Alright, this one's another one.
Thank you for coming back.
Thank you everyone for listening along for however long you have.
I don't know how well the audio is going to be on this one because I'm doing this one
as an example of how easy it is to just continue recording whenever you get the itch.
So if you have an iPhone and you have a set of wired headphones, always, always, no matter
what anyone tells you, always get wired headphones or a wired mic.
No matter what, there is a bit of an argument to be made about getting a wireless microphone
without the headphone pairing and even that, I would stray away from it just because you're
getting a little bit more expensive when you don't need to get right off the bat.
If you have the money to shell out, go ahead and shell out for a microphone that's wireless.
Go for it because it's a little bit better than being tethered to the device that you're
recording to.
And I apologize for any plosives that you may hear, but when you have wired headphones,
one you have essentially zero latency.
That's for the recording and for the monitoring.
That is the biggest deal that you can ever worry about and that is monitoring.
You want to be able to hear what your voice sounds like, what kind of background noise
there is and right now, I got quite a bit of background noise.
The reason being is I'm in my work van.
I'm in a RAM 1500, whatever, ProMaster you want to call it and I am driving on the most
rocky of back roads and hopefully you won't be able to tell.
I say hopefully because all of these audio processing algorithms have their own strengths
and weaknesses, they can tune out certain things and tune up certain things.
They can make your voice sound studio quality with a couple of clicks and ticks and s's
and who knows what, maybe they'll take care of plosives better.
Maybe not, but that's where proper mic technique comes in and speaking of proper mic technique,
I'm not doing the best job at it, but I'm doing as much as I possibly can.
Then coming into it, say, no, no, that's another topic.
I'm going on rabbit trails.
My point is this is an opener for episode two of the Cloudcasts, how to record a podcast
segment.
This one is just showing you, I decided to record this episode while I'm in my vehicle
driving to a job that is pretty far away, so I have some drive time, but I'm in the
least audio treated area you could ever imagine.
As an example, as this is still on topic, on audio treatment, I spoke with a lady who's
trying to get the best possible sounding audio quality, essentially audio book recording
audio quality, and she has a room setup that was built custom, just a few sound panels
on the wall, but the reverb is insane.
And I'm in an untreated van with nothing but hard surfaces, nonporous materials everywhere,
everywhere around me, everything's plastic, everything's glass, everything's just rickety
and shaky, and even then, the podcast will turn out better than, I want to say, 70% of
other podcasts out there, because there is a good amount of high quality audio out there,
but still, there is an even greater amount of garbage quality audio.
And all you have to do is run a few effects through Audacity or Fertiloupe Studio or Premiere
Pro, I think Premiere Pro is, no, Adobe Audition, you can run through any of these programs,
use any audio filtering you want, and you're still miles ahead by applying one filter.
That's what I'm getting at here.
Get to recording and get to sending something out there.
Don't take Claude's inconsistent upload schedule as an example.
There are plenty of people more dedicated than I am as far as consistency of recording
and uploading, but not as good in the audio quality department.
I'm not the best, not by a long shot, but I still only want to produce something that
people could actually suffer through.
So, be that as it may, this episode is actually about art and about naming your show.
My question is, how will you name your show?
What is your show about?
Is your show about quilting?
Like I mentioned in the last episode, is your show about minor league baseball?
Is it about little league baseball?
You want to talk about being a coach of a little league team because there are no shows
that, well, I mean, I haven't looked into it, but let's just say you've looked into
it and you haven't found any show that tells you how to be a coach in little league baseball,
and you decide to do the entire world a favor by putting a show out there that talks about
dealing with all of the other parents that don't agree with the rulings to deal with
other parents who are a little more competitive than even their children are.
Whatever the case may be.
You want to coach little league and you want to help people understand what it means to
be on a little league team, everything in that nature.
I don't know a single thing about little league baseball.
I don't know a single thing about mighty, mighty tykes or little tykes or mighty mikes
or whatever you call that minor league football team.
