
Speaker 1: a sales team and an ads team, and they worked
Speaker 1: together to be able to get potential ad reads for
Speaker 1: the various shows. And typically hosts have the opportunity to
Speaker 1: review the ads that will run on their shows, not always,
Speaker 1: but usually, and we have a chance to say yea
Speaker 1: or name. So if we find something truly objectionable, like
Speaker 1: let's say that for some reason Sarainos wanted to run
Speaker 1: an ad on my show, if it were still around,
Speaker 1: I could say, yeah, no, not really, not really a
Speaker 1: big fan of that one, and it would just go away.
Speaker 1: But if it were something that I don't have an
Speaker 1: objection to, then you know, I might do the ad
Speaker 1: read myself. It's frequently how we do it, and then
Speaker 1: we do a recording session, usually of just ads. We
Speaker 1: don't typically record ads live in a audio recording of
Speaker 1: an episode. We can do that, and it has happened
Speaker 1: in the past, but more frequently these days we do
Speaker 1: separate recording sessions so that we can really hone in
Speaker 1: on getting the ad just right, and then we can
Speaker 1: insert it into episodes later down the line. Uh. I
Speaker 1: know that a lot of people don't really care for ads,
Speaker 1: they find it irritating. But seriously, without advertisements, we don't
Speaker 1: have a way of making revenue, and without revenue, there's
Speaker 1: no reason for us to do the shows because we can't.
Speaker 1: We can't recapture the cost it it takes to make
Speaker 1: the shows. So the ads are what make the shows possible.
Speaker 1: And our goal is to always choose companies that we
Speaker 1: like and ads that we don't object to, and then
Speaker 1: incorporate those in our shows. Some weeks it's more challenging
Speaker 1: than others, but that's always our goal. So we don't
Speaker 1: do it just to throw ads at you. We don't
Speaker 1: do it because we're swimming in slag. Most of us aren't. UM.
Speaker 1: Once in a blue moon, I might get something where
Speaker 1: I get to try it out first, so that way
Speaker 1: I can actually talk about it with sincerity. What I'm
Speaker 1: doing an ad, But it's not like I'm surrounded by
Speaker 1: products from all the major companies all around me all
Speaker 1: the time. If that were the case, UM, I probably
Speaker 1: have a lot more guitars, but I don't. So that's
Speaker 1: how things worked pre coronavirus. When we come back, I'll
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about how things have changed since
Speaker 1: we started working mostly from home. But first let's take
Speaker 1: a quick break for one of those ads. I was
Speaker 1: just talking about March Friday. That appears to be the
Speaker 1: last day that most of us were in the office.
Speaker 1: Some of us kept going back a little bit after that,
Speaker 1: but not much more after that. Georgia is where we
Speaker 1: are located. And for those who have followed, you know
Speaker 1: that Georgia has had a real rough time of it,
Speaker 1: and part of that is because leadership in Georgia really
Speaker 1: dragged its feet about issuing stay at home orders. Not
Speaker 1: in Atlanta, we actually got those fairly early on, but
Speaker 1: the state of Georgia, certainly that was not ever really
Speaker 1: a big push. So most of us weren't coming in
Speaker 1: after Friday the thirteenth. I can say that definitively because
Speaker 1: I have had to go back to the studio a
Speaker 1: couple of times since then. I'll get to that. And
Speaker 1: when I was there, I saw on my co worker's
Speaker 1: desk a desk calendar and the last date that was
Speaker 1: showing was March thirteen. Grim reminder of how things used
Speaker 1: to be. Well. We had to pivot very very quickly.
Speaker 1: We were all recording podcasts. It was hard to do
Speaker 1: without having access to the studios. We weren't sure how
Speaker 1: we were going to manage doing this when we're all remote.
Speaker 1: But fortunately we have a very dedicated team of people
Speaker 1: who were working very hard to make sure we had
Speaker 1: the assets we needed that included microphones. So most of us,
Speaker 1: I think, ended up with an audio technical a T
Speaker 1: two thousand five USB mike. This style of microphone is
Speaker 1: a dynamic microphone. That means it's directional. It's not a
Speaker 1: condenser mike. You can find condenser mics things like the
Speaker 1: Snowball and the Yeti, both from Blue Microphones. Those are
Speaker 1: condenser style microphones. This one's directional, which means that if
Speaker 1: you start to wander off to either side of the microphone,
Speaker 1: your volume is going to drop. Because the microphone is
Speaker 1: really designed to pick up sound in a cone that
Speaker 1: extends out from the end of the microphone, you're supposed
Speaker 1: to maintain, you know, a fairly close distance to the mic.
