Letters to Lost Friends

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: https://letterstolostfriends.com/?feed=podcast and thus it, as they say, begins.

Ok, so with this, we have a working podcast feed! Stay tuned for Episode 0 to drop on Thursday.

Hello again. Things keep moving forward and I have this site and the forum set up to a level I’m comfortable with. I still need to do some work on the guidelines and FAQ, and, knowing me, I’ll be making some tweaks here and there, but I’m ready to move on to the next step. The plan is to record an introductory podcast tomorrow and post it by Wed or Thursday. It probably won’t have letters from anyone, but I’ll talk a bit about how I see the podcasts being structured, a little about why I decided to make this my first podcast, and I’ll probably throw in some quotes and some music as well. Sort of a shakedown cruise if you will. As long as all my hosting, rss and recording issues go smoothly, I hope to put Letters to Lost Friends out every week (barring extreme circumstances) starting April 24.

While I do not plan on posting each and every letter on the website, I will use the site as a way to keep everyone updated and will link to the podcasts here as having them served up through iTunes and Ourmedia.org. Additionally, I’ll probably drop in some quotations about friendship or random posts about friendship as time goes by. Hopefully we will have some guest writers as well.

That said, my main focus will be on the podcast itself. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I’m enjoying putting this project together.

Letters to Lost Friends is in its infancy, but I am expecting to raise it to toddler status within the next several days. Thank you for stopping by and I hope you will join me on this journey as I create a podcast and website dedicated to honoring all those friends we have lost along the way of life.