How We Produce Our Programs
(August 2007)
We start having questions about how we produce our shows, so, here we are, telling you how we do it and, hopefully, if you, so desire, can do this yourself.
Web Development
We host our site at a web hosting company in the USA, we were aware of the company because of the podcast that we usually listen to, Diggnation, and some other shows also confirm their reputations.
Passakorn write all pages himself, learning how to do it by reading books (we refer to these in the section below), putting them all in Thai and English. Since we do not know much about how to use photo editors, so our site is not graphic-intensive. The site gets new look every time Passakorn manages to learn something new from the books.
Piyatad wrote the logos from Passakorn's specifications. They were prepared in haste due to the urgency to have them in time for iTunes submission. Beauty became a second priority.
Music
During our first year (Aug 2006 - Aug 2007), we asked two friends for favors, and they were
- Introduction music is composed and produced by Nophawan Totassa.
- Longer Introduction music is composed and produced by Rud Sooparb.
However, since we switched to a MAC, we are using more and more jingles from Garage Band.
Recording on Windows
Aug'06 - May'07. We use the well-known Open Source program, Audacity, this is distributed under the GNU General Public Licence, it is very easy to use and fairly reliable. The microphone is a free one that we received with a Fujitsu notebook 8 years ago. The computer is a two-year-old IBM Thinkpad X31.
Recording on Mac
As of June 2007, we use MAC primarily for our web development and podcast production. So we use what comes with a standard MacBook Pro, these are iLife'06; Garage Band and iMovie. We use Belkin's TuneTalk for microphone. We find the mic that comes with MacBook Pro is not good enough.
iTUNES Submission and RSS / XML
Koson took care of the iTunes part., while Passakorn prepares the RSS files for each program.
Routine Process
There is nothing new about web development and voice recording, they are straight forward. After a recording is finished, we edit for commercial breaks, using Audacity (on Windows platform), and Gigavox's Levelator (for both Windows and Mac platforms) for smoothing the voice file, re-write the RSS file and upload the voice file, web page and the RSS file to the server. iTunes submission is a one-time thing, iTunes takes care of updating the info itself via RSS feed.
Reference Sites
What we mention on this page is not a secret. You may want to explore a more detailed information at About.com. It is also very enlightening to hear it from a pro himself, Leo Porte from This Week in Tech , he explains in detail how he produces the program and also points out all equipment that he use.