Speaker 1: We also have pop filters. These are a little round
Speaker 1: filters that have a a gauze like material. It's it's
Speaker 1: like almost like panty hose. In fact, there are people
Speaker 1: who have made pop filters using Penny Ho's and the
Speaker 1: chief purpose of that is to stop puffs of air
Speaker 1: when you start hitting things like pas. Like if you've
Speaker 1: listened to some of the episodes that came out shortly
Speaker 1: after Lockdown, you'll hear a lot more popping peas, or
Speaker 1: they'll be a lot more prominent. I'm using the word
Speaker 1: words that have p's in them way too much right now,
Speaker 1: But there are a lot more prominent in those early
Speaker 1: episodes because it was before I had put my pop
Speaker 1: filter in place. Now I've got it there and you
Speaker 1: can still hear it, but it's not nearly as a
Speaker 1: big of a punch in the in the ear drum
Speaker 1: as it used to be. The a T two thousand
Speaker 1: five USB mike. This is not an AD They didn't
Speaker 1: get AD space or anything for it. But it's a
Speaker 1: microphone I particularly really like because it does have an
Speaker 1: XLR output, so you can hook it up to an
Speaker 1: XLR cable if you wanted to put it to a
Speaker 1: physical mixer and then connect that to a computer. But
Speaker 1: also has the USB port so you can connect it
Speaker 1: via USB to a computer directly. And it's actually a
Speaker 1: pretty decent quality microphone. It's not at the same level
Speaker 1: as the professional microphones we have back in the studio.
Speaker 1: And I'm sure if you were to listen to episodes
Speaker 1: back to back from one that was taken in the
Speaker 1: studio to one that's done at home, you'd be able
Speaker 1: to start to hear that. But it's it's decent, it's
Speaker 1: really good. It's it's amazing to me how these style
Speaker 1: microphones have improved over the last five years or so.
Speaker 1: And uh, we tend to record into various recording software.
Speaker 1: I use Audacity. Audacity is a free piece of software
Speaker 1: and you can use it to record multiple tracks to
Speaker 1: a single recording. Um, it's really handy. It's a little
Speaker 1: bit it's a little bit tough to to learn how
Speaker 1: to use all the different features. It's got a bit
Speaker 1: of a learning curve to it. But it has a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff in it that is really helpful for
Speaker 1: podcast recording. For example, there's a noise removal tool where
Speaker 1: what you'll do is you'll capture room tone room and
Speaker 1: we would do this in the studio too, because it's
Speaker 1: it's a very standard approach. But room tone is just
Speaker 1: letting the microphone pick up the sound that is native
Speaker 1: to whatever the recording environment is there might be a
Speaker 1: hum from air conditioning or the noise from the fan
Speaker 1: from a computer or something like that, and you just
Speaker 1: let the mic record for you know, ten seconds or so,
Speaker 1: and then you use that as a sample, and the
Speaker 1: software what it does is essentially looks for frequencies that
Speaker 1: match that sample and remove it from the finished recording.
Speaker 1: So that way you can eliminate or at least reduce
Speaker 1: the audio of whatever the room sounds like. So Audacity
Speaker 1: has that capability to um. It has the ability to
Speaker 1: do lots of stuff like I can do reverb things
Speaker 1: like that, not that I ever would for an episode
Speaker 1: of tech stuff seems like that be a bit much,
Speaker 1: but you can do that. So if you want to
Speaker 1: record stuff, I do recommend checking out Audacity. Like I said,
Speaker 1: it's free to use. There are also a lot of
Speaker 1: different plugins you can get that can add more features
Speaker 1: to Audacity. I used to do that a lot before
Speaker 1: I was recording podcasts with with how Stuff Works, So
Speaker 1: that was that's that's kind of the approach I take.
