Austin's podcast

This Meetup for the Beginners was held on 22 April 2009 at the Central Market - North location (in the COMMUNITY ROOM), 4001 North Lamar Blvd., Austin, Texas. Plenty of free parking was available.

We pretty much follwed the agenda for this Session that was oriented toward the BEGINNING PODCASTERS

We had our full and display of podcast equipment/software/books - including three Zoom Portable Recorders (Zoom H4, Zoom H2 and the new Zoom H4N)

After we got to know Armando, Karen Kreps and John Mayo had arrived at the start of the meeting. We then had our update and demo of the portable recorders for podcasts of the Zoom Hx Family, including a demo (some of which is in the audio podcast episode)of the NEW Zoom H4N.

We spoke about different tools--including the free version 3.0 of Camtasia Studio from TechSmith (version 3 only), the MP3 Tag Tools editor for ID3 tags, which you can get for free at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/massid3lib

We then focused on Audacity (free software on all platforms). You can get a free copy from:
http://www.audacity.sourceforge.net

We referred to the six Camtasia video tutorials from Jason Van Orden at web site:
http://www.how-to-podcast-tutorial.com/17-audacity-tutorial.htm

And then we had a brief demo of editing features and tools within Audacity as we created an audio track, used fade-in and fade-out tools with some imported audio bed music that I had licensed from www.michaelandmike.com, and then we showed how to synchronize, overlay and create a WAV file of one track with 2 stereo channels. Finally, we showed how to use the LEVELATOR free software (from IT Conversations at the Conversations Network -- originally Gigavox) to equalize and "levelate" the wav file with a new name extension of .output.
Lastly, we created the mp3 file by exporting it and then edited the file and included a graphic as the podcast badge by using the MP3 Tag Tools utility.

A great evening of sharing information and assisting one another, the general feeling was that it was of great value to the members who attended--so much that almost all of them are feeling empowered to attend the May 18th session for the Intermediate and Advanced podcasters.

thanks for your support, and we shall see you on May 18th at 7pm in the COMMUNITY ROOM of the Central Market- North location at 4001 North Lamar.

Sincerely,
Fred Castaneda
Organizer for 2008-9
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P.S.: For those of you who wish to get an UNEDITED REVIEW (IN 2 PARTS) of the new Zoom H4N portable audio recorder, here is my summary and evaluation when I received mine during this last week:

(1) General review (30 minutes) at:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/fgcastgain/SOP-review-ZoomH4N-18Apr09-STE-005.mp3

(2) Additional words about the $29 remote control unit which is an extra option that is not included with the main unit:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/fgcastgain/ZoomH4N-addl-remote-ctl-STE-006.mp3

For those of you who want to see a 2:47 promotional video from the CES event in Las Vegas earlier this year about the Zoom H4N:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yGObJmUifs