This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,900 for Friday the 14th of July 2023.
Today's show is entitled, Preparing Podcasts for Listening.
It is hosted by Ahu Ka and is about 12 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is I prepare my podcast files for listening in audacity.
Hello, this is Ahu Ka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to talk about how I prepare my podcast files for
listening.
This might be some information that will help one or two people out there in HPR land, because
if you listen to HPR, you like me or probably someone who listens to a lot of podcasts.
Now I do listen to a lot.
I have from time to time reported on which ones I listen to, such as a link I put a link
in the show notes to a Hacker Public Radio episode.
Now bear in mind when you listen to that, it's probably not even accurate anymore, because
it changes, you know, certain things I get tired of and I drop them, I find new ones that
I'm interested in, I add them.
But let's just say my G-Potter right now has a couple of thousand files in it, so that
will give you some sense.
Now when you listen to a lot of shows, it's important to be efficient.
Now for me, that means I listen to them speed it up by approximately 80 percent.
I could probably train myself to listen to them even faster, but this is comfortable for
me at the present, you know, I suspect Mike Ray is probably a two X or three X at this
point, but he spent years developing that, but it's worth doing that if you listen to
a lot of them because you can get through them faster.
Now there's a number of ways you could do this.
If you listen to podcasts on a smart phone, there are apps that will let you download your
podcast episodes and then listen to them speed it up.
And that's probably good for most people, or certainly a lot of people, I have two issues
with that.
The first is it will drain my battery even faster, and I prefer not to do that.
Second, my phone is large enough to make this a bit unwieldy for how I like to listen.
I like to put on my headphones and listen while doing things around the house, doing
yard work, driving in my car, and so on.
So what I like is a nice small MP3 player, like a Sansa clip, or some similar ones.
This is something that's about one inch by two inches and about a half inch thick, and
I can either put it in a shirt pocket, or, you know, it has a snap on feature, I can attach
it to a t-shirt collar, and it doesn't get in my way.
But, you know, those don't have a ton of features built in.
So one consequence of this is I have to have a software workflow to download and prepare
my podcasts.
So, you know, there's preparation work.
And for downloading, like I said, I use G-Potter.
I put a link in the show notes, it works fine, I'm like Ubuntu box, once I enter
a subscription, it checks automatically, multiple times per day, downloads, new episodes as
they appear, and so on.
So once I have finished listening to the episodes, I have loaded on my MP3 player, I connected
to the computer, delete all of the old shows, and see what new shows are now available.
Then I need to prepare them.
Now, preparing the shows is where I use Audacity, which I have done for years.
Audacity can do anything I need done in preparing the shows, and it can do multiple things
in a script.
Now Audacity calls these scripts, macros, and you can set one up by going to Tools, macros,
and then clicking new.
You give your macro a name, click OK, and then you will see in the right-hand window
steps that it has created a step called zero one end, and don't worry, every macro has to
have an end, and you can add other steps above it.
I start mine by doing the speed-up step, go to insert on the right, click that, and look
for a procedure called change tempo.
Now note that there is also a procedure called change speed, but you don't want to use
that, because it will also change the pitch.
This would be like changing the speed on a tape deck, right, and if you love listening to
chipmunks, cool, but I don't, I just want to hear it faster.
So change tempo will speed it up while keeping the pitch correct.
Now, isn't digital editing wonderful.
Click on that, then click OK, and you will see it is now the very first step.
The one called end has now shifted down to zero two.
Then click on the change tempo step, click edit, and set the percentage of speed up you
want.
Now mine is set for 80.
If you have never done this before, I recommend starting at a lower level like 30 or 40.
Once you get so that you never notice things being fast, you can increase it by another
10 until you get to the desired speed level.
Like I said, you know, Mike Ray probably goes a whole lot faster than I do, but he's
been added a lot longer than I have.
Now you could stop at this point, but I don't.
I'd like to do a few more things, and audacity macros let me change several procedures
together, so why not do more.
The next procedure I like to use is called amplifier, and as you might think, it increases
the volume.
You know, some of the podcast I listen to most of them, in fact, are just a bit softer
than I like, you know, at least played through my tiny little MP3 player.
So this lets me boost the volume just a little bit, you know, in my podcast, you know,
they're all spoken word, you know, and many times the volume is just to, now, if I always
listen to professionally produced podcasts like the TWIT network, I probably wouldn't need
to do this, but to tell you the truth, I don't listen to the TWIT network anymore.
I used to, but it just stopped being interesting to me.
You know, I click on amplifier, okay, and now that is at the top of step-o-one.
I'd rather have it follow the speed up, so I just use move down to make it step-o-to.
Then click on edit and set the increase in decibels.
I'd be careful here, decibels are a logarithmic scale in which an increase of one decibel
means an increase of 10 times the power.
It doesn't mean it would come across as 10 times as loud for a variety of reasons, but
I would start with maybe a one or two decibel increase and see how that goes.
Now the next thing I do is add a normalized step.
I leave the default settings alone on this one.
And finally, the last step I add is to export as an MP3 file.
You'd have to export your file as something, and this is the most practical for my MP3
player.
So now I have a 5 step macro.
Step 1, change tempo, step 2, amplify.
Step 3, normalize.
Step 4, export as MP3, step 5, and great.
I can click on okay and it is all saved.
Now I have to use it.
Now to use the macro, you go to Tools Macros and click on the macro you want to use.
I have about a half dozen macros I've created for various purposes.
So I can select the macro speed up 80 which speeds up my podcast by 80%.
Then at the bottom of the screen I click on files and select the file or files I want to
apply this macro to.
You can apply the macro to any number of files as long as they are in one directory.
Since G-Potter puts each podcast in its own directory, I leave them there.
So sometimes I'm applying this macro to only one file at a time.
Other times I might be applying it to 100.
What will often happen is I come across a podcast that really I love.
And discover that while there is 100 episodes of this out there, I'll download the whole
100 in G-Potter, run the macro, it might take me an hour or two to go through all of them.
But I have a computer just for all of that stuff that is separate from my main workstation.
Now, when this happens, audacity will create a sub directory called macro-output in which
it will place the modified files while leaving the original file in its original directory.
So what I mean by that, that sub there will be a sub directory within each of those original
directories.
So if I go to my hacker public radio folder and I look inside, I will see inside of it another
folder called macro-output.
And whenever I process an HPR episode, the processed version will show up in that sub directory.
Now I think leaving the original file alone is good.
Sometimes I may want to refer back to the original file for some reason.
As I run this macro on all of my new shows, what I do next is I move all of the transform
files to a directory called podcast staging.
I do this added step because sometimes I want to see more information about the shows I
have on my MP3 player.
And as I've mentioned, my MP3 player is pretty barebones.
So now, if I'm done, I probably have 15 or so MP3 files ready to go and copy them onto
my MP3 player.
I listen to those shows, depending on what else is going on in my life, might take me
one, two, or three days to go through that many episodes.
And then start over by deleting the old shows, going back to G-Poter, finding all of my
new shows, running the macro, and wash rinse repeat.
So I hope this is helpful to some people.
So this is a hookah for Hacker Public Radio, signing off, and as always encouraging everyone
to support free software.
Bye-bye, you have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org.
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