Speaker 1: I set up my microphone, I start Audacity recording, I
Speaker 1: let it record for about ten seconds, and then I
Speaker 1: record my episode. Stop the recording. I then go through,
Speaker 1: remove any long pauses, and maybe do some minor edits.
Speaker 1: I then save the project. I convert it to a
Speaker 1: wave form and I save that to drop Box because
Speaker 1: these files tend to be pretty large, and I share
Speaker 1: from Dropbox over to Tari. So Tari can then download
Speaker 1: a wave file and then she can import that into
Speaker 1: Audacity and make edits and do things like attach things
Speaker 1: like the theme music. Have it, but go into the
Speaker 1: right um, the right the right format so that everything
Speaker 1: is proper. You know, we've got the opening and closing theme,
Speaker 1: We've got the ad breaks, all that kind of stuff,
Speaker 1: and then she can then publish it and then you
Speaker 1: guys get it. So now, uh, that's how I record
Speaker 1: because I do a single host show, so mind's easy.
Speaker 1: There are people who obviously have more than one host
Speaker 1: in their show, and for them the process is slightly different. Uh,
Speaker 1: they will record in one of several ways. They actually
Speaker 1: there's there's not one single way to do this. So
Speaker 1: I'm going to talk about a couple of different approaches
Speaker 1: and the pros and cons to each of them. Some
Speaker 1: people will use a service like zen Caster or squad cast,
Speaker 1: and these services are somewhat similar, and it's really fascinating
Speaker 1: how they work. So everyone logs into an online session
Speaker 1: using whatever tool they're using, and they can hear each other,
Speaker 1: and depending upon the service, they might be able to
Speaker 1: see each other too through webcams, and as they uh
Speaker 1: they can start recording through this session. But as they
Speaker 1: start that recording, the recording is not going over the
Speaker 1: internet directly to the cloud. Instead, each person is recording
Speaker 1: to his or her direct device, their computer. So it
Speaker 1: looks like you're just having an online video call. You're
Speaker 1: all chatting and having your conversations as you record, and
Speaker 1: it's almost like you're in a studio. It's just that
Speaker 1: you're doing this over video chat. But what's actually happening
Speaker 1: is that each audio track is recording to the individual
Speaker 1: computers and then at the end, the computers upload that
Speaker 1: recording to the cloud, where the service will then put
Speaker 1: it all together so that it's all synchronized and you
Speaker 1: have a nice master recording of separate tracks for each person.
Speaker 1: That is phenomenal to me. That's like magic to me,
Speaker 1: because it means that the quality of the recording you
Speaker 1: get is the best that it possibly can be, because
Speaker 1: it's the going natively to the computer. It's not like
Speaker 1: an internet phone call. If you've had a lot of
Speaker 1: Internet meetings, you know that even just a little bit
Speaker 1: of Internet you know, hiccups will cause delays. You might
Speaker 1: have someone's vocals drop out. There are a lot of problems.
Speaker 1: But because this is initially recording to your local device
Speaker 1: and then gets uploaded, you get a much better quality
Speaker 1: recording that way, and then it gets uh put together
Speaker 1: in the cloud and the producers can take that and
Speaker 1: do the edits that they need to. They can download
Speaker 1: a sound file and go through the editing process before
Speaker 1: publishing it. That's one way that people are recording their
Speaker 1: shows if they have multiple hosts. Another way is that
Speaker 1: they will use some form of internet communication tool like
Speaker 1: Zoom or Microsoft Teams or uh Skype or whatever in
Speaker 1: order to have the call. They might even record that
Speaker 1: that call so that they have sort of a scratch track,
Speaker 1: that's what we call a reference track. But they will
Speaker 1: record their individual audio locally, so they might start up
Speaker 1: an Audacity file, for example, or a voice memo file
Speaker 1: or something along those lines, and they will record themselves
Speaker 1: locally to their machine, and then once it's all done,
Speaker 1: they will share their recording to the producer of the show,
Speaker 1: who then has to take all these recordings, synchronize them,
Speaker 1: and put them all together. This is potentially very complicated
Speaker 1: if people are recording at say different bit rates, you
Speaker 1: can have real issues with synchronization, like you can have
Speaker 1: it where audio will drift a bit and eventually you
Speaker 1: can get to a point where someone is answering a
Speaker 1: question before the person who's asking it has even finished
Speaker 1: asking the question because the recordings haven't quite lined up properly,
Speaker 1: and it requires a lot of fine tuning adjustment to
Speaker 1: get it fixed. It's a lot of it's a huge headache.
