podcast Archives - Page 4 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Restless Weekend

January 23, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend was a bit of an odd one, because at least for me it centered around recording our “Games of the Year” show on AggroChat. This is generally speaking a huge ordeal given that our show is made up of six very different minded people. Back during the days when we had four regular hosts it was less of a proceeding but now that we essentially have six people each picking three games a piece… that means we wind up talking about 18 games, which as it turns out divides neatly into two 9 image panels. The above image is the first of these and serves as the backdrop for our normal show card of sorts, however with the text over it you can’t necessarily make out all of the images involved so I decided to post it here. You can as always find the show on AggroChat or my method of choice for sheer simplicity of listening… YouTube. The reason why this largely dominated my weekend is because we ultimately recorded two podcasts that were both two hours long before I set down to edit them. Post edits they both clock in around an hour and twenty minutes, which really is shocking given that I did not actually time anything out in an attempt to make them work as relative set pieces. I guess however if you set out to record nine games per show… the end result comes out fairly evenly. I did make an attempt to shuffle the deck in such a way as to put the games I thought we would most likely talk the longest about divided evenly among the shows.

So we recorded from 8 pm CST until just after midnight, and then I got up around 7:30 Sunday morning and edited until 12:30… and as a result every other element of the weekend felt like it was shoved to one side or the other. Of course all of this madness has a purpose since the double episode is timed perfectly to cover the absence of myself and Ashgar as we go to Pax South. Now in theory Grace, Kodra, Tam and Thalen could record without me… but that would mean I had the forethought to have the mess that is our show in a state that I could easily hand over the reigns to an understudy. I have not planned ahead that far, and while I do have a series of Audacity and Photoshop projects to speed up the process… I am not sure if I could even properly explain what exactly I do each week. It is my hope however that I managed to not only publish yesterday, but also schedule everything else to publish next Sunday while I am driving home from San Antonio. Staging a publish to happen without me is always a fraught thing for me… because so rarely does it actually work as intended. Even if it does… I am literally stressed beyond reason until I see the tweets show up in my timeline from the publish process actually doing its thing appropriately. In the grand scheme of things however… it is not the most important thing in the world… but it is important to me.

As far as gaming went this weekend that was equally scattered. I patched up Final Fantasy XIV and made it far enough to hit the first instance gate, before ultimately walking away. Similarly I patched up Wildstar, created a Chua Warrior and played to around level seven before once again walking away like a bored child. As far as gaming that managed to last for more than an hour… we had World of Warcraft where I finally hit 35 points on my Protection Artifact and started pushing up Fury instead. I have gotten back in the habit of logging in each day to do my Emissary quest because now there is also a potential legendary upgrade waiting at the end of the grind. I started doing my Time Walking dungeons… but only managed to make it through the first one tanking it before once again wandering away. The game that seemed to stick the hardest was Elder Scrolls Online where I completed a good chunk of Malabal Tor, a zone where I am already completely enthralled by the storyline… even though it involves largely nothing but elves and their internal politics. I’ve decided that the Bosmer are what it takes to make me really enjoy Elves. I am really enjoying the whole lore regarding the Green Lady and the Silvenar, and I guess in truth that was an aspect of the lore that I had either forgotten or ignored in playing other Elder Scrolls games. I even managed to have a few emotional gut punches last night, when I lost characters that I actually really liked during one quest chain. In truth all I want to do right now is hide in my blanket cocoon on the couch and play more ESO, but that said I do want to at some point get a Mythic+ in for the week since I have a +5 Maw of Souls key.

Breaking Routine

October 17, 2016 by Belghast

This weekend was a bit of an odd one, namely when it came to Sunday morning. Generally speaking I have the process of finishing up an AggroChat episode down to a fairly regimented process. Saturday night before I crash I try to do what I call the initial edit, which is most of the actual edit work. Then Sunday morning I write the small bit of copy, and upload and syndicate the podcast to the various sources where it gets put. However this week was the first week doing all of this on the new machine… and I was not prepared. For starters we recorded a really long show mostly about the Final Fantasy XIV 3.4 main story quest. We did not unfortunately ONLY talk about that, and that meant we had almost three hours of recorded audio to process… and didn’t actually finish things up until around midnight my time. Instead of staying up further, I decided to crash and deal with it in the morning. Then Sunday it was a carnival of errors, as the version of audacity on my new machine was apparently slightly newer than the version I had been using which means a lot of the filters had different options… or at least were arranged in different ways. Additionally there was the process of trying to find all of my source files off of the old machine, which is thankfully still accessible over the network.

