Podcast round up

I do like a good podcast. I subscribe to several that are a mix of UK radio shows I can't listen to live, US public radio that's been recommended to me, and podcasts that aren't made by traditional broadcasters. I usually listen to these in the car during my 40ish minute trip to work.

First up is Answer Me This which is having a spring break while Helen and Martin the sound man get married. Answer Me This is a simple idea, done well. Sometimes a bit smugly, but well. Listeners send in questions, asking Helen Zaltzman and Ollie Man to "Answer me this..." Helen and Ollie use all the knowledge available on Wikipedia to provide answers and gently mock the questioner. I've been subscribing for about a year and it's the podcast that makes me shout at the radio the most. Which is probably not the interaction they're aiming for with their audience, but it makes me happy. When the podcast comes back Helen and Ollie are going to be smugger than ever as they've just won a Gold for Best Internet Programme at the Sony Awards.

Desert Island Discs is brilliant as a podcast. With shorter musical inserts (for contractual reasons) the castaway's story suffers from less interruption. Kirsty Young is very, very good interviewer able to move easily between chapters in the castaway's life and clearly enjoying every minute of it. The castaways themselves aren't always well known public figures, but are always interesting. Recent favourites have been Johnny Vegas, Lawrence Dallaglio and Alice Cooper.

I'm sure that Steve Martin won't mind me describing the Earshot Creative Review as being a podcast for radio anoraks only. It's a review of creative content made for radio: jingles, promos and adverts. Steve knows his stuff and brings in a range of contributors each month from commercial radio and the BBC to play stuff they've made and been inspired by and talk about why it works. It's often recorded on location somewhere, is always well made and is much more fun than it sounds.

Radio 4's Friday Night Comedy Podcast allows you to catch up with the Now Show or The News Quiz, depending on which show is having a current run. The News Quiz is the radio precursor to Have I Got News For You, presented by Sandi Toksvig and The Now Show is a Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis vehicle with an eclectic roster of extras and guests. Whichever show is running you'll get half an hour of satire based on the previous week's news. It should be essential listening for news junkies and comedy fans alike.

I'm going to bundle the next two together. Media Talk and Tech Weekly both come from The Guardian's impressive stable of podcasts. They take advantage of The Guardian's expert journalists in these fields so Media Talk's regular presenter Matt Wells will be joined by the likes of Maggie Brown and John Plunkett as they round up what's going on in the media. Tech Weekly sees Jemima Kiss, Charles Arthur and other Guardian tech heads in the studio with Aleks Krotoski.

Karl at work suggested I try WNYC's Radiolab. It's a fantastic, but sometimes frustrating listen. Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich present each hour long episode which will feature three stories loosely linked by the edition's theme. It's sort of science based - because it's a Radio Lab - but the storytelling is more important than the science. The programme has a distinctive style which is where I sometimes fall out with it. It's higly edited, and sometimes the presenters will talk over a contributor to precis what they've said and move the story along. To me this is an example of form triumphing over content and it causes more shouting at the radio. That said it is something different to anything I've heard on radio in the UK and does feature some brilliant stories. The fortnightly episodes are an hour long, but the podcast feed also includes "Radiolab Shorts" which are bitesized extras where you can hear material that didn't make the cut, pieces inspired by the longer episode and sometimes responses to earlier programmes.

99% Invisible is another programme from US public radio. It's presented and produced by Roman Mars, the man with the best name ever. It describes itself as "a tiny radio show about design"and recent editions have included Soviet design classics, concrete furniture and Nikko the Concrete Commando who scratched his name across a city. Roman is a droll host and each five minute episode is made with as much love and care as each hour of Radiolab.

So that's what's in my Podcast library in iTunes. What do you think of my selections, and what do you regularly download. Let me know in the comments.

Audition CS5.5

When the public beta of Audition 4.0 for Mac came out I downloaded it straight away and blogged about my first impressions. Since then I've enjoyed having a version of Audition on my MacBook, and now that the final release has come I've taken advantage of a generous education discount and bought the full version.

I was surprised to see the new version of Audition included in the CS suite, because I thought Soundbooth would stay there and Audition would be on it's own branch. However it does make much more sense to bring Audition in with the other pro apps. Soundbooth has been discontinued, so there's no budget audio editor from Adobe: it's Audition or nothing.

