Radio Free Caemlyn Main Series

Over on Radio Free Caemlyn, the episode listing is cluttered with various ideas for shows. There are Friday Night Trivia episodes, there are creepypasta recordings, there are poetry readings, and there are the “main series” episodes (usually studio episodes wherein I discuss various topics).

To make sorting through things a bit easier, I’m going to post all the “main series” episodes here, and update as necessary.

Note: I actually didn’t start numbering with episode one. Don’t know why, don’t remember why, but for some reason the first episode is labelled as episode twelve. Doesn’t make sense, but there you have it.

Another note: subtitles for these have nothing to do with episode content. The episode descriptions contain that information. The subtitle is always some sort of play on the episode number. It’s a thing I got from the Mike O’Meara Show podcast.

Anyway, episode listing:

Marble Operator at GMX

The Geek Media Expo is an annual convention in Nashville, TN, representing various facets of geek culture. The 2012 event is the fourth annual GMX.

Last year’s GMX saw the Marble Hornets guys in attendance. They hosted three panels, and had a booth at the dealer’s room. Their first panel was a Q&A session about how to make a web serial, their second was a live commentary on season one entries, and the third was a more casual Q&A session on Marble Hornets. They also had a booth at last year’s GMX, selling Marble Hornets DVDs.

So, Troy, Joseph and Tim are appearing at this year’s GMX, hosting some panels, and with a booth again.

I am pleased to announce that two of the three main co-host trio of Marble Operator will also be in attendance. KissofJudas and myself will be at this year’s GMX. We’ll be among the guests at the expo, hoping to meet the MH guys. I’m also hoping to record a bit of an interview with them for the podcast, but we’ll see how that goes with what time they can spare.

So there you have it. Marble Operator will be present at GMX 2012. I’ll try to have something with me to identify me as a Marble Operator co-host, so feel free to say hello if you see either of the cohosts. It’d be neat to meet listeners at the expo.

Geek Media Expo 2012 is October 26-28. Hope to see you there!

The RaT Project Returns (Updated)

I was just throwing together a posting to my Google+ page, in which I talk about upcoming podcast plans, and I made the decision to bring The RaT Project back to the airwaves.

The RaT Project was my first podcast, which I started six years ago. It was in early 2006 that I had discovered podcasts, mainly through the then-new This Week in Tech podcast (live.twit.tv), hosted by Leo Laporte, and featuring many familiar names from the old TechTV cable network (Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose, and others). I was learning about what podcasts were, and, realizing how simple a podcast was to make, I started my own.

(To know more, I recommend listening to an episode of Radio Free Caemlyn I recorded a while back, wherein I discuss my life-long love of radio and broadcasting)

Anyway, The RaT Project started off as an occasional audio blog, and I’d occasionally discuss some gaming news of note. I’d upload the episodes to Putfile (a site that no longer exists, as far as I know), and link them on The Outcasts Guild, a messageboard I frequented.

Eventually, I found out about TalkShoe, where the show lives to this day. I started playing around with doing live shows, after migrating much of the back catalogue to that site. So that’s how the show started on TalkShoe.

There was quite a while, two years or so ago, when I would regularly do shows on Saturday nights. Gaming news, tech news, those started each episode, then we launched into each week’s particular topic. The show gained quite a few regulars, including DaveAC, Logan*, and Graeme “The2ndDoctor”. Then, life intervened, I went back to Uni for my last year, and the show got shelved.

The show has been on indefinite hiatus for long enough, now. The back catalogue, which includes my early attempts (though I’ve removed the pre-TS shows), is still available for download.

In the time since I’ve put the show on hiatus, I’ve received a lot of requests to bring the show back, from either people who were participants back in the day or people who’ve discovered it since. The show is popular, and it is wanted again. So. What now?

