Podcast Help Desk

News: Levelator now works in OSX 10.11 - Doug Kaye from Conversations Network did a small update on Levelator, a free audio levelling software that has not been maintained since 2012. He said he just wants to make sure it still runs on all modern OS’s. Levelator is available for WIndows, Mac and Linux here: http://www.conversationsnetwork.org/levelator (make sure you get 2.1.2 if you are on a Mac)

*** Bumper Music by Airmen of Note affiliate link

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Promote YOU or Your brand, Not your podcast company’s brand!

What would you rather have on YOUR website?

I like the PowerPress player I use, much better :)

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Review swaps - UGH!

Someone asked me to be a guest on their Blog Talk Radio show. They sent me a “Guest Intake Form” to fill out and part of the form is a $10 payment that YOU have to pay to be on their show. I didn’t fill it out.

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Blubrry Tip

Handling Stats redirects in PowerPress

The way PowerPress works with the statistics redirect with a single show is that you sign into your blubrry.com account from the services and stats area of the powerpress settings (in advanced mode). This automatically puts the stats redirect in front of your media URL. This only works this way if you only have 1 podcast coming from your wordpress site.

If you have more than one coming from your wordpress site using categories or channels, ALL podcasts from all categories or channels get the redirect from the show selected when you signed in to your blubrry.com account from PowerPress.

If you don’t mind your stats all in one account, you can leave it like this. If you want them separate, you must do one of two things.

Option 1. Create another listing for each show (category or channel) at blubrry.com and the main one will still catch all shows, but you manually put the redirect URL for the show you are posting in front of the media URL when posting. That way you will have 1 catch all that gets all the stats and another stats account for each of your shows that are separate.

Option 2. Unlink your blubrry.com account from your wordpress blog. Then, put the redirect in manually each time you post. This option also requires that you come to blubrry.com to upload your file if you are using blubrry hosting.

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Soundcard bingo

I got a Behringer UCA222 Soundcard to replace one of my Griffen iMics so i could tell them apart. On the Mac, the sound cards are named by the system and you can’t change them. So having 2 soundcards with the same name was screwing me up when I tried to do skype interviews using mix-minus (I will go over mix-minus again in a future episode).

Problem mostly solved with the UCA222 and 1 iMic. now I have a very slight (you might hear it, you may not hear it) ground loop hum now. I just ordered a Boss B25N RCA to RCA Ground Loop Isolator for the setup, so that VERY slight hum will be gone by the next episode.

Did You Plug it IN?

News and Articles

Move over Millennials, Seniors Are Discovering Podcasting, Too

http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/2747478

Howard Stern (again)

http://cccnews.info/2015/11/17/howard-stern-demonstrates-the-value-of-live-radio-over-podcasting/

38 podcasts so meta…

https://medium.com/@harryduran/28-podcasts-so-meta-they-all-cover-the-topic-of-podcasting-itself-da977dcf3c3f

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Inverted Audio problem

Thanks to Daniel J. Lewis from The Audacity To Podcast for helping me figure out what was wrong.

I *THOUGHT* I had the portable recorder problem figured out.   I bought a new cable and the plug end for the 3.5mm makes it so it doesn't go in the socket all the way (Size does matter I guess:) ).  Anyway, it gave me a mirror effect left to right.  SO when it is played on a mono speaker (iphone, ipad and others) the left cancels out the right.

***UPdate! It wasn’t the cable after all.

It was the setting on my recorder for Mic Type.  It was set to Stereo and to fix it, I had to set it to Mono.  Ugh!

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Tech Support - Did you plug it in?

Why those of us in Tech Support ask the simple questions first.

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Blubrry Announcements of the week

PowerPress supports in Feed fundraising links for certain apps http://www.powerpresspodcast.com/2015/11/04/powerpress-podcasters-can-now-crowdfund-their-podcast-directly-to-subscribers/

Clammr Player Plugin integration with PowerPress.  http://www.powerpresspodcast.com/2015/11/16/clammr-wordpress-plugin-supported-by-powerpress/

Blubrry Partners with Trition with a private plugin for Blubrry Pro customers for Ad management.

http://www.powerpresspodcast.com/2015/11/19/triton-tap-plugin-powerpress/

Appendipity  themes player bug in PowerPress 6.2 which caused some themes issues with the player.  Angelo is working on releasing  PowerPress 6.2.1 as I record on Friday.  Should be out Friday evening so if you are having player troubles with your theme, it will be fixed SOON.. Update your PowerPress whenever it’s updated.

