Perusing Problems pertaining to the Petaling Street Podcast - Phew!

Well, the second PPS Review Podcast is up, but it was a tough ride this time. It was so easy to do it last week, that I forgot Murphy's Law, and things went all asymmetric watermelon-shaped this time round.

Problems:

• Content: E and I spent far too much time trying to pick out stories. As a result, by the time it came to time to record, our energy levels were low. The enthusiasm was lacking, my humour wasn't on a 'high'. Instead, I should have just short-listed a bunch of them, and then we just work down the list until we ran out of time.
• Recording levels: We not rich people. We no have studio. So, what we do is to take turns at on the minidisc microphone. The first week, we just left it there on the table, and our voices were faint. This time around, E just held it up and we got much closer to the mike. However, it wasn't evenly shared (because my big fat head kept bobbing around) and what we got was a very loud Errolyn, and a loud/soft Dzof.
• Transfer problems: For some reason, everytime I tried to record the MD to the soundcard using a line in, it was shaky, poppy, skipping. Real bad. I had to transfer it three or four times. And the computer kept rebooting when the disc reached a certain point. Don't ask me. I only do IT consultancy for a living.
• Mixing down to... what?: It's still an arcane art for me. How to maximise volume levels while keeping noise to a minimum. This week, I tried separating left and right audio channels, so you heard me from the left, and E from the right. I'm still not sure if it's a good idea or not.
• Fiddly RSS feed: The bloomin' RSS feed doesn't update immediately, and even when it finally does, it doesn't always get the enclosure correct. This means that iTunes subscribers don't see the latest episode. This is the result of trying to use free services at every step of the way, when there is a break in the chain, it breaks the whole system. *sigh*.

The problems don't end there. This week, E is out of KL, so I am partner-less. My backup is also out of KL. A third person is nowhere to be found. Will I be flying solo this weekend?