On 1 September, a Saturday, The RaT Project Live returns to the airwaves, at 9pm EST. The show will precede Squidlord’s Operation BSU, of course (which has made the transition to Google+ Hangouts, a thing I am still considering), but we’ll see what happens. We’ll still cover the same topics, and discuss the latest gaming and tech news, and discuss various topics each week.

I hope to see you there. Still on TalkShoe for now, while I see how Squid does with Hangouts. We might transition there at some point. But TS for now.

UPDATE: Turns out, Doctor Who returns 1 September on BBC America, at 9pm EST. Same time I was planning on doing this show.

So. DW runs for five episodes, so the weekend after it ends, RaT Project will resume.

TalkShoe or Google+ Hangouts?

This is an extension of a thing I’ve debated for a long time, at least as far as Friday Night Trivia is concerned.

The basic idea, from a couple years ago (when I started doing FNT), was to include images or perhaps even video into the trivia shows. Back in the beginning, I was structuring Friday Night Trivia like Jeopardy! episodes. To keep the players aware of which questions were still available to choose, I’d need a visual representation. Back then, I made charts to go along with the trivia shows, but had no way of displaying them in any way other than repeatedly uploading updated images.

Skip ahead to now, when Google+ is a thing, and Hangouts now have on-air functionality. Start a G+ Hangout, go live, and you can share audio and video with everyone in the room. It’s a similar setup to TalkShoe, except with G+, you have to be a G+ member in order to join the Hangout. On TalkShoe, you can join anonymously as a guest. This leads into a list of things to take into question when determining whether to do Friday Night Trivia (or any podcast, really) on TalkShoe or Google+ Hangouts. Anyway…Friday Night Trivia has settled into a regular crowd, most of which are on G+. But not all.

Anyway, what would moving trivia to Hangouts mean? Improved audio quality, shows would be posted to my YouTube channel, those are the two main things (I could also extract an mp3 to upload to the RFC feed). Besides that, the show could continue to grow and improve, with all sorts of new category ideas opened up with the functionality G+ Hangouts offers. Then there’s the stability of G+ as opposed to TalkShoe, which is wont to have the occasional issue.

So, what does all this long-winded gobbledygook mean? (Also, Chrome’s spellchecker actually accepts “gobbledygook” as a word) It means I’m considering moving Friday Night Trivia to Google+ Hangouts. It’s not a definite thing. As things stand, I’m leaving the show on TalkShoe, with Radio Free Caemlyn. It’s really up to your response, the listeners and people who’ve been regulars at Friday Night Trivia.

So, I turn to you. Listeners and participants, what do you think? Should Friday Night Trivia stay where it is on TalkShoe, where everything works and we’re familiar with the format? Or are Hangouts a viable alternative, and something we should try at least once? Let me know.

The Eye of the World ReRead

In these months leading up to the release of the final The Wheel of Time novel, A Memory of Light, I’ve been doing a special series of podcast episodes wherein I read the first book in the series, The Eye of the World. While I might not finish the first book, I probably won’t be reading subsequent books. Even having picked up the pace as I have, I’m currently only 16 chapters, 212 pages in. Nowhere near halfway.

Anyway, I thought I would compile a list of just the reread episodes, in order, rather than have to scour the RSS feed for them. Here they are:

Prologue: Dragonmount
Chapter 1: An Empty Road
Chapter 2: Strangers
Chapter 3: The Peddler
Chapter 4: The Gleeman
Chapter 5: Winternight
Chapter 6: The Westwood
Chapter 7: Out of the Woods
Chapter 8: A Place of Safety
Chapter 9: Tellings of the Wheel
Chapter 10: Leavetaking
Chapter 11: The Road to Taren Ferry
Chapter 12: Across the Taren
Chapter 13: Choices
Chapter 14: The Stag and Lion
Chapter 15: Strangers and Friends
Chapter 16: The Wisdom
Chapter 17: Strangers and Hunters
Chapter 18: The Caemlyn Road
Chapter 19: Shadow’s Waiting
Chapter 20: Dust on the Wind
Chapter 21: Listen to the Wind
Chapter 22: A Path Chosen
Chapter 23: Wolfbrother
Chapter 24: Flight Down the Arinelle
Chapter 25: The Traveling People

So there you go. If you can stand to listen to my voice reading things for hours, then….there you go.

