Letters to Lost Friends

[UPDATE: I went out and bought myself a Blue Snowball USB Mic - and it's much better.]

I’m using a Behringer C-1 mic plugged into a Behringer Xenyx 802 mixer plugged into a Behringer F-Control Audio unit plugged into my Macbook Pro.

I’m so not happy with the sound that I’m getting. The buzz on the mic and the random electronic squeaks and squeals and buzzes are driving me absolutely crazy.

Need to do some more experimenting and testing of different set-ups and try to get the sound a bit more clear and less annoying.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

(Show is on track to be released either later tonight or tomorrow evening.)

The original theme that I picked out for the site is old and non-widget ready and doesn’t work properly with IE7. While I like its simplicity and colors I have decided to change themes before releasing the first episode.

Which is where you come in.

If you have a Wordpress theme that you think might work particularly with with the spirit of the site and with the image that I’m using as the LtLF icon, drop me an email at editor@letterstolostfriends.com with the link and I’ll test it out. I prefer rounded corners and a clean, simple look. I also like the idea of of each post and each sidebar item “floating” in it’s own shape rather than in an undistinguished column.

Help theme this site!

Letters to Lost Friends is now listed on iTunes, so all anyone with iTunes has to do is search in the store and we show up.

While I mention submit@letterstolostfriends.com as the way to submit letters, you can also write me at editor@letterstolostfriends.com if you have general questions or comments.

Days ahead of schedule, here is the first episode-that-is-not-an-episode. Really, this is as much a test of the whole process, from recording to delivery as it is an actual episode. Thus the “0″ designation. Overall, I think it sounds ok. A bit too much sibilance here and there and I tend to ramble (which will hopefully be mitigated in future episodes as I will be reading more and improvising less), and I’m not terribly happy with the quality of my mic, but in the end it’s better than some podcasts I’ve heard and I’m hoping to get better with experience and as I try out different recording methods and post-production tricks. I recorded the voice track in Amadeus Pro and then mixed everything in Garageband. Unfortunately, Garageband doesn’t seem to have a built in deesser, so I brought everything over into Logic Express, added the deesser to the vocal and exported it all out to mp3.

Clumsy I know, and I forgot to use Levelator on the files before compressing and I think the whole workflow in general needs some tweaking. Please, let me know what you think. Any and all criticisms will be helpful to me at this stage of the game, so be cruel to be kind . . . I can take it.

The next episode is still slated for April 23 and I will take the extra time to try and get submissions and play around more with the production elements. Hopefully, this will show upon iTune’s podcast directory in the next couple of day. When it does, I’ll drop a post here to let everyone know. In the meantime, you can use the feed link in the previous post.

Here it is:

We have a working feed! Point your podcast catcher or iTunes to: http://letterstolostfriends.com/?feed=podcast and thus it, as they say, begins.