zHEIGHTgeist

I didn’t exactly rush episode 003, but I didn’t do as good a job on it as I could have.

Once again, I thought I’d fight with the condenser mic, figure out how to make it work. I built a large frame of sound-baffling panels to surround the mic on three sides, plus more panels under it, and recorded the episode repeatedly over three days. Tuesday was amazing, because it seemed I’d become endowed with the mystical ability to summon aircraft. Not only did passenger jets fly low and frequently over my apartment, I heard military craft and independent pilots taking turns. It was unrealistic.

But I recorded my tracks, listened to them, futzed with as much graphic EQ as I understand, which isn’t much, and solidified the episode.

When I listened to it the next day, when it dropped, I was heartbroken. Everything sounded crappy and… yes, I’m an amateur, but it sounded amateurish. This inferior product bothered me all day, but my wife simply reminded me that I could rerecord it at any time.

I did that tonight, Thursday, the day after release. I set up a step stool on my bed to suspend a fuzzy blanket overhead, with several sound panels inside to mute any echo off the steps—the whole thing looked like a great start to a fort—and recorded it all on my phone.

The audio files didn’t even need my usual compression/normalization/EQ fixes. I just lowered the levels on all tracks to around -6 dB, compared them repeatedly to each other, and saved them as an MP3.

Next came my education into replacing podcast episodes. WordPress makes it easy: you click on the track in the Audio Block, and it presents you with the option to replace the audio file. Bam. When that was done, all the podcasts following my WordPress RSS updated themselves.

Same thing with Spotify for Podcasters: I replaced the audio file, and it’s slowly repopulating over iHeart, Pocket Casts, Apple, Amazon, RadioPublic, &c. Now I’m trying to get the new logo to update on the various platforms, too. The old one was an AI jobber, on one of the rare occasions I was able to trick Starry AI into generating something that looked like a giantess. It had a retro look that I liked, though the hands were janky.

But what I wanted was exactly what I have now. I talked to Tail-Blazer, one of my favorite contemporary Size artists, described what I was envisioning, and he knocked it out of the park. I’d already released two episodes but the third one has the new logo, and I’ve laboriously scrubbed every trace of it out of my WordPress account (it turns up in the most unsuspected reaches), so I hope that it’ll update on the other platforms. If not, oh well, that’s just part of the murky beginnings all podcasts go through.

Oh, also, I got an account with Adobe Express because that is the most reliable way to turn an audio track and a static image into a video for YouTube. I tried it in Canva, which was free, but they only let you do that in ten-minute chunks. My episodes are longer than that, and I wasn’t going to mess around with matching up the audio between two chunks. I tried Headliner, but I’ve had nothing but problems with that “service”: they won’t let me set a password, they can’t read my RSS, and they attached the first episode’s description to the third video. I’ve reached out to their help desk, but I suspect there’s nobody at the rudder. Adobe Express works perfectly for me, and the cost is nominal. I have a tip jar on the front page but won’t call it out for a while.

So that’s that. Thanks for listening (thanks for your patience), and check out my newsletter if you like.