***update, I'm testing 6.2.1 now and it should be out tonight (11/20/15)

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Support the show..

See everything on the left sidebar of the site (in a computer browser).

Had some trouble encoding this one for some reason. *** Update! It works now thanks to Daniel J. Lewis from Audacity to Podcast figuring out what was wrong with the file. I figured out WHY it was wrong and fixed it :)

Let me know if this one works for you :)

From the road.. Short version of Podcast Help Desk this week.

I go over my mobile setup and talk about safety while podcasting and driving.

For those who want to map this, I was on M-32 (Michigan Highway 32) between Atlanta and Hillman MI.

See you next week with news, views and reviews about podcasting!

***Warning*** Don't try this at home! Podcasting while driving can be dangerous. ***

NaPodPoMo 2015

Hello to listeners Peter DeMott from http://www.equinephotographerspodcast.com/ and Lester Graber from Texas. Thanks for listening guys!

Rob Walch from Libsyn said some very nice things about me on the latest episode of The Feed - Thanks Rob! (Around the 1:07:00 mark)

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That Ain’t Radio! - A Dinosaur speaks out about podcasting

http://www.radioink.com/article.asp?id=2991720&spid=24698 (article by Fred Lundgren )

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Blubrry Tip of the week

Adding a second podcast to your wordpress site.

USE CHANNELS!

Be OK with mixed up stats

did I say use CHANNELS!

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You can have a podcast about anything!

http://newmediashow.com/2015/10/18/nms-104-harry-duran-of-podcast-junkies/

First thing. I want to say THANKS to Steve and Dave Lee from Modern Life Podcast Network for the opportunity to have Podcast Help Desk there as a trial. We decided that PHD wasn’t really a good fit for the network as I’m promoting my own stuff and I wasn’t so much a part of the network as the other shows there. That being said, I enjoyed being affiliated with MLN. So much so, I’m re-starting a long-dead show which will be on MLN fully. Geek of the North will be on MLN starting next week. Steve and I did a little intro show to get the feed started over there. I still have the domain name so I pointed it at the network page where it will live. Check it out over at GeekOfTheNorth.com

News:

Google Play is now taking submissions of podcasts to go into the google play store and their podcast listening app that will be coming out in about 4 months. (YES, 4 Months). So no hurry, but check it out if you want to submit your RSS feed to them. http://g.co/podcastportal

Soundcloud: Something is happening over there and I don’t really know if it’s incompetence or just plan old dirty pool, but, for some reason, they are changing the links to people's media files in their feeds. I had a podcaster who was using powerpress for her podcast and using soundcloud as a media host. All of a sudden, with no warning, her media file links all changed. That broke her podcast. We figured it out. I’m not sure, but it seems as though Soundcloud is trying to push everyone using them for hosting back to using the feed that soundcloud owns, not your own feed. Yet another reason to use a PODCAST media host like Blubrry.com.

NMX - Rick Calvert has been heard from. He sent an email to everyone that had a VIP ticket telling them that he just checked out for a while, and is now back. We still don’t know if NMX is coming back next year. I hope so, as it’s a great place to hang out with a bunch of podcasters in one place.

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BACKUP YOUR SITES!

I had a bit of a scare this week as I was moving everything back to podcasthelpdesk.com from modern life podcast network. I deleted the folder on my webhost by accident. I then realized that I had not been backing up my wordpress database!! Well, Good thing is, my database lives somewhere other than the folder that PHD’s website was in. After contacting my webhost, they told me about “history mode” in the file manager. So I went back a day and restored the folder, but it made me think of both security and backing up. So, here is a list of the things I do at PHD to keep it secure and backed up:

Plugins I use for security in wordpress:

Disable XML-RPC I’m not really sure of the geeky reason this is important but it does eliminate another way your wordpress can be hacked. It’s enabled by default in wordpress now. Read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC

Limit Login Attempts This simply limits the login attempts so that a brute force attack can not work on your login.

Rename WP-Login.php This lets you change the login page to anything you want. NOTE: it says it’s not maintained but it works fine.

For backup I do 2 things.