There's not a massive amount more to say. I haven't given it a full work out yet, so can't tell you too much about the functionality. Visually the final release is very similar to the beta; a History palette has been added to the bottom left of the screen, and you can search for help in the top right corner.




There are a couple of other things I've noticed that are different to Audition 3.0, and probably were in the beta too. In the multitrack view you used to be able to drag a clip out of the files panel and move it across to the right hand end of the timeline prompting everything to move left and allowing you to find the end of the previous clip. This was really neat for quickly putting together radio packages and doesn't work in the new version. I also liked the "Autoplay" tick box in the open/import audio file dialogue box that allowed you to preview files by clicking on them which was handy if you had a large directory full of sfx or other files to browse through.*

In the beta there was no "Generate" menu which in 3.0 allowed you to create tones and noise. This is still missing, as is the ability to group clips in the multitrack view.

For a full list of what hasn't made it through from previous versions into Audition CS5.5, or what's been renamed have a look at this page on the Adobe website.

Over the next few days and weeks I'll explore the package further. If you've questions, or things you want trying out (mainly from a broadcast production point of view, I'm not planning on recording an album) then leave a comment and I'll do what I can to help.

*I've just remembered that in OS X you can use Quicklook to get a preview of files in dialogue boxes by clicking on the icon, which is almost as good as Autoplay. How you can replicate that in Windows is another matter.

Shiny like Chrome

Earlier in the week, for reasons that I've not been able to work out, Safari died on me. Clicking bookmarks in the bookmark bar froze the program. Deleting preferences, clearing caches, resetting the application and other suggested fixes didn't fix it.

I've stuck with Safari since it was a beta, and have been happy enough with it - we're only talking about a web browser after all, and it's the content that really counts, not the conduit.

I've had Firefox installed for the odd website that didn't play well with Safari, but in contradiction to what I've just said, I never really liked it much and don't fancy using it all of the time. So I've installed Chrome and I have to say I'm quite happy with it. Rather than trying to import settings and bookmarks from my sick version of Safari I started at scratch.

The first thing I set up was the Save to Delicious bookmarklet, because I store most of my bookmarks there and just use what I can fit in the bookmarks bar locally. (Delicious is great, and seems to have a better future now that Yahoo! have sold it. If you've never looked into Delicious, you should). Then I added extensions for bit.ly and Evernote. I don't like the default setting of new tabs opening next to the current one, instead I want to open at the end of the tab bar, like Safari, and there's an extension for that too.

I subscribe to one or two RSS feeds, and although they're all in Google Reader I don't like that interface and prefer to read them in NetNewsWire. Chrome doesn't seem to have native support for sniffing out feeds and subscribing to them, but a bit of Googling brought me to these instructions and the RSS subscription extension.

And I think that's all the tweaking I've done. What have I missed? What are the extensions you like and use the most?

Thirsk fire

I heard about Storify a while ago, and it's now gone into public beta so I was keen to have a play.

Then tonight there was a big fire in Thirsk, so I had a little play.



If you're not familiar with Storify it's a way to curate content from various social media sites to help tell stories.

How has the BBC doubled the TV audience for the Australian GP in only two years?

Earlier this afternoon Jake Humphrey, presenter of F1 race coverage on BBC television, tweeted about the viewing figures for the weekend's Australian Grand Prix:

You guys are amazing. In 2008 less than a million got up to watch the Australian GP live. On Sunday it was OVER 2 million at 6am! #bbcf1less than a minute ago via webJake Humphrey
jakehumphreyf1

2008 was the last Championship that was covered by ITV, in 2009 the BBC took over, so the clear implication of Jake's tweet is "We've more than doubled the audience!!" Which would be something to shout about.

But with viewing figures it's never that simple. How can you be sure you're comparing like with like?

In 2008 the Austrailan GP started at 15:30 local time, meaning that British F1 fans had to be in front of the telly at 04:30 to catch the start. This year the red lights went out at 17:00 local, which meant viewers had to be up at 07:00 to see the start and 06:00 to see the build up to the race (although it would feel an hour earlier with the change to BST overnight).

For what it's worth I think the BBC coverage is better than ITV's was* but it's not so much better that it will have doubled the audience. There are only so many F1 fans and even if the programme is better now it can't create more fans from nowhere - although having had a good couple for years for British drivers and constructors in 2008 and 2009 won't have hurt.

