Alfresco Fresh Talk…

I recorded Episode 3 today and decided I couldn’t sit on it for a whole week, so consider this a pleasant little bonus.

Today’s guest is Reuven Cohen, co-founder and CTO of Enomaly, a consulting company (and Alfresco partner) focusing on Open Source technology.

Reuven is a self-described “Serial Innovator” who’se creative skills and grasp of web technologies have landed him gigs with the likes of Napster and MTV. He’s founded three companies and his current company is about to release an Open Source Virtual Server Management Console called Enomalism.

Reuven is most certainly a very interesting person to talk to and I hope we can bring him back in the near future.

Topics discussed:

• Reuven’s background and freelancing experience.
• The attraction to Open Source Software.
• The founding of Enomaly.
• The creation of Enomalism.
• The appeal of Alfresco.
• Reuven’s upcoming interview at “Call for Help” on G4-TechTV.
• Rich Internet Applications and AJAX.
• Recent news such as Adobe Spry, Intel Core 2 Duo, Open Rico.

This is a great interview and is not to be missed.

As always, your feedback is appreciated.

 

 Alfresco Fresh Talk Episode 3 [65:41m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Our second podcast features Steven Tedjamulia, Sr. Knowledge Manager at Novell and one of the bloggers at CollaborationLoop.com. In this episode we touch on electronic collaboration topics, Jason Fried’s (CEO of 37 Signals) views on collaboration vs. interruption, Plone, WebHuddle, and Collanos.

As always, your feedback is always appreviated.

 

 Fresh Talk Episode 2 [63:41m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Travis Wissink left a comment in a previous blog entry that has prompted me to describe my podcasting/recording setup. 

The goal is to be able to record multiple participants at the same time, both locally and through Skype or other VOIP systems. In other words I could have 2 or 3 people at my “studio” (ie. my office) and up to 5 more via Skype.

I therefore need a multi-track recorder and the ability to channel audio in a variety of different ways so that the podcast participants hear each other as well as any music, sound effects, etc.

From a hardware perspective, I use USB Headphone/Mics from Plantronics. These have a built-in DSP and offer reasonably good recording quality while eliminating some of the background noises.

Keeping in mind that I use a Windows PC, these are the software components I use:

1. Multi-Track Recording: Kristal Audio Engine from http://www.kreatives.org although I may start using Reaper from http://www.cockos.com
2. Audio Routing and Patching: Virtual Audio Cable from http://www.ntonyx.com
3. Low Latency ASIO Drivers: ASIO4ALL from http://www.asio4all.com
4. Audio Cleanup and MP3 Transcoding: Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net) and LAME (http://lame.sourceforge.net)
5. Filtering, Gates, and Normalizers: I use a variety of public domain VST filters to help clean things up a bit.

Key to all this is the use of Virtual Audio Cable (VAC). With it I redirect the sound from Skype into Kristal but also use it to route a mix (minus the participant’s own voice) of the audio back into Skype so that the participants can hear me, the people in my office and any music, sound effects, etc. 

Now, in my first podcast, my microphone was coming in really “hot” that was a mistake on my part, since I forgot to check levels and my voice got loud and scratchy. Additionally, I didn’t spend too much time cleaning up the audio. We had some problems with one of the participant’s microphones, but all-in-all I’m rather pleased with things.

Naturally, I’ll keep fine-tuning things to get the most out of my setup. The key was not to invest alot of money and so far I’ve only spent about $70 in software and hardware. I have a friend who has spent over $3000 on his podcast rig (mixer, microphones, noisegate/compressor, telephone recorder, and many yards of cabling) and after MP3 compression, the audio quality is practically the same.

As always, your thoughts and feedback are appreciated.