The worst part of it however was the changes to the Truncate Silence filter…. which is a crutch we lean on heavily for AggroChat. We are fairly pensive folk, and as a result there are a lot of lengthy pauses in conversation. With truncate silence that 3 hours of audio becomes 2 hours… but on my first attempt it maybe clipped a little more than actual silence. For whatever reason it was clipping the hell out of anytime Kodra talked, giving his speech a record skipping characteristic. However this is not something I realized until I was just about to upload the files to our host. Thankfully I caught it in time and was able to redo that portion, lowering the granularity of the filter. This mean’t what is normally a couple hour process… ate up I think four hours in total. Admittedly I was piddling around in Guild Wars 2 during much of it, so there were probably moments when I didn’t notice a filter had finished here or there. The positive however is that every filter applied went massively faster than on the previous AMD FX-6300 based processor. That was really my hope with the new i7 based system, is that it would be able to chew through rendering tasks far more successfully. As with any system there is going to be an adjustment and moving in period, and I am hoping that now that I have finished a single podcast on this machine additional ones will be much quicker.

As far as the weekend itself went, I was all over the place. I played a significant amount of Destiny, completing a bunch of bounties and discovering the Archon’s Forge… or more so how easy it was to get a pick up group. Much the same way as the court of Oryx, you seem to be able to just show up and folks will either be doing it… or quickly swarm when they think anyone else is. I also played a lot of World of Warcraft, completely a few mythic dungeons as well as successfully completing my first Mythic+ keystone. I’m looking forward to seeing that upgraded loot in the weekly order hall chest. In addition to that I completed the five time-walking dungeons on both Belghast and Exeter, and on the later I used it as a way to gear him up. I am now sitting over the 825 cap needed to get into LFR so my hope is tonight I will be able to run the two parts available and potentially get more upgrades that way. Generally speaking on Belghast the 835 rewards are not super enticing, but I still ran it this week for the purpose of getting some rune stones. I also need to do a bunch of fishing, as I now have the pattern to turn the 300 versatility food that I spent a chunk of the weekend crafting… into a 375 version. I am only using this stuff for raiding and mythic+ attempts, as I keep a bank full of Faronar Fizz for other stuff.

The biggest take away from the weekend is that I am actually finding myself legitimately enjoying Guild Wars 2. Recently it had been a game that I was dipping my toes into for the sake of my friends that were also playing it. However before the podcast we ran several of the story mode dungeons and they were pretty enjoyable. Enough so that when I sat down to decide which game I would play during the podcast, I decided to go ahead and stay with Guild Wars 2. That means that I spent the next three hours roaming aimlessly completing little objectives here and there, and mostly finding my way to the next story mode dungeon. The post 80/ Heart of Thorns mastery leveling is pretty slow. In all of that time I only managed to get about half of a mastery level… and then I ended up wasting a bunch of experience because I didn’t notice I needed to click through and train it. I am pretty not sure what my purpose in game is, but I am still fairly dead set on the warrior… and more importantly hammer warrior. That makes me the make shift tank for the group, and I have been using rifle lately as my dps weapon because it allows me to have something that I can hit things with at range. At some point I want to pick back up where I left off in attempting to level armor smithing, but right now my craft window looks somewhat like madness to me. All in all I feel like I have come to terms with the game in accepting what it is… and more importantly what it is not.

Half Sleeping

May 17, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 57 – Preparing for Heavensward

Tonight we have Belghast, Ashgar, Tamrielo, Kodra and Thalen and once again we felt like we didn’t have much to talk about. However once we dug in a little bit I noticed a trend. Each of us was busy working on this item or that in relationship to Final Fantasy XIV each with our own goals that we have been trying to finish before the expansion. Ashgar just finished his Nexus weapon after the length grind, and talks about how it compared up against other grinds he has completed. Kodra talks about working on Turn 9 with two different raid groups and how he hopes we can get through it within the coming weeks. I talk about my own quest which involves me descending into the dark madness that is crafting and slowly stair stepping each and every crafting class five levels at a time.