Grands Prix used to start at 13:00 local time wherever they were held, and European viewers had to get up early or watch races into the evening. Now Bernie Ecclestone has done deals to get races on screen at better times for us in Europe, in order to get higher audiences and more sponsorship revenue.

If you're on telly at 04:30 you really are only going to get the die-hards, if you're gifted a more civilised start time you're going to get better figures.



*When ITV won the rights from the BBC in 1997 they too did a much better job. Programmes stagnate, teams get stale and ideas run out. A new contract should result in a better show, for a while at least.

Tits on the Radio

Swearing on the radio is a funny business. Radio in the UK has no watershed, so if you can justify it, and get clearance from the appropriate senior editorial figure, you can say fuck in the middle of the afternoon in a Radio 4* drama.

I'm writing this having listened to the Radio Academy's Radio Talk podcast about late night phone-ins, where about 25 minutes in the talk turns to swearing. There's a discussion about why radio and TV differ in their use of bad language.

But generally, radio is much less sweary than the telly. I think this is a good thing. There is an argument that says that our listeners will be swearing in their day to day language, so why not swear on the radio? Good radio is meant to be conversational, and what could be more conversational than slipping in the odd fuck?

I think there are big differences between radio and TV, how the programmes are constructed, and how we consume them. Radio is a much more intimate medium than TV. As a presenter if you swear on the radio it's like you're swearing directly at your listener. And for good radio presenters it is the listener, they're communicating to one person, not many.

On the other hand telly programmes are aimed at mass audiences, and a TV presenter isn't swearing just at me, but to the crowd. It's a much more indirect insult.

Also, and I've only instinct rather than RAJAR and BARB figures to support this idea, I suspect that radio listening is more likely to be done alone whereas television viewing is a more social activity with groups of people watching together as friends or families. So again the swearing on the radio is directed at me whereas on the telly it comes at us.

I like it that there's little swearing on the radio, and wouldn't like it to change. I don't buy the argument that swearing more on air acts as some sort of leveller between presenter and listener. But am I wrong - what do you think?

*UPDATE: Thanks to Justine Potter who suggests Radio 3 is a better bet to get your really bad language on the air in daytime.

Lock 'em up and throw away the key to the ballot box?

Prison. What's it for? Punishment or rehabilitation? Do convicts merely lose their liberty or are their human rights taken away too? Do we differentiate between people in for a few months for minor offences and those locked away for longer terms.

What if you happen to be inside when an election is called? If you were sentenced to time in a British jail today you'd have to be expecting to serve more than four years to still be there when the next general election happens. In Scotland the average sentence (not including life sentences for murder) is over nine months (281 days).

Today MPs voted by a margin of 234 to 22 (where the hell were the rest of them is this is so important?) to defy the European Court of Human Rights' decision that inmates should be enfranchised.

This isn't a simple issue, it's not black and white. There's a whole rainbow of shades of grey between the two extreme opinions. If you believe that convicted criminals lose their human rights and should be left to rot then it's clear cut; how can you let these people have the vote? Of course you can't.

But I think that prison is about more than punishment. Convicts lose their freedom. Massively. And so they should. But we shouldn't forget about them. One way we judge a society is by how it treats its prisoners, and it's important that however long they're sentenced for that they're prepared for what will happen when they're released. Teach them functional skills, prepare them for work, keep them busy to avoid the fall into drug use and the "university of crime." As the end of a sentence approaches and we're trying to prepare a convict for life outside again, why not let them have a vote if an election comes around? Inmates preparing to be released should be encouraged to take an interest in the society that they'll be re-joining. Let them engage by voting.

On Wednesday Eric Illsley, the MP for Barnsley Central pleaded guilty to charges of fraud relating to £14,000 worth of expense claims. He's due to be sentences in four weeks. If he gets more than 12 months the Representation of the People Act 1981 will cause him to be disqualified from parliament, his seat will be declared vacant and a by-election will be called. If he gets less than a year he doesn't have to give up his seat. How he'll represent his constituents and where he'll hold surgeries is a bit of a mystery. It's grossly hypocritical to have laws that allow MPs doing time to keep their jobs, but to stop convicts from voting them out of office.

So where do I stand on this? Well, not all prisoners should be allowed a vote, but perhaps those in open prisons preparing for release should get their place back on the electoral register, or maybe those serving less than a year. And what about prisoners on remand who are yet to face trial?

It's not easy, but sometimes being a small-l liberal means you have to support things that aren't popular.