Nothing.
But you do.
So when it comes to naming your show, you want something that is in the lingo of that
field.
So if I was doing something for, I don't know, let's say restoration because I have experience
in restoration or finished carpentry or framing will come up with a few names for podcasts
about all the topics.
Now it's hard for me to imagine someone doing a podcast about framing.
It's hard for me to see someone doing a podcast about finished carpentry podcast.
And I'm saying that specifically because I think a podcast is audio only video only
or sorry, video podcasts are just videos.
So you can call it a masterclass.
You can call it a YouTube channel.
You can call it a video docu series.
Call it whatever you want.
But I wouldn't necessarily call it a podcast.
Either way, if I was purely thinking of the naming for that subject matter, that being,
let's say, restoration, I want to talk about everything that the restoration world is about.
Let's just say I would come up with a name that sounds something similar to read in on
restoration or water logs, something like this.
Waterlogged, something like that.
Something where it's little punchy, little catchy, little tongue-in-cheek or something
that has the subject matter of the podcast.
Also the content of the podcast kind of in the name.
I would suggest that people get a little bit creative with their naming structure because
this is your show.
This is your baby.
This is your art project.
This shows how creative you are.
This also shows creativity aside, not everyone's creative.
You could just be as upfront as you want.
Restoration podcast.
I mean, that's better for SEO, I would say.
Much better for SEO.
But how do you want to represent your podcast is up to you and your personality.
That's also a big thing.
If I'm a person who likes to be a little bit fun, I'll say fun.
Fun is a word, whatever.
If you want to be fun with it, then do what I did.
But if you want to be just clear, just set in your ways, like as an example, you have
the Huberman Labs podcast.
Andrew Huberman.
He's a neuropsychologist, neuroscientist at Stanford.
He's got one of the best podcasts when it comes to health, wellness, anything that you
want to know about health, anything you want to know about science and medicine.
And it's wonderful.
It's well produced.
He's a great host.
He's good at what he does.
But there's not much creativity involved.
There is a little bit.
It's got his last name and it's got the word labs.
I mean, that's kind of cool.
Oh, he's got his own lab, but it's a podcast.
That's kind of cool.
But you know that it's got something to do with laboratory things.
A laboratory, a laboratory, however you want to pronounce it, wherever you're from.
But that's the idea.
That's the idea of his show.
So speaking of the idea of your show, what exactly do you have in mind for your own show?
If you're on a podcasting 2.0 enabled application, go ahead and set in a boost.
Any amount doesn't matter.
I don't think there's a minimum.
I think you can do one Satoshi.
Just send in whatever you want and let me know what your name, the name of your show
is or what you want it to be.
And we'll talk about it.
I mean, we can if you want.
We can if you want.
If you just want to use this as a springboard and you don't want to really have interaction,
that's fine.
Just think about that specifically when it comes to the beginnings of your show.
What your name, what the name of your show is basically sets the tone for the rest of
the podcast.
The rest of your production is basically based on that.
Moving on to choosing art.
Because artwork is, it's either overlooked or, what is it?
It's either overlooked or the main focus.
And that's, well not always, but it's post off in that.
It's either overlooked where it's just some random piece of nonsense that you can find
on Unsplash or it's something that's so highly produced that the rest of the show is kind
of like, like you'd think, hey, where did the content go?
Is it just the really cool album art?
Like I get it.
You got some gems in here, but it seems like your personality is lacking a bit.
That's just my own, my own critique of most people's artwork.
Your artwork doesn't have to be done by your own hand.
It doesn't have to be done professionally.
Just produce it well.
Make sure that it shows up.
When you're looking at artwork on your smartphone, you see a pretty large image whenever it comes
to the, what you call it, the app that you choose to use.
Most apps don't actually produce a large enough image file for the searching of the
applications, or excuse me, searching of the podcasts.
Reason being is, my goodness, that's a little bit of up talk there.
The reason being for the small size of the thumbnail of your artwork is that we're trying
to fit as many podcasts in this search feed as possible.
