Here at Booktalk, we just got word from the Deborah J. Ledford, our first  guest author and the lead editor of So West, So Wild that the anthology is a finalist for Best Anthology of 2011 in Suspense Magazine! Big shout outs to all the authors who participated in the collection, including our very own Dr. Howard Carron and recent guest Martin Roselius!

Check out the December 2011 issue of Suspense Magazine for more info!

A few weeks back I designed a logo for Booktalk, but I never actually, you know, put it on anything. (Well, I did attach it to our iTunes feed, but that’s about it.) So today I took some time and fixed that. Here’s the latest ad for Booktalk along with a QR code pointing at our website!

After a thirty-five year career in the graphic design/marketing communications field as a designer, illustrator, and copywriter, the last fifteen of which he was the principle of his own design firm, he retired with his wife, two adult children, and three grandchildren to the warm, dry climate offered by Arizona, where he lives in Scottsdale and pursues his passion for writing.

Read more about him on his website!

Join Howard, Tony, and Dan along with special guests Martin and Sherry Roselius and Karrie Romero as they dramatize a story by Martin Roselius – Nightfall on Black Beach! This suspenseful little tale puts you on a beautiful dark beach, almost as dark as the events that happened there.

Credits:

Image- Richard Thripp

Incidental music – Sonic Wallpaper: Arpegallegiance

In this episode (Episode 05), we find Tony and Dan, still heavily caffeinated, in a race to drive from the far Northwest Valley back to Phoenix, Arizona to do yet another show at the State Library! It’s gonna be another long drive, so our boys are going to need a little something extra to get them through. Naturally, the consequences will be grave, yet the results will be hilarious!

Big shout outs to Tony for providing the rockin’ guitar riffs and guitar based sound effects!

Well, the good news is that it’s dead simple to do and you can make a really decent podcast with the simplest of tech. Indeed, you probably have most of this stuff lying around your library right now. For this little tutorial series, I’ll go over the basics of what you need, what we use here on BookTalk, and what else you can do to liven things up.

The Basics

At its heart, all you need to record a podcast is something that will record digital audio and then a computer to upload the audio the Internet. There are digital audio recorders out there with prices varying from tens of dollars to around a couple of hundred dollars. My recommendation is that you use a laptop computer, a microphone, and some kind of audio recording software to do the job. This is a very compact, easily portable system that you can take anywhere. Let’s take a look at the basic equipment.

The computer-

A laptop computer makes for a really decent podcast recording platform because of its versatility and its portability. Not only can you record the podcast on it, but you can use it to edit your audio, prepare it for upload, and then upload it to the Net for all to listen to. You don’t need a high end machine at all. You’ll want something with a modern processor (say, three years old or younger), a microphone jack (you’d actually have to look for one without such a thing), a headphone jack (ditto), and at least two GB of RAM (if you’re using Linux, you could probably get away with less). Almost any hard drive that comes with almost any computer made in the last five years will be more than large enough to hold your audio data so that’s not a big concern there.

Seriously, there are some high end netbooks out there that will do the job.

The microphone-

You need at least one microphone. If you’re going to have quite a few people in on the podcast, you’ll want to get something decent that picks up sound from all around it. For this, you’l want something called an omnidirectional dynamic microphone. To translate that jargon, you’ll want a microphone that picks up sound from all around (omnidirectional) and converts that sound to digital input (dynamic) for your computer. Most of these modern microphones are fairly inexpensive and plug into your USB port. See our section on what we use on BookTalk for some recommendations.

The software-

There are tonnes of applications out there for the recording of audio. In my opinion, one of the best is Audacity. Audacity is a free, open source programme which does a fantastic job of recording multi-track audio. Not that you need multi-track audio for your podcast, but it also does single track just fine. For such a robust, multiple purpose bit of audio software, you can’t beat the price and the quality.

What We Use

Now then, please don’t look at our set up as something you must absolutely have to record a podcast. What we use, and why we use it, is a study in special circumstances. See, before I became a librarian, I was a theater geek, and I mean a professional theatre geek. I went to a high school with a professional grade stage and there was a stage craft class that I absolutely adored. I learned everything from stage carpentry to lighting to, you guessed it, audio engineering and soundboard. Here at our library, we happen to employ several people with musical abilities and, thus, we formed a library band. (I mean, wouldn’t you?)

So some of the things we use pulls double duty for our show and for the band.

Okay, we clear on that? Good. Now, here’s what we use.

The Laptop-

We use a Toshiba Satellite laptop computer. It’s no dream machine, but it’s got a decent processor and 4GB of RAM. It runs Windows 7 which, as a computer geek, I make sing and dance and bend it to my will quite nicely.

The Microphones-

We use two different kinds of mics. There are the Audix OM-2 microphones that we use with the band and for recording spoken word, but there are also two USB microphones that we have running around here. Now, the funny thing is that those USB mics are from the video games Rock Band and Guitar Hero. Yes, they’re video game microphones used to sing along with a rhythm game. However, they’re USB microphones and they’re actually pretty respectible for recording to a computer. Just plug in a mic, and you’re set.

Also, can’t beat the price. The Audix microphones cost over a hundred dollars per unit. The USB microphones from the video games? You can pick those up for around twenty dollars and they do a very good job.

