Tom Raftery’s Social Media

I use the Audio Player plugin on a number of sites where I publish podcasts, principally PodLeaders.com

The main reason I use it is to simply populate the posts with a Flash player for any podcasts which I post so people can listen to them onscreen.

However, since upgrading PodLeaders to WordPress to 2.5 the plugin has stopped working It simply displays a blank where the Flash player should be.

I tried switching to the Default WordPress theme to see if the problem was theme related but it appears not to be as the problem also happened in that theme.

I downloaded another plugin, called Podcasting which is supposed to work with WordPress 2.5 but that didn’t seem to work either.

Does anyone have any idea where the problem might lie and what I’ll need to do to fix it?

UPDATE: Problem solved. Pete reminded me in the comments of this post to check my folder structure for the Audio Player plugin and sure enough when updating from 1.2.2 to 1.2.3 I had inadvertently uploaded the plugin folder instead of simply the contents of the plugin folder! Fixed now and working once more. Thanks Pete.

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Endgadget are reporting that Microsoft has announced Windows Mobile Edition 6 - Microsoft’s operating system for mobile phones.

According to the article, the major new features of WME6 are

• HTML support in email
• Windows Live for Windows Mobile
• File transfer capability in Windows Live Messenger
• New versions of mobile Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint with rich editing
• Remote wipe capability for stolen and lost devices
• Call history in contact cards
• Tight Vista integration
• “Calendar ribbon” for more easily viewing schedule by day or week
• New versions of .NET Compact Framework and SQL Server built-in

Some nice features in there alright but how about support for RSS? It would be great to be able to have an RSS reader built-in to the phone. This would make it trivial allow people to subscribe to podcasts, for example from their phones and do away with the need to be carrying a phone and an iPod.

There’s a demo of WME6 on YouTube.

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I have put a copy of all the podcast mp3 files from PodLeaders on Libsyn today after the previous host’s server disappeared taking all my podcasts with it.

Unfortunately though I couldn’t find a copy of the podcast I did with Sam Sethi last Sept/Oct. If anyone has a copy of that mp3 I’d love to get it and put it up again.

Sam has been exceedingly gracious and offered to do another podcast (an offer I will take him up on shortly) but I’d really love to have the original interview as well.

If you come across any podcasts on PodLeaders not working now, please do let me know. As far as I am aware the Sam Sethi one is the only one not working but I could easily be wrong in that.

UPDATE:
Thanks to Colin DiPonio, I now have the Sam Sethi podcast file once more. Thanks Colin.

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The BBC is reporting that there will very shortly be a plugin for Skype which acts as a lie detector by analysing:

audio streams over a Skype call in real time and illustrates the stress levels of the other person

Most of my PodLeaders podcasts are recorded Skype conversations - this could add a whole new dimension to the interviews!!!

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Advertising any product to me is becoming more and more difficult. It is not just me, there is a growing number of people who are discovering ways to skip ads almost completely in their daily lives.

In my own case, I honestly can’t remember the last time I bought a newspaper but it would be years ago. I prefer to get all my news online.

I use the Firefox plugin Adblock to ensure I don’t see most ads online (see below)

This is the ENN site viewed without the Adblock plugin

This is the same ENN site viewed using the Adblock plugin

I used to listen to quite a bit of radio when I was on the road. Now however, I fill my iPod with podcasts before setting off on any journey and listen to those instead. This means that I am listening to content of my selection, relevant to my work, and I am not at the whim of whatever presenter happens to be on the radio.

I watch a decreasing amount of television. The TV I do watch tends to be DVDs or movie channels with no ads. I’d potentially watch a little more TV if I had Sky+ (similar to Tivo) but it is waaaaaaay too expensive.

And yes, before anyone says it, I do see the irony of posting this on a site who’s hosting is being paid for by Google ads!

So if you were an advertiser, trying to get your brand/message through to me (and people like me), how would you go about it?

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Audacity is an open source, cross-platform sound editing application. It is the sound editor I use for producing the PodLeaders and it@cork podcasts.

The process I use for producing the podcasts was:

1. Record the interview using Skype and Wiretap Pro (with Wiretap Pro set to save as mp3)
2. Import the mp3 file to Audacity and edit
3. Export as mp3 and publish

After a recent conversation with Doug Kaye, I decided to try his Levelator application to get the levels on the recordings the same. This meant I had to change Wiretap Pro to output to aiff ( a lossless format) instead of mp3.

I did this and recorded a number of interviews successfully, saving the interviews as aiff. However, yesterday, when I went to edit the first of those interviews, I was disappointed that the Levelator couldn’t work with the files (gave an error and stopped trying to level them).

However, I was horrified when I tried importing the files into Audacity only to find that the imported files had massive echo problems, echo problems (!). No matter what I tried I couldn’t get rid of the echo and it made the audio useless.

Finally, I hit on a solution:

1. Import the aiff files into iTunes
2. Export from iTunes as mp3
3. Import the mp3 file into Audacity - no echo (phew!)

I should have hit on this solution sooner but it had been a long day!

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