Speaker 1: If everyone's recording on the same bit rate and everything,
Speaker 1: you you bypass that, but it doesn't always happen. Sometimes
Speaker 1: people just don't notice their settings, so it still remains.
Speaker 1: One of the big challenges is which way do you go.
Speaker 1: Do you use the zen caster type approach where everybody
Speaker 1: is in the same virtual space and then eventually their
Speaker 1: audio gets uploaded to zen Caster and the producer can
Speaker 1: pull it down, or do you record each track individually
Speaker 1: send that to the producer who then has to assemble
Speaker 1: the podcast out of that way. Tari is lucky for
Speaker 1: tech stuff. She's unlucky in a lot of ways, but
Speaker 1: this way she's very lucky because it's just me. So
Speaker 1: she just has to get the one audio file from
Speaker 1: me and then she can edit that and send it on.
Speaker 1: So that's easy on that level. Uh. It's one of
Speaker 1: those things where I didn't really appreciate it till I
Speaker 1: had to deal with it. I've done a few episodes
Speaker 1: where I've done some interviews, and that's where you start
Speaker 1: coming into potential problems, whether it's an issue with the
Speaker 1: software running on another person's machine, or their internet connection
Speaker 1: or your internet connection. I mean, there are a lot
Speaker 1: of things that can cause issues. Now. I mentioned that
Speaker 1: I have gone into the office a couple of times
Speaker 1: since we shut down in the middle of Mark and Uh,
Speaker 1: in those cases it was because I was recording episodes
Speaker 1: of Smart Talks, the IBM series that I um I
Speaker 1: am one of the hosts for, and Smart Talks is
Speaker 1: a really important show. I talked to really important people.
Speaker 1: And my internet at home occasionally decides it wants to
Speaker 1: go on vacation at a moment's notice and it'll drop.
Speaker 1: So rather than risk having that happen while I talk
Speaker 1: with these important people. I will make the trek into
Speaker 1: the city to go to Pont City Market, to go
Speaker 1: to one of our studios and to record there where
Speaker 1: I can be reasonably sure that my internet connection is
Speaker 1: as solid as it gets. It's fast, and it's not
Speaker 1: likely to drop. And and because there's nobody else there
Speaker 1: most of the time, uh, there's no congestion on the network.
Speaker 1: It's just me. Sometimes it's me and maybe one or
Speaker 1: two other people. I can report that everyone is following
Speaker 1: very strict processes and rules in order to do this properly.
Speaker 1: We wear masks, We have antibacterial uh wipes everywhere which
Speaker 1: we use to wipe down equipment. We have you know,
Speaker 1: hand sanitizing stations throughout the office so that we can
Speaker 1: frequently do that as well. So we take that very seriously.
Speaker 1: We have a full list of steps that we follow
Speaker 1: when we go into the studio, which includes wiping down
Speaker 1: the equipment both before and after we use it so that, um,
Speaker 1: you know, when you're talking into a microphone, you want
Speaker 1: to make sure that you've sanitized that microphone so that
Speaker 1: the next person who uses it doesn't end up getting sick.
Speaker 1: If you happen to be carrying COVID nineteen and you
Speaker 1: don't know it. You don't want to infect anybody else.