The Audio Mixer-

Remember, I came from a theatre background. So, while I’m not a professional audio engineer, I know what a decent audio mixing board can do for you and how it can help with your recording. We use a Behringer Xenyx 802 mixer which you can snag for $45 – $60 depending on the site you visit. It’s inexpensive, but it allows us to use multiple microphones, with independent volume controls, and hook them all to one computer. This way, if you have a presenter who’s a little quiet, you can turn them up. Ditto for someone who’s loud, and you can turn them down. While you don’t need a mixing board, it really helps the quality of your podcast.

The Software-

We use two different software programmes for audio recording and editing. Part of this goes back to being a musician and recording my own stuff.

To actually record the podcast, I use Audacity. It’s basically a fire and forget solution. Hit the big, shiny red button, and you’re recording. Monitor your levels using the sound board and the only time you have to touch Audacity again is when you stop the recording and save it.

To edit the podcast, I use Adobe Audition. It’s a pretty expensive app that I have a long history with from recording my own songs at home. See, I used to use a multi-track recording package called Cool Edit Pro. It was a brilliant piece of software that I was intimately familiar with because I used it for, well, everything audio related. I still use Cool Edit Pro, except that Adobe bought the company who made it, renamed the product as Audition, and changed very little else. So basically I use Audition because it’s what I’ve used for years.

There are very few things that you can do in Audition that you can’t do in Audacity. I use Audition to add sound effects to our recording. You can do that in Audacity. I use it to edit out mistakes, bad takes, and other undesirable stuff. You can definitely do that in Audacity. I use it to mix everything together, edit volume control, and filter out some background noise. You can do all of that in Audacity as well.

But for the length of time that I’ve used Audition, I’ve developed a workflow and I can do it five times faster in Audtion than I can in any other software package. So don’t feel like you have to drop the money for it. I use it because I know it. You can learn to do the same thing in Audacity.

Now then, stay tuned for Part Two, in which we’ll go over the basics of recording and editing your podcast!

• Summer (which is like Christmas for librarians)
• Hospital visits and surgery (Doc is recovering nicely and we look forward to his triumphant return!)
• Moving the site
• Equipment failure (a failed hard drive can really kill plans)

We are making our return to the Internet on August 5th!

After we put on our show at the Adult Services Retreat, we were invited to perform again at the Arizona State Library! We’re very honoured and delighted that Shayna Muckerheide caught our act and liked it enough to ask us over to play at the Adult Services Summit being held at the historic Carnegie Library in Phoenix.

Once again, we’ll be recording a podcast live and in front of librarians from all over the State of Arizona. Our show will be a sequel to Caffeinated Roadrunning, so if you’ve not listened in on that one yet, go catch up! It’s short and I’m told it’s funny.

We’re recording in the afternoon and Dan should have everything edited and online by the evening of August 5th.

Thanks for listening and checking out our new site. We’re looking forward to hitting the Internet once more!

While Blogger was a nice place to start our little podcasting experiment, we quickly saw that we needed more and by “more” we knew we needed our own site. We wanted to create something with a more modern, and attractive, look where you could come and listen to the shows, read about our authors, maybe learn a little a little about podcasting, and more!

We’re still getting things hammered down around here so some stuff may come and go and get broken as things progress, but for the most part, we’re ready to show the world our new home.

We took a bit of a hiatus over the summer because of a bunch of things dropping at the same time, not the least of which was the creation and launch of our new site. We’re going to be back in August with new shows (more on that soon) and we’ll be updating this site more frequently with shows, articles, how-tos, and all kinds of stuff.

Thanks for visiting, and join us for BookTalk. We’ll be back on the Net with a new show on August 5th!

Murder to Mil-Spec

Featuring TOURADA A CORDA by our very own Howard Carron!

Buy it now on Amazon!

Since 2006, Wolfmont has published a yearly anthology to benefit some worthy cause, raising thousands of dollars in donations. This year’s anthology, MURDER TO MIL-SPEC, benefits Homes for Our Troops (www.homesforourtroops.org). Dehumanizing? That’s how some people think of the military, and of war. But the truth is, life-threatening conflict and being pushed to our utmost can often bring out the very most human parts of us, those parts in which we can take the most pride.

Here are twelve authors’ stories of the humanity of veterans and active-duty military-stories that display to us just how human we can be, no matter how stressful the situation is, and how honor and courage-ancient military traditions-live on.

“The authors are, without exception, experienced novelists and crafters of shorter fiction. Experience shows. It shows in the overall excellent quality of stories ranging from WWII-era to Afghanistan. They are by turns, bitter and surprising, tender and real. These stories… accurately recall and reflect military and home-front actions and attitudes.” -Carl Brookins, author of DEVILS ISLAND

“World War II, Vietnam, Afghanistan, anywhere-all wars are hell, interrupted by moments of valor and selflessness, and all wars live on in the hearts and minds of those who fight them. This extraordinary collection of stories brings to vivid life the men and women who fight for their country, their triumphs and occasional failures, their scarring and their redemption. There are stories in this book I’ll never forget, and no one who reads it will look at the news the same way again.” -Tim Hallinan, author of the Poke Rafferty series

“Wolfmont Press has again gathered a group of talented authors to ply their trade on behalf of a worthy cause… something every reader should place high on their must read list.” -Allan Ansorge, author of the Bay Harbor series