podcast delays?

I made a lot of podcasts lately because Suzy Bean made it so easy. It takes hours to mash the file, upload it, put all the right descriptions and then announce it in the appropriate places. Each time. And there are all sorts of things that can and will go wrong. Suzy Bean has it down.

And now she off seeking new adventures. It sounds like she is going to explore the country a bit. She says she will keep processing and uploading podcasts. There are quite a few in the hopper waiting for her to process. I guess we will get podcasts when we get podcasts. So all the hard work behind the last 100 podcasts or so were done by Suzy Bean. About 300 hours. And when we had technical difficulties, she went and edited a hundred podcasts, one at a time, to make them work better.

Suzy Bean is a super quiet woman. I think she says about eight words a day, and four of those are "yes!"

I guess I thought it would be good to have a thread that would let people know that there could be delays. Plus to let folks know about the huge amount of work suzy has done.

(btw, suzy bean has a paypal account: susanna.bean gmail com)

how nice, I hope she really enjoys her adventures..maybe she'll stop by if she is wandering up our way

Such a volume of great work you've done, Suzy Bean!

I received a suggestion about a different way to record the podcast thus being able to bypass the need for the work that suzy bean does. And that suggestion was to simply change how the podcast is recorded.

I want to point out that I currently use two different ways to record podcasts and then I hand the resulting file over to suzy bean. So the suggestion would make no change in that. What suzy bean does is three hours of post-processing for each podcast.

First of all, I suspect that almost nobody is capable of listening to AMR files. About 2/3 of the podcasts are in AMR format. So simply uploading AMR files won't do any good. The other format is a freaky huge MP3 file. I doubt people will want that either.

Next, I suppose that people won't want a file called "0004-201203141257.AMR" and there is zero information about what the podcast is about or even a title. I would guess that 70% of the work that Suzy Bean does is to come up with a good name and description complete with links to discussions on these topics.

Next, there is the stuff that gets embedded in the the MP3 file. This makes it so that when the file is played the name of what is being played will show up.

Finally, the file is written out in a pretty lean mp3 format. Uploaded to archive.org and then properly linked to from the podcast blog page.

It is possible that Suzy Bean does more stuff that i can't remember. But this is a big job. A job that has to be done over and over and over and over .... many people have stood up to say "I'll do it! You can count on me!" and then the task became a massive burden - weeks would pass between podcasts. It's a lot harder than you might think!