Re: FIRSTcast: What do you want?
 

Few more topics

Game speculation for next year

Repeating robot designs over the past years

You could maybe have an episode about a special way to construct things or .. swerve drive, crab drive etc, and how to do it properly

Interview big name team leaders and ask them what makes their team so successful and stuff like that..

You have already been doing some of this - I like FIRSTcast

-Bharat

Re: FIRSTcast: What do you want?
 

I think you need to examine the value of the "radio" format. What can you get out of radio/podcast/auditory media that you can't get out of textual information? The following things come to mind

• Getting a sense of people's personality. Hearing someone speak carries a great deal of peripheral information along with the actual substance of what is being said. Use this to your advantage, interview "famous names", people FIRSTers may want to get a better sense of outside their incredibly witty ChiefDelphi posts.
• Music!

Outside of those elements, I can't really see the advantage of "podcasting" (a term I absolutley cannot stand) over textual media.

A large part of what goes in to a good broadcast is the personality of the hosts. For instance, I feel I could recognize Matt Krass at a competition from hearing his voice and general mannerism of speech. Others on the show are a bit more reserved... I feel like I'm listening to NPR. Listen to a lot of good traditional radio hosts (Art Bell on Coast to Coast, despite having a lot of really insane guests, has an interesting style, and the BBC is the gold standard) and do what they do.

Oh, and I'd like to be on some time, I just need to cobble together a decent audio set up for recording.

Oh, and the most recent show is under-edited. If you aren't live, you shouldn't ever have awkward pauses. The second show was great in this regard, nixing dead air that didn't contribute to the flow or "naturalness" of the conversations. Also, add an amplitude envelope to the beginning of hosts phrases to elimnate that "airtraffic control" feel.

Another sound-editing idea would be to record each host as a seperate audio track (each person could simply record themselves... I'm not sure if the software you use is conducive to this) so you could equalize on a host-by-host basis. Some simple equalization could go a long way in making things sound better (the again, so could better microphones ;)).

I'm still eager to volunteer as both a host or audio editing lackey.

Re: FIRSTcast: What do you want?
 

Hmm? Music? :D *pokes Conor and Matt* I have yet another supporter for adding music!

Not necessarily. Some people on our show use simply their onboard soundcard and a headset, while others some use USB headphones (like I did in Episode 2), and finally, there are a select few who use tabletop microphones.

If you do wish to be a guest star or have a request for a specific guest star, shoot an email to firstpodcast@gmail.com with what you want to talk about or what you want them to talk about on the show, and we'll see what we can do!

Actually, each host and each guest star records themselves as a seperate audio track, though a few issues beween my motherboard and Windows XP (which have already been fixed) were causing problems with spacing and tracks just spontaneously moved themselves when I was doing the exporting process.

Honestly, the original raw audio is much worse than what you hear, and there is a lot of improvement between that and the final release.

Thanks again for the suggestions. Remember everyone, anything you say on these threads will be considered (assuming that the suggestion isn't too outlandish)!