FIRSTcast is here
 

Ladies and Gentlemen, without further adieu, here is Episode 1 of FIRSTcast, the original podcast of FIRST!

The main page has been updated, and you can find the link to download the mp3 files here: http://podcast.openfirst.org/. Alternatively, go straight here for the links. Enjoy, and keep on podding.

Re: FIRSTcast is here
 

Yay. FIRSTcast!

I'm listening to it now.

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Yay, I'm keeping up the torrent all night to help with seeding!

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Glad to hear it, keep seeding guys we appreciate it, and we can't wait for your feedback!

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It's very refreshing.

Reminds me a lot of listing to radio chatter at the airport. Not a bad thing, it made me smile quite a bit.

Good job.

-Andy A.

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It is good to see young people taking initiative and having fun with a project of their own during the summer. :)

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Thank you guys for seeding! Takes a load off our backs.

Hope you guys enjoy the show, we tried to make it the best possible. And as the Audio Producer, the clarity probably should improve in the coming podcast's.

Enjoy the show, and watch out for more!

ps-iTunes decided not to list it yet, the RSS feed is submitted but they don't want to show it. Just use the torrents or http downloads and you'll get it for now.

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Might I recomend cutting out the white noise?

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Just finished listening. Pretty cool thing you got there. Looking forward to future episodes. Also looking forward to debating some opinions. (disagree with the "outgrew Disney" comment, but everyone is entitled to an opinion.) Keep up the work!

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great first show..

everyone has their opinion on where the championship is lol... but it's all good.

i can't wait to hear future episoides.. it was my break between studying lol..

thanks for doing it and keep up the great work!

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I'd just like to remind everyone to send in your questions for the mailbag to firstpodcastatgmaildotcom :) Many more questions are needed. Let's help the creators make this a kicking show!

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This isn't a question more advice really. If you want good robotics material on current research go to www.robots.net its trully aa amazing site! I highly recomend this to all FIRSTers.

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Is there a way to elimnate the dead air that sometimes comes up? I know things like that happen in conversation, but can it be fixed in post-production without making it sound weird? Overall, sounds good!

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OK, I'll post my review:

I liked it. Like Andy A, I found the show very refreshing - it's nice to hear voices discussing FIRST after all these years of just reading these kinds of discussions on CD. You guys had a good idea with a lot of potential, and kudos for making something of it.
All that being said, there's always room for improvement, so I'm gonna offer you my suggestions.

A few tips on what I think would make the show sound more professional:

• In general, I'd like to hear more evidence of scripting and organization - presenting a scripted and detailed outline at the beginning of the show would be great, as well announcing it when you get to the beginning of each part.
• It would be a good idea to have and use a set script for the things that won't change between shows - the host introductions, the explanation of what FIRSTcast is about, the thank-yous and goodbyes, etc.
• I'd personally appreciate it if you guys would always reference each other by name when passing off the discussion to each other - that way I won't forget which voice belongs to who.
• Having a longer lead in/out song(s) would be cool.
• Lastly, I know you can't do much about it since you're not all speaking from the same location, but an increase in sound quality would be nice - I noticed a bit of a lag between one person and another (maybe this could be edited out?).

Now a couple of content suggestions:
I liked your idea of having a tip of the week, and I think it would be cool to expand this concept to having a team of the week, and a mentor of the week - so that FIRSTcast isn't just limited to discussion. These would probably work best in interview format - someone would volunteer and answer general-type questions about their team and how it works. As for the mentor, you could probably get anyone who's well-known around these parts and ask them UFH-interview-type questions.

Nice job on the first episode, and good luck in the future!

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Playing now! Can't wait to hear it! :)

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Hey, Hey, Hey, SF Astroworld isn't that bad. They have and S&S Sky Swatter, a heart line twister, and an Intamin Stand Up... what more could you ask for?

Re: FIRSTcast is here
 

We're working on improving the detail of our scripting, but we want to be careful not to lose the free form the show has also, that's where most of the fun is for us :)

Things like intros and sign offs are going to be set in the future to keep it neat, we're still hammering out a lot of the little details on them.