So, How Do You Capture Audio Clips?

It’s a question I’ve been asked several times, mostly on Twitter. The explanation is longer than 140 characters, and would take multiple tweets to answer. Also, given the transient nature of tweets, I’d have to retype in case someone else asks.

So here’s my tutorial for how I capture audio for use as clips on podcasts/netcasts.

First of all, I use Audacity to grab audio clips. If you don’t have Audacity yet, for some reason, grab it, it’s a free download, and a great program.

Anyway, set Audacity’s audio input to Stereo Mix. Look for the microphone icon on the menus along the top.

Now, the screenshot I have has “SigmaTel Audio: Stereo Mix”. That simply refers to my soundcard settings. The dropdown list for microphone settings in Audacity should reflect your computer’s soundcard settings, but “Stereo Mix” should be there somewhere. Stereo Mix is what you are looking for. Stereo Mix tells Audacity that it should record whatever audio your soundcard is playing.

Now just load up the video you want to grab video from. It could be a video you have on your computer, which you play in VLC, KMPlayer, whatever. It could be from YouTube. Whatever, just load a video and get it ready to play.

Got that ready? Now, before you hit play on the video file, you need Audacity to start recording. Switch back over to Audacity, and hit the record button.

Good, with that taken care of, go back to your video and hit play.

Now, for longer videos, if you’re looking for a certain clip, just skip ahead to wherever the clip you’re looking for is, and let the video play. Once you have the audio you want, pause or stop the video, go back to Audacity, and stop recording.

There, you’ve got the audio you wanted there in Audacity. From here you can trim down the selected audio to what you specifically want. Two ways to do that, both require you to highlight your desired audio. Just click at one end of that bit of audio and drag to the end. Either hit CTR+T to trim it, or go to File and choose Export Selection.

There you go, that’s how I grab audio and make audio clips for use on podcasts, specifically those that I use on Marble Operator. Hope that helps!

A note: should nothing appear in the microphone settings in Audacity (either in the menu bar or in the main window for preferences (just hit CTRL+P in Audacity)), check the audio settings in Windows itself.

I know, I know, that’s Windows XP, not Windows 7 or 8, but it’s what I am using. What you’re doing is the same: check the audio input, to see if Windows itself has anything listed. You should see your soundcard listed, at least the drivers listed. (In that screen, you see AK5370, that’s my USB mic)

UPDATE: A much easier solution to this problem is to install the Easy YouTube Video Downloader add-on for Firefox. Once done, simply choose the “MP3 (128k)” download option.

Friday Night Trivia LXI – Gameplay Update

Direct Download

DarthSkeptical was the guest host for last night’s Friday Night Trivia, the 61st edition of that series. At the start of the show, Darth introduced a change to his formula of doing questions. Instead of just waiting for someone to either correctly guess a question or for everyone to just give up, he sped up the process by giving everyone one guess to each question. Should everyone guess incorrectly (or if it just seemed that everyone was stumped by a particular question), Darth would call time on that question and introduce multiple choice answers, and everyone would have to type in their choice in the chat room.

I quite like this change to what had been the standard formula. This eliminates all the dead air that we usually end up getting during trivia shows (and what, in effect, makes the recordings so unlistenable, in my opinion). This also speeds up the shows quite a bit.

Definitely a welcome improvement to the trivia shows, and one that I’ll be implementing whenever I host.