In addition to this there is some more Shadowrun talk as we each continue our play throughs. Kodra goes into yet another dark place by playing some Demon Souls and talks about those experiences. He and Tam spent a good deal of time this week watching the first season of Sword Art Online and we get into a discussion about that as well. I talk about my experiences working on the Blackhand encounter in World of Warcraft, and we talk a bit about the lackluster numbers released by NCSoft regarding Wildstar sales. Yet another night of varied topics here on AggroChat.

Automotive Struggles

It is now officially “weather season” here in Oklahoma and over the last few weeks we have been deluged in rain storms. In fact we skipped Mother’s Day last weekend due to the fact that there was rampant flooding in the area of the state that our Mothers live in. This meant this weekend we had to make up for that fact and venture out to see all three mothers. Friday night we met my folks for dinner and chatted with them for a good while, and then Saturday we ventured to the northern part of the state to see my wife’s mothers. The only problem with this notion is that there was the constant fear of bad weather hanging over the day. The national weather service had used the term “life threatening” and “super cell” in relation to the storm that was supposed to be arriving that night. To make matters more tense we opted to drive my wife’s Pontiac Torrent because it is more comfortable on long trips. That said it has also been having some issues lately.

There is a point between second and third gear where it “chugs” for lack of a better term, or as my wife calls it “hiccups” while trying to change gears. This seems to hit most often on inclines but over time it has gotten worse. While driving north on the turnpike it happened again around 75 mph and this time had a corresponding check engine light. I pulled over to the side of the turnpike and shut down completely, and upon powering back on everything seemed happy. We were just outside of town, so we popped off and went to the local GMC dealer. While the service department was not open, the shop foreman just happened to be working on his mothers car and was able to at least hook up the Torrent to the computer and tell us what was happening. Turns out that the engine was misfiring and after some research there is a factory recall that we were never notified about. He promised that our vehicle would not strand us, but instead it would just get horrible gas mileage until we got it taken care of. Nonetheless with impending weather issues it made the rest of the day feel far more tense than it normally would have.

Half Sleeping

The national weather service originally predicted that a huge batch of Tornados would be hitting the Oklahoma City area around 3pm CST. The storm however stalled out over the state and by the time we started up the podcast last night it still had not fully hit us. The problem with a late night storm is that it pretty much destroys any semblance of sleep. Today I am completely dragging ass because we did not get the “All Clear” until about 4:30 in the morning. This means it was yet another night of sleeping with the television blaring the weather so that if something went horribly wrong over night we would hopefully hear it. Sleeping while half paying attention to the television means you don’t actually get much rest. I have a feeling I will be taking a nap at some point because right now I am struggling to get through my morning blogging routine, let alone do anything more productive. The good news is that for the most part we made it through the storm unscathed. The bad news is, that not every suburb in the Tulsa area can say the same thing.

The Broken Arrow area seems to have gotten hit the hardest from last night. Earlier on the news they showed footage of what like the remains of a trailer part strewn along the country roads. At that point the reporter was uncertain where exactly the debris was coming from, but there was a lot of it. My hope is that everyone made it out alive. It is always surreal to talk about Tornados because they are equal parts commonplace and revered here in Oklahoma. Everyone knows someone who has been effected by one in the past, but at the same time… when you spend every spring dealing with the warnings it also seems “commonplace”. For years I used to wonder how the folks on the west coast dealt with Earthquakes, but since we also have those… I am guessing it is much the same. When you are used to a natural disaster, it just becomes a bit less scary. Right now it seems like most of the issues happening today are just massive flooding. After years of drought, I had almost forgotten what “real” rain was like. At this point all of the rivers are well over flood stage, but fortunately I don’t live in an area that actually floods. Expect normal gaming blog posts to resume this week I hope, but today… was all about the weather.

The Podcasting Bug – Part 3

May 16, 2015May 16, 2015 by Belghast

Putting it Someplace

Today is the final post in my series highlighting some of the decisions that you need to think about when starting a podcast. In the first post I talked a bit about various formats, casting options and some of the design aspects. In the second post I dove straight into recording your podcast and editing it. In this mornings post I plan on handling the least exciting part of the equation… hosting it somewhere that other people can listen. If you wanna be a rock superstar and live large… well you are going to have to dump those shows somewhere reliable and fast. There are so many options here that it will make your head spin but I am going to try and do what I have done to this point and just talk about a few of the potential paths.

Dedicated Podcast Hosts

When I ventured down this road I noticed that pretty much all of the podcasts I listened to had one thing in common… they all seemed to be hosted by a service company called “Libsyn” so for ease of use that is who I chose to use for AggroChat. These companies are dedicated to a upload and forget it business model automating a lot of the process to make it easier to integrate with services like iTunes and Stitcher radio. One of the things you are going to realize quickly is that you have no real idea just how much space you need. For example the basic Libsyn account is $5 a month for 50 megs of monthly storage. What that means is that you can upload roughly 30 minutes of new audio each month before incurring additional overage fees. For a weekly show I knew without a doubt that this was not going to be enough.

When I set up the AggroChat account initially I went with the $15 a month 250 meg of monthly growth account, thinking that surely this was going to enough. The problem there is that there were a few weeks where I quite literally had to wait until after the monthly reset before uploading that next episode. Finally I have settled on the $20 a month account for 400 mb of storage. This gives me some breathing room, and allows our podcasts to fluctuate in length naturally without being extremely concerned about running out of space. Ultimately what you are going to have to figure out is what works for you. If you figure 50 meg per 30 minutes of podcast that means you can record at a decent bitrate and hopefully have a bit of wiggle room when it comes to your monthly allowance of space.

LibSyn

LIbSyn honestly seems to be the gold standard for podcast hosting. The problem is it is rather pricy as compared to say a normal blog web hosting account. In part this is because they work slightly different. For starters LibSyn has no concept of maximum monthly transfer. They are only concerned about how much file growth you are generating each month. Additionally they host your back log and archive indefinitely, which is extremely nice. We’ve recorded 56 episodes and all of them are available to listen to on demand, which means they are hosting roughly five gig of audio for us. The other big thing they provide is really good statistics and analytics about who is listening. I would highly suggest if you consider them at the very least going with the $15 a month 250 mb plan.

PodBean

In every market there is a “Bargain Provider” and just like that statement usually means… you ultimately get what you pay for. When you compare I am paying $20 a month for 400 mb worth of monthly growth through Libsyn, it seems like an absolute steal that you can get an $8 a month unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage account through PodBean. The problem is that they have a fairly abysmal reputation for reliability. The Better Business Bureau has them listed as an “F”rating, so you are more than likely taking at least some risk. However if you really cannot afford a better option this is there. I would love to hear thoughts if any folks out there are actively using this service and liking it. Most of the complaints I have heard centered around customer service. Considering the price I looked at it seriously for “Bel Folks Stuff”.

SoundCloud

The service I am the least familiar with to be honest is SoundCloud but from what I can tell a lot of folks are having good luck with it. In part the way its pricing is structured allows you to ease into using it, and as such get your feet wet before committing to a monthly fee. The free account allows you to upload 3 hours of audio. Now this is not per month, but this is 3 hours of audio period. For $6 a month you can get a total of 6 hours, and then upgrade to unlimited to $15 a month. When you compare the raw hosting power to my Libsyn account this seems like the clear winner, but for me personally LIbsyn still comes out ahead in the number of things it just takes care of for me. SoundCloud offers basic RSS support but from what I am tell it is not quite as optimized. Still this is a really solid option especially if you are considering hosting multiple podcasts off the same account.

Self Hosting Audio

You can at least in theory host your podcast off a traditional blogging account. The problem being is that when your web host sees the usage of folks constantly downloading MP3s from your site, chances are that they are going to hit you with some sort of bandwidth overage fee. Because of this what might be a perfectly reasonable and awesome place to host your blog, might be exactly the wrong sort of place to host a podcast. Libsyn is not terribly flexible when it comes to adding new podcasts without adding additional subscription fees. So when I started kicking around the notion of “Bel Folks Stuff” I opted to try and host this myself. For some time I had a cheap unlimited storage and bandwidth hosting account that I used for some development on the side. As a result I opted to simply host my MP3 files there, and link to them directly from WordPress.