We don't want the songs to be too long because the show is getting longer in the next few episodes we're expecting, and the file size is already painful for 56kers, extra song is unnecessary and worsens that. We're looking in to acquiring higher grade microphones and as always trying to tweak our systems for the best recording performance. Also we're working on the sound quality and voice lag, go easy on Conor though, for someone who just jumped in to this stuff, he did a very good job.

As far as content goes, we're going to try to have weekly guests, which are going to add a lot to the show we hope. We don't want to directly endorse any teams of the week or mentors of the week though because not everyone likes everyone else and we're trying to avoid any potential minefields, since I'm told our own discussions are already politically volatile :)

Thanks for your comments and we look forward to more feedback from you guys and girls in the FIRST world!

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Like I said earlier, the show will really appeal to anyone who is into ham radio or spends a lot of time on VOX. There is no gentle fade in fade out as you get in person or over the phone.

I kinda think it gives the show a high tech modern sound, but I can understand why it could make listening difficult.

The trick is to shorten the dead space between vocals, generate a white noise between (as if the mic never turned off- like a radio show) and remove the VOX clap at the beginning and end of each transmission. A quick fade in and out at the beginning and end of each vocal would help a lot. Audacity can also subtract some of the mic-on whitenoise, but because of all the diffrent mics and noise levels, it would take a long time to subtract the noise from each speakers sections. Probably more work then you want.

Audacity is capable of all this, it's just repetitive as all getout. I don't know of anyway to automate this or prevent having to do it in the first place. If you wanted to, you could all use a button to turn on the mic a moment before speaking, where as right now it sounds as if you all use a VOX system to just turn the mic on as soon as you start talking.

But I still like radio chatter.
-Andy A.

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Ok just a notice:
All questions for use in this week's edition for the Mailbag should be submitted by this Wednesday at 3:00 EST. Theres no guarantee we will use you question this episode but we'll probably get back to them at some point or another.

As for the Audio:
I'm having a lot of fun doing this and I'm learning a lot, I know theres a lot of dead space and udder silence. I'm working on it for next show, you'll hear it improve. But heck, I'm a first time audio producer in high school, so I got time to improve. It's not like i'm getting paid for this....yet. But i'm trying, be assured of that.

If anyone has an in at iTunes, ask them to list FirstCast ASAP. For now you can keep searching iTunes for it. But i reconmend sticking with the http or torrent download for the time being.

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I just finished listing to it, I thought it was good for the first episode most of all my suggestions have already been made by other people.
I cant wait to hear the next show and I hope one day that I can be a guest speaker.

Keep up the good work

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The first FIRSTCast (hehe) was about fifteen minutes long. In my experience, voice recordings can be compressed without significant quality loss to pretty small. The rule of thumb for CD-quality is "a meg a minute," but I have compressed podcasts to about a quarter-meg a minute. I have found 48kbps or even 32kbps at mono (this is key!) to be entirely acceptable.

If you are particularly concerned with 56kers, just keep a "high fidelity" copy just the way you're compressing now, and release a "low fidelity" copy compressed with LAME Mp3 at 32kbps mono. A fifteen minute show would be only 5.3 megs. The audio might not be as good, but it will be good enough to listen to and you could produce a show twice the length of the first episode at the same filesize.

PM me if you want more details.

Re: FIRSTcast is here
 

A minor correction/clarification folks.

I was listening to episode 1 to help determine what to change with episode 2 and I realized a statement I made would be very easy to misinterpret.

Whilst discussing early regionals vs late regionals I mentioned the field and scoring computer troubles at the early regionals. I've noticed that it could be easily taken as a jab at IFI for software problems that weren't their fault. It was not, I was merely commenting that on top of setting up for first week competitions they also had to work the bugs out of yet another scoring system. I meant no blame or otherwise negative will towards IFI, or Hatch Technologies for that matter. I hope I haven't offended anyone at either company and I will be a little more careful with my wording in the future :)

Sorry guys!