Speaker 1: So we do have those rules still in place. Everyone
Speaker 1: follows them and it's been challenging. We've got some super
Speaker 1: cool podcas asks that are coming out of our studio
Speaker 1: that require us to use the studio space that I'm
Speaker 1: really excited to listen to. I can't even talk about
Speaker 1: them now, but let me tell you they are. The
Speaker 1: people who are working on them are some of the
Speaker 1: hardest working and most creative people I know. I am
Speaker 1: not on this project, by the way, I don't merit
Speaker 1: that consideration, but the stuff I'm hearing about it is
Speaker 1: really exciting and I can't wait to share it once
Speaker 1: it's ready to go. But it's one of those things
Speaker 1: where they have to go into the studio and so
Speaker 1: we have to take all those precautions. So when you
Speaker 1: listen to our podcasts, whether it's tech stuff or stuff,
Speaker 1: you should know stuff they don't want you to know,
Speaker 1: ridiculous history. Keep in mind these shows are being done
Speaker 1: by people in various parts of the world at this
Speaker 1: point and on various pieces of equipment, and that we
Speaker 1: all all had to adapt to that super fast with
Speaker 1: not really a whole lot of prep time, And to me,
Speaker 1: it is phenomenal that we were able to keep doing
Speaker 1: that with a bare minimum of fuss uh, at least
Speaker 1: fuss that was noticeable to the listeners. I'm sure there
Speaker 1: was a noticeable change in the quality of recordings, and
Speaker 1: in some cases there might be outstanding uh incidents where
Speaker 1: it's even more noticeable. But overall, I think we've done
Speaker 1: a pretty darn good job, and most importantly, we keep
Speaker 1: delivering the stories that excite us to you guys. So
Speaker 1: next time you hear a podcast that you really like
Speaker 1: and you think, gosh, those folks aren't they are not
Speaker 1: sitting across a table from each other the way they
Speaker 1: used to, you know, take a moment to appreciate that
Speaker 1: and the hard work that they do, not me. I
Speaker 1: stay here by myself. It's really not any different. If
Speaker 1: you want to feel sorry for someone, feel sorry for Torii,
Speaker 1: because since she can no longer listen to me record live,
Speaker 1: she can't make those markers anymore in the audio file.
Speaker 1: So that means she has to listen to every single
Speaker 1: episode all the way through and catch all the times
Speaker 1: I make mistakes, and then do it that way she
Speaker 1: can't just you know, put in a marker so that
Speaker 1: she can come back later and fix it quickly. She's
Speaker 1: the one who really deserves the props. Me, I'm doing
Speaker 1: what I always did, It's just I'm doing it into
Speaker 1: a different microphone. Now. Well, that's a peak behind the
Speaker 1: curtain of how things are going in the the COVID
Speaker 1: nineteen world in podcasting. How we were able to to
Speaker 1: pivot to that and adapt to that with I think
Speaker 1: the a pretty small disruption to how we do things
Speaker 1: in the grand scheme of things. I'm sure that like
Speaker 1: most of my other co hosts, I'm sure everybody's really
Speaker 1: looking forward to a time and we can go back
Speaker 1: to the studio and see each other in person and
Speaker 1: actually sit across from the table and and have a
Speaker 1: discussion and not be separated by miles and miles between us.
Speaker 1: I'm sure everybody, like me, we're all looking forward to that,
Speaker 1: and I do think it will have an impact on
Speaker 1: just the quality of the conversations we have. But my
Speaker 1: hat is off to all of my peers out there,
Speaker 1: both within the I Heart radio community and outside it,
Speaker 1: everyone who's working so hard to try and keep things
Speaker 1: going in incredibly extraordinarily difficult times, and then, of course
Speaker 1: also goes outside the realm of podcasting. I know lots
Speaker 1: of you out there have been impacted in various ways
Speaker 1: and have been working very hard in your own right
Speaker 1: to keep things moving, and my hat is off to
Speaker 1: you as well. I think we're all in this together,
Speaker 1: even if we all have to be a part. Wow,
Speaker 1: that's that's deep. Okay, let's wrap this up. I have
Speaker 1: to go out and get ready for a vacation where
Speaker 1: I'm going to be in a cabin in the middle
Speaker 1: of nowhere in the Georgia Mountains, and I will be
Speaker 1: contemplating I don't know my toes. Maybe we'll see. Maybe
Speaker 1: I'll learn to play guitar a little bit more while
Speaker 1: I'm out there. If you guys have suggestions for future
Speaker 1: episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's a specific technology, maybe
Speaker 1: it's a company, Maybe it's a trend in tech. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's a personality and technology, anything like that, anything tech
Speaker 1: related or how tech impacts our lives, reach out to me.
Speaker 1: The best way to do it is on Twitter. The
Speaker 1: handle is tech stuff h s W and I'll talk
Speaker 1: to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an I
Speaker 1: heart radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows.