The View from Tab Version 2.0?

Last night Bietz and O’C and I played around with the technology at hand prefatory to creating a podcast. This was my first experience with Skype, which is as easy as babycakes pie. As Bietz had promised, it’s just like IMing. Click on a name and the next thing you know, you’re chatting away. You can also see the person if they have video, so for a while MB and I got to see each other’s smiling phiz, but when we added O’C, three phizzes seemed to be one too many, or else O’C’s phiz was specifically banned from the interwebs. Whatever.

To do this right you need a couple of things. Most importantly, you need a good microphone. MB and I both already have such things, since we’ve both podcasted before, but O’C has to run out to the delicatessen and pick one up ASAP because any alternative provides too much extra white noise. Then, you need headphones, which everybody has a million of, but it is preferable that you look like a total nerd to get it right. MB and I had no trouble with that, and although we never did get to see O’C, the idea that he might look like a total nerd…? Not hard to imagine, nosirreebob, not hard at all.

The next thing you need is some way to capture the audio. Now there are programs that will do that, at various levels of complexity and cost, but we’re going to try a suggestion MB picked up using GarageBand (a Mac gimme, if you’re a PC person and have no idea what that is). You each record your own track and then you sync them in post production; simple enough if the sync is right. I recorded my own track last night for a while and it was clear as the proverbial bell. The assumption is that this gives us the best audio short of truly professional equipment.

We’re going to record Episode 1 next week. I’ll put it out over iTunes via The View from Tab, since I’ve already got that RSS feed, and I’ve created a similarly named blog where people can comment on the content, and we can post show notes, if any. MB has also acquired the URL, if we really get into this. To be honest, I can’t imagine that we won’t get into it, aside from time constraints. We’ve got the techie inclination and the debate ability to talk about everything, and the debate world always seems to have something going on worth talking about. Show #1 will address openness, specifically case lists, as our main topic, plus we’ll start introducing a couple of what might become regular features.

Needless to say, I’m really looking forward to this.

(When I opened GarageBand—for the first time, despite my years of Little Elvis—I realized what a goldmine this little sucker is. You can make your own music. Duh! Time to write “The Theme from The View from Tab.” Violins. Sousaphones. Spoons. Whoop-de-damn-doo! Then there’s “The March of the Cruzians” and “The Mike Bietz Polka.” Forget podcasting. Music, music, music!)