So we're going to shrink down the size of the image to something that's recognizable.
Sure, if you have a consistent album art cover.
That's at the expense of not showing everything you may have in your image.
So if you have small text, as far as let's say you have a portrait shot of yourself.
And let's say you have a pretty big, a pretty big portrait shot of yourself.
So you know who you are, and you got some decent lighting on your photos.
It's good.
You want your photo, you're a good looking person.
You want people to know that this is the host.
Okay.
What about your name of your show?
How big is the font?
Is it behind your head?
That's taking away from the name of the show.
That's fine because it's already in the title.
Is it very small and in the bottom corner?
What if I have to squint to look at it?
Not everyone has as good eyesight as you do if you have good eyesight.
And if you have poor eyesight, not everyone has as poor eyesight as you do.
You want something that's kind of in the middle.
You can use only text and even that's alright.
Why not?
Go for it.
That's kind of cool sometimes where you have just simply text on the screen saying,
I mean, for example, Restoration Podcast.
I bet.
Now I know.
It's like, that's pretty intense.
You have it on the title and on the image.
Now I know what I'm looking for and I know you got what I'm looking for.
Cool.
When it comes to commissioning someone to do the artwork for you, do you know any artists
personally?
Do you know anyone that is in your family line, your close circle of friends?
If you're trying to do a podcast, you are either, well, not either.
There's not only two options, but there's a possibility that you are an outgoing person.
There's a possibility that you have a little bit of extraversion in you.
So you should have a decent number of people that you are around that you've made friends
with in the past that should have some sort of creativity in their background as well.
But in a different sense, like artistry, why don't you ask them if they want to do a commission
for you?
A value for value proposition.
I'm going to produce a really valuable podcast, I believe.
Would you mind putting out some artwork for me?
Maybe they're not seeing the value exchange as being comparable.
So at that point, just offer something in return that you may have if you live the value
for value lifestyle.
The way I see it is kind of the iron ran version of things from Atlas Shrugged.
So if I'm going to, I don't receive things for free.
That's not like someone had to work for it.
So if I value what you gave, what you provided for me, I will return that value back in some
way, shape or form.
If you tell me you're not going to take money, all right, I still owe you something.
It doesn't have to be money, but I still owe you something and I will provide that value
back.
So that's kind of where I'm at on commissioning people to do things for you.
Do your very best to provide value back if someone provided value to you.
Something of which this episode is actually going to be a little bit shorter and I'm going
to round it out with the value for value segment and that will be with recognizing a certain
someone who came back after a year of me being on hiatus, but I'll get back to that.
Finding your artwork.
I just learned about a thing about artificial intelligence that and every time I say the
word artificial intelligence, I intend to preface that with the idea that there's nothing
intelligent about it.
There's nothing special about it.
It's simply an algorithm, a good one at that for what it does and what it claims to do.
Sure, I can agree with that, but there's nothing inherently special or intelligent about the
algorithm and there's actually a growing amount of evidence that it will implode or just destroy
itself because if it is a self-learning algorithm, the 0.1% of error margin that it has will compound
in a snowball effect that it learns on that isn't corrected because that small margin
of error is acceptable to humans so we allow it to pass through until the next training
protocol where it's still somewhat acceptable, but now the entire data set has trained on
it and it just continues to fail and get worse.
Either way.
There are some decent and mid-journey.
Mid-journey is a decent AI art generator.
It tends to make things look a little bit more like they came from DeviantArt, the website
if you wanted to look into that, but if you wanted to, you can put in the right prompts
for any of these AI image generators.
If you know how to write the prompt properly, then you should be able to get any style of
artwork that you desire.
If you wanted to use a completely free, without any restrictions, I would say.
Except for, I mean, no NSFW stuff or anything like that.
You could use dolly2 and I will have that linked in the chapter art of this episode.
There's going to be a minimal amount of chapters in this episode and this is going to be a
shorter one because this topic does not need to be explained too much.
Most people get the idea of how to name their own show.
They already have a name in mind.
Most people have the idea of what kind of artwork they have in mind, but this is not
everyone is the same.
This is for the people that don't have that in their mindset.
And I'm even thinking about adding a part two to the part one on how to record, how
to start recording because not everyone gets the idea of how audacity works innately to
understand even which button is the record button.
Excuse me, button.
Still, this is for those people.
Use a website that can build your artwork for you.
If you want something more simple, just like in the sense of a logo almost, you can go
to Canva, canva.com and they produce decent looking logos for cheap if you don't want
to do anything extremely special, but it is acceptable.
It's somewhat corporate.
There's almost not any distinguishability of your artwork if someone else uses the same
service, but you can get kind of crazy with the color scheme.
You can get kind of crazy with some of the glyphs that you can add.
It gets pretty crazy if you know what you're doing, if you don't and you want something
standard and you think your content's quality is better than your artwork or power to you.
At that point, keep it up.
Keep going with the way you already have your mindset going.
Don't let Claude change your mind.
This is for the people who don't know.
If you do know, you may as well have skipped this episode completely, but this is for everyone
who doesn't know.
And that's what I'm trying to cater this towards, the people who are just starting
and the people who want just a little bit more information, a few resources that maybe
they haven't heard of or maybe they haven't thought of using in this way.
Last but not least, before I get to the value for value, which will round this segment out,
as always, I have to shout out this product because it is phenomenal in how well it can
do to clean up the audio and hopefully by the end of this episode, or excuse me, by
the time I upload it and when I go through it, I will notice the difference and you will
have not.
But right about now, I'll go ahead and just let some of the background noise that you
didn't hear much of throughout the episode, just bleed through the recording so you can
hear what I'm talking about as far as background noise that this tool cleaned up and just,
it's just unbelievable as far as untreated rooms, you'll hear what I'm talking about.
But I'm also using a secret weapon that has a noise gate that already cuts out most of
the noise.
So that's going to be episode three, I think I already mentioned that on how to record
a little bit better and cleaner, I think I mentioned that before, either episode three
or four will be the best way to get the best initial audio versus doing way too much editing
in the back end.
So for now, that's it, the last tool that I wanted to mention that I've been dancing
around for a second, Adobe Speech Enhance.
I think everyone who's mentioned this tool on YouTube has been paid to do it.
I haven't, I'm a podcaster, I have not enough listenership to even get on anyone's radar,
but this is something that you should get on if you don't have the best recording environment
but you really want to record a show.
Start using the tools that you have at your disposal to get better sounding audio quality
even though you can't afford the massive studio.
There you go, that's my endorsement.
It is paid now for less, it is paid for the full suite that was there in beta, but you
have it.
So as a last point of note, I'm going to go ahead and get into the value for value segment
right about now.
And this one is not going to be the longest one, this is going to be a little bit of a
short one because this came from, this boost came from Ptar.
Ptar, glad to see you too buddy, glad to see you too.
He says glad to see you back bud with a melting face emoji.
I'm glad Fountain supports emojis now, but yes, yes it has been quite a long time, there's
been a few job shifts, there's been a few changes in Claude's life, there's been quite
a bit that's gone on since the last episode and yikes, yikes.
I'll save this for another episode, there's been a major development that a lot of people
disagree with, but then again, it's just something, I'll save that for the next episode, or another
one in the future if I get poked and prodded enough by enough people.
But for now, yeah, thank you, thank you, it's always great to talk to you, it's always great
to get support from you, to get everything that I can from you, so thank you very much
Ptar for the boost, thank you for being around for so long, thanks for supporting the podcasting
2.0 community, community, thanks for everything you do for everyone, not just for me, it's
just encouraging to have someone that's been in your corner since the very beginning.
Anyway, that one's gonna round this one out guys, very short, very sweet, very simple,
just a quick one, why not?
And I'll catch you guys in the next one where we talk about more on how to podcast.