RFC 39 Playlist

Here’s the playlist for Radio Free Caemlyn episode 39 for 23 February, 2012

Set 1
Mega Man 4 Let The Be Light OC ReMix
Rooftop Run Act 1 (Sonic Generations) – Tomoya Ohtani
Final Fantasy Trancelude OC ReMix

Set 2
Donkey Kong Country Permutation OC ReMix
Dragon Warrior Thou Art a DJ OC ReMix
Zelda (Techno Remix)
Koopa’s Road – Super Mario 64

Set 3
City Escape Act 1 Sonic Generations
Legend of Zelda Abandon Theme (Techno Remix)
Banjo-Kazooie Malevolent Mansion OC Remix
Muda Kingdom theme – Super Mario Land
Wizards & Warriors Theme OC Remix

Set 4
Cave Dungeon – Super Mario 64
Kirby’s Dream Land 2 Breakbeat Forest OC Remix
Green Hill Zone Act 1 Sonic Generations
Zelda Link’s Awakening It’s My Turn to Dream OC Remix
Sonic Generations End Roll Medley 2

Radio Free Caemlyn Returns to Its Roots

Last night I resumed somethng I used to do with Radio Free Caemlyn, back before Friday Night Trivia became the main thing that podcast is known for. Following on from the news that MonotoneTim will be hosting his own radio show on his Uni’s radio station, I thought back to what I had once been doing with Radio Free Caemlyn, when I would host impromptu live shows, with a mix of music sets and discussion on various topics. I never had a set schedule for those, I’d just do one whenever I felt like.

Well, I thought, why not bring that old format back? Why not resume what I used to do, only this time have a set schedule for these? So last night, on my test channel on TalkShoe (it’s a secret to everyone), I hosted a live show, playing sets of video game music (I find that works best with these shows) and discussing myriad topics. I now have that recording up on the proper RFC feed in case you want to give it a listen.

Now, several issues come to mind when dealing with this idea: it’d be neat to have an audience for these live shows, but I’m not sure how to deal with callers, should people want to call in and join me on the air. Whenever I’m on the air with someone, I feel that music is an intrusion, so if I have callers on the air with me, I’ll hold off on playing sets of music. Unless they’re okay with that, and we’re at a break in the discussion anyway.

That’s the main thing, which I guess I just resolved anyway. Then there’s the other thing, that being audio quality. It’d be nice to enjoy the music, but audio through TalkShoe is very compressed. I’d like to have clear audio, so the music sounds the best. I’ll look into alternative methods of streaming, to get that higher audio quality, but whatever I find that way won’t be done live via TalkShoe (sure, the recordings will (hopefully) be uploaded to the RFC feed).

But it’s all about the audio quality, and what TalkShoe provides just is not up to what I want.

Hope to see you on the next live show. I’ll try to do these each Thursday night, 9-11pm eastern time, TalkShoe ID 72402.

Marble Operator Resumes

As a fan podcast of Marble Hornets, Marble Operator only really has discussion topics when MH is presenting new entries. Marble Hornets’ second season concluded late last year, and the podcast has thus gone on hiatus, after having a roundtable discussion on how the second season concluded. Marble Operator’s return has been dependent on Marble Hornets’ return. Looking at the @marblehornets twitter feed, as well as OoG information, it looks like MH may be resuming sometime soon. J is actively investigating the whereabouts of Tim, and finding some interesting details.

So, with the third and final season of MH nearly upon us, MO is going to come out of hiatus. Join Rand, KissofJudas, other panelists and guests this Tuesday evening, 14 February, at 10pm eastern, at TalkShoe ID 112081, for a live episode, as we discuss the latest from the MH twitter feed, and give our thoughts as to how we expect season three to open, and what we hope to see in Entry #53.

After that live episode, we’ll see how things go with MH itself to decide on additional live episodes. At most, MO will probably remain a once-weekly podcast, though.

Anyway, that’s the latest on the Marble Operator podcast! Hope to see you at the next live show.

	Super Awesome Fun Ti… on Super Awesome Fun Time With Ra…
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Radio Free Caemlyn

Official Blog for the RFC Podcast

Author: Rand al'Thor