The problem with this is once again you get what you pay for. While my unlimited host is cheap… and unmetered it is also sluggish at times. As a result I am telling you about a method that I am contemplating abandoning or at the very least tweaking how I do it. The host I am using is Arvixe which offers a $4 a month unlimited transfer and unlimited storage account. Overall it works well enough for my purposes but I have noticed that roughly once a week I have at least one minor outage in service. These outages are usually less than five minutes according to my wordpress uptime monitors, but they still happen. Now this could be for any reason including legitimate maintenance… or simply because they have over sold their resources. In whatever case it is something you should be wary of when looking at any “unlimited” account. There is almost always a small measure of “snake oil” in those sales pitches.

BluBrry Powerpress

The heart of this process relies upon a WordPress Plugin called BluBrry Powerpress. In its free form this plug-in takes care of the functionality that Libsyn does with its iTunes optimized RSS feed. In its paid subscription version it also adds in the robust analytics and statistics. For “Bel Folks Stuff” I chose to simply use the freebie version. I manually upload the MP3s to my web host, and then once activated I can link to the media in a traditional wordpress post. The end result feeds out as a podcastable rss feed, and visually embeds a player on the page. This works pretty flawlessly, and were I using a different host I would even maybe think this is the preferable way of dealing with a podcast because it gives me the maximum control. The nice thing about this plugin is that when I chose to create my own custom AggroChat.com wordpress site, I can still use it to cleanly embed media from libsyn into posts.

Advertising The Show

Now that you have your hosting set aside and hopefully your website created to embed your work, now it is time to talk a little bit about getting your show out there. This is something I honestly do a pretty poor job of myself. I just happened to stumble into an affiliate network through the close ties I made thanks to the Newbie Blogger Initiative. The Gaming and Entertainment Network was essentially formed out of NBI in a way, and were it not for that happening my shows would likely still be unaffiliated. I do a pretty horrible job at the business side of blogging and podcasting, so hopefully someone will come along after writing this guide and tell you all how to actually recuperate your costs. That is something I have yet to master, because this hobby is absolutely a money sink. Regardless though you are going to want some listeners and I am going to talk about a few of the avenues I use.

Twitter

Twitter is an absolute no brainer. Make an account for your show, and syndicate every new show over twitter. You can get as complicated here as you want or be as generic as you like as well. Ultimately in a perfect world you want to hashtag in some of the topics you spoke about during the show. I have yet to really master the art of this without making the advertisement sound anything other than smarmy. We publish on Sundays, so I tweet out the link early that morning. Then on Monday I tend to re-tweet it again for anyone who missed the first posting and is looking for something to listen to at work.

iTunes

I do not use iTunes at all, but man it seems like every other person on the planet does. There is apparently a meta game to getting your podcast placed in iTunes perfectly and there are all manner of guides to timing the launch just right. Truth be told mine is only up there because my friend Jaedia asked me to put it there. The act of getting it up there is relatively simple and Apple provides a list of specifications that the podcast needs to follow in order to qualify. From there you simply have to wait the requisite three or four days before it shows up in the index. I think for me it happened in about two but depending on backlog of podcasts it has been known to take as long as a week. Like with anything you can get higher placement if you convince your friends to go into iTunes and vote it up. I was shocked to find out that apparently our podcast has a five star rating.

Stitcher

The other big player in podcasting directories seems to be Stitcher Radio. Just like iTunes they have a series of requirements for getting a podcast listed, but have a handy dandy FAQ outlining them. Essentially it reads your RSS feed and re-syndicates it on their network. The only problem with this is that it seems to absolutely butcher my podcast. It sounds like a garbled mess running off their servers, whereas iTunes seems to leave everything as is. Just like with iTunes someone asked me to list my podcast there because they liked using the stitcher mobile client to listen to podcasts so I did just that. Really uncertain if I am actually getting any traffic from this but it can’t really hurt.

Go Make a Podcast!

So over the course of these three guides I have done my best to share the small amount of knowledge I have about how podcasting functions. The thing is I am still very much learning as I go because I don’t feel like this is the sort of the thing you can actually “master”. You might be sitting back and thinking…. god that is a lot of information to take in. The positive is that I knew absolutely NONE Of these things before I dove head first into recording our first episode of AggroChat. So my hope is that I can give someone who is on the edge and considering jumping into this world a bit of a head start. These are the things I wish I knew beforehand, and I have talked about some of the choices I might have made. Ultimately podcasts are extremely unique beasts, so yours can be whatever you want it to be. Again if you have any direct questions I am more than happy to answer them, but my hope is that maybe just maybe someone is going to read this mess and get the courage to start.