colophon

We record and produce using:

This website is brought to you by:

recording to podcast

timeline

The specific times can naturally vary from episode to episode, but normally:

  • the crew record the episode on the first Wednesday night after a LugRadio episode is released
  • neuro ships the master to Xalior within an hour of the end of the recording (or the conference call, whichever finishes last)
  • Xalior ships the edit back to neuro on a Thursday night and begins the show notes
  • neuro completes the edit between Friday and Sunday, and updates the site; Xalior completes the show notes from the final edit
  • neuro updates the site and uploads the episode files on Monday
  • You download the episode ;)

recording

We record a Skype conference call using HotRecorder, usually with neuro hosting and recording the conference. HotRecorder runs on a separate Skype account on a different machine from the conference host to reduce CPU load. The resulting data is exported from HotRecorder as a VBR Ogg Vorbis file, and is transferred to Xalior.

Please don’t complain to us that we use proprietary software to record our show; Skype currently gives us the best call quality to conference the calls between the presenters and any guests, and also allows us to seamlessly conference in presenters or guests via telephone (PSTN). HotRecorder is the simplest solution to record calls from Skype, and gives us the best quality master audio in Ogg Vorbis, which we then use as the foundation of the edit using Free or Open Source software.

editing

Xalior edits the master recording using Audacity to remove silences, irrelevant conversation and metameta: discussions about the actual recording itself, i.e. when to edit, are we recording, can I cough yet, and so on. This edit is shipped back to neuro as a native Audacity project, where the theme music, stings and outro are added. This is then saved as a native Audacity project for archival, and exported as a 44KHz WAV for compression and encoding. Meanwhile, Xalior uses his edit to draft the initial show notes.

compression, encoding

neuro encodes from the WAV to MP3 and Ogg Vorbis codecs using LAME [1] and oggenc2 [2] respectively. The encoded files are then edited using Winamp and iTunes to ensure the appropriate metadata are embedded for your playback pleasure.

[1] ./lame --resample 44.1 -V 8 -b 32 -B 48 -m m $1 `basename $1 .wav`.mp3
[2] ./oggenc2 -m 24 -M 48 -o `basename $1 .wav`.ogg $1

podcast

neuro updates the hashlugradio site in WordPress and PodPress to create the basic post containing everything required to let you download the episode and read the information about it. Xalior uses this post to complete the show notes, and the final episode is uploaded before the site is updated and pushed live. iTunes is pinged at this point to ensure those downloading purely from an iTunes subscription can get the episode as quickly as possible.

audio sources and licensing

We cite individual audio sources used on a per-episode basis, for example if we use a sound effect or one-off audio track. These sources can be found in each episode’s entry on this site.

For our theme tune, stings and outro, we have mashed up Jono Bacon’s Little Coal Nose, for which we received permission from Jono to do so, and have used sound effects from Freesound Project user FreqMan [1] [2] [3], which are licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 licence.

hashlugradio is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivs 2.5 licence, meaning we permit re-use and distribution of both the podcast and this website content for non-commercial purposes, as long as you give full attribution back to us, and that you do not modify the podcast before redistribution or re-use.

Creative Commons License
hashlugradio is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. For more information about Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that offers flexible copyright licenses for creative works, visit creativecommons.org.