I manually backup the folder where my wp install lives. I do this once a month or so. This saves the files and whatnot, but not the database. Not sure it’s needed, but from now on I’m doing it.

WP-DB-Backup by Austin Matzko - This is a Plugin. I have this run once a week and email me a backup of the database to a gmail account. That way I have a recent database backup. this is in case I have to reinstall wordpress. Then I can copy my wp-content and everything back in and be back up and running quickly.

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Blubrry Tip of the week

Get your RSS feeds into the blubrry directory.

This is the final in my "Podcast Guru" interview series. Today I have Rob Walch. He is the creator of Podcast411 (one of the first podcasts about podcasting) and the host of the very popular Today in IOS show. He is also the VP of Podcaster Relations at Libsyn.com.

We had a very good conversation. (only half of it made the show)

If you want to get a hold of Rob, you can email him at [email protected]

You can also hear him on:

Podcast411

Today in IOS

The Feed

He is the producer (and proud dad of Porter) of "Porter's Podcast"

"Normal" show next week. Get your questions in for the Podcast Help Desk!

I was on the Powerpress Podcast this week. Listen to that here: http://powerpresspodcast.com

I’m going to be speaking at Converge South 2015 at Wake Forest University next Friday. There will likely NOT be an episode.

This episode is a bit Blubrry Heavy (as you can imagine)

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I got a chance to have a conversation with Todd Cochrane who is my boss at Rawvoice / Blubrry. Todd is a hall of fame podcaster, CEO of Rawvoice Inc (parent company of blubrry.com) and executive producer of Geek News Central (which I write for and will have a new show on coming soon!).

You can follow Todd and GNC on Twitter @geeknews and find his main website at GeekNewsCentral.com

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Use Promo code HELPDESK at checkout for a free month of anything blubrry.com sells.

International Podcast Day

I was on WKLT in Traverse City talking about International Podcast day. I Opened for Paul Stanley of KISS :)

IPD was trending worldwide at #1 on Twitter for a few hours on the 30th.

Steve Lee was in the New York Times!

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I will be on the Powerpress podcast (the official Blubrry podcast) next week. If you want to check out our REbooted podcast over at blubrry, check out PowerpressPodcast.com

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Rob Greenlee - Head of Content at Spreaker.com

Host of Spreaker Live Show at http://spreakerliveshow.com/

http://www.robgreenlee.com/

Twitter.com/robgreenlee

http://newmediashow.com/

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Blubrry Tip of the week.

Even if you are not interested in using blubrry hosting or statistics, you should really get listed on blubrry.com’s directory. It’s easy, free and it gives you another place on the net to be found and seen.

What makes blubrry’s directory different is that they are the ONLY directory on the web that encourages you to subscribe via something other than their platform. With a blubrry listing, it encourages your listeners to subscribe to YOUR rss feed, not ours.

News:

Powerpress 6.0.5 is out - bug fixes.

Powerpress Podcast Relaunched - http://www.powerpresspodcast.com/2015/09/10/powerpress-podcast-relaunch/

Bowe Bergdahl on Serial Season 2 ? http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/09/upcoming-season-of-serial-covers-bowe-bergdahl.htm

http://gizmodo.com/the-second-season-of-serial-will-be-about-sgt-bowe-ber-1732551462 l

Undisclosed Podcast - http://undisclosed-podcast.com/

The Powerpess Podcast is relaunched. Find it at PowerPressPodcast.com - Mackenzie Bennett is the new host and she will have on someone from The RawVoice/Blubrry team every other week. I was down at the Columbus office last week to help setup the studio.

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Daniel J. Lewis from The Audacity to Podcast

Some of Daniel's sites are:

My Podcast Reviews (affiliate link)

Podcasters' Society

Noodle.mx Network

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Double Ender Recording

The interview with Daniel J. Lewis was a Double Ender recording.

What that is, is that he recorded his end, and I recorded my end and we communicated via Skype. Then I edited it together so it sounds as though Daniel is in my studio with me. This is a great way to do it if your guest has the equipment to record on their end.

Please support the show. Use the Promo Code HELPDESK at blubrry.com for any of the services. Check the sidebar for more ways to support the show.

Today I talk with Dave Jackson, Mainly of the School of Podcasting and a bunch of other places.

Other places to find Dave:

DavidJackson.org

Ask the Podcast Coach

It was fun having Dave on my show for a change. I've been on his shows a few times.