I’ve watched Ubercaster go through the ropes of development and been impressed with every step of the way.
Ubercaster – This is the recording software that I prefer to use.This also allows us to bring on any other guests that also use Skype on their PC. With Alanah doing her thing on the island, Dave on the north shore, and the rest of us in Vancouver, this is the crucial piece of software that ties us together. Skype – Without this, we have no podcast.Perhaps we might not be able to stop at ten.I’ve been thinking of doing a more, detailed post about how a typical episode of The Crazy Canucks comes together, but I’m going to make a simple list of all the gear we use to make it work. We originally planned on doing ten episodes, but our list of guests is looking really good.
So far we’ve received a lot of positive feedback, some helpful audio quality tips, and a single review on iTunes. Pressing StartĪfter two months in production, we launched Up Up Down Down last week. Not only is it a great track with an interesting origin story, the band generously made it available on SoundCloud in a vocals-free version I could drop into the show. In a stroke of digital destiny, I stumbled upon the crazy story of the I Fight Dragons song that never shipped. I was conflicted – I wanted to feature their music, but I didn’t want an automated takedown notice years from now because some cranky bot found our theme song in its database. Their lead singer/songwriter Brian was happy to give me his personal blessing to use their music, but he couldn’t technically give a legal one since they’ve left their label. For a video game themed show I couldn’t imagine a better artist than I Fight Dragons, by far the best 8-bit rock band of all time. Once I got the hang of Logic, all we needed was a theme song. We haven’t solved that puzzle yet, but I definitely disagree with Marco’s sentiment that this stuff being hard is a good thing for listeners. The gaps between these tools are cracks where quality slips through. It’s insane that the best known approach is to use Skype, Audio Hijack, Garageband, Dropbox, Logic, LAME, Levelator, and ID3 Editor to produce a single mp3 file. Overall, the entire process of getting the show together was way more pain than it should have been. I’d love to see something written by Jason or perhaps Marco on how a podcaster can get started with Logic, but I may need to fill that gap myself. Incredibly, the most insightful thing I found was an article by Jason Snell about how Garageband could be better for editing podcasts. I had never really edited audio before, but I’d assumed the internet would have helpful tutorials on how edit a high-quality podcast with Logic. Planning and recording the shows is hard work, but it’s not nearly as exacting as editing. We know plenty of game and app developers that have war stories to tell, so we picked some topics and started recording. With this theme in hand, we pulled our favourite elements from shows we love like Hypercritical, Unprofessional, and ATP into a format we really like. I’m intensely interested in what makes a game good or bad, the market forces that conspire against great games, and the recent explosion in games’ artistic merit. Our lunchtime debates about what’s wrong with modern stealth gameplay are legendary. We’ve both made video games, which has given us a critical view of how they are designed, developed, and sold. Formatting…Ī wise man once told me about podcast formats, “Whatever you do, don’t make it two guys talking about tech news.” Luckily, there’s something I enjoy discussing with Nigel about more than tech news, and that’s the games industry.
Before we could start a show, we needed a format. Before we could do it right, we needed to do two things first: investigate the podcasting industry, and start a show of our own. In November, my co-founder Nigel and I started planning an app to help record podcasts.