#6 – Technically Working

Apparently Lincoln earned the goat of me About the ghost of me nothing He just told you that as you came in well meal with oh So meal was reading the words goat of many hats She like I know what this is and she spelled all over it out all this one long blob across you got to start over Spent again and so she oh a tea. I said okay, so stop that's one word and then she said go goat of many hats And I was like yeah, so high five from Nick is like I earned that goat I earned that goat last week. And I was like, oh, well, that's great. And that's the extent of that conversation. Listen to Connected. I know you're talking about the one from last week. (laughing) The one where they got to drop everything to go get flights. Go get flights, yep. They are like, what, is it five, 10 minutes into the show before they even do the introduction of like, yeah. I found that so hilarious. If you wonder what we're talking about, we're referencing Connected. You don't even need to be a pro member to get this, I don't think. Because I'm not from them right now. No. Yeah, I did not renew in November. I did, but it's only because I've gotten spoiled by not having any ads. I will be renewing here shortly. And that is also the reason I've never done a trial of YouTube premium or whatever it's called this week because I know I will get used to seeing no ads and then I will be stuck paying for it because I'm spoiled by no ads. Plus, you know, that's a whole conversation for generating income for your podcast or your YouTube channel or any kind of content creator. I don't mind paying for people's content. Mike finally convinced me to join the DTNS patron. So I'm now a patron of DTNS. I like not having the pre-roll ads for Acast at the beginning. It was worth it to me just for that, honestly. I just like didn't pull the trigger 'cause I was lazy and also didn't go on to Patreon. But so that's been done. I pay for what is it, Connected Pro? I pay for Twit. Twit actually is a really good deal. So they're still running the same sort of setup that the Relay FM member ship started as, which is you pay a flat price and you get ad-free versions of all of the shows. So for Twitter, that's seven bucks a month. That's good. I should go pick that one up 'cause I don't listen to Twitter because the shows are so long and then you gotta add the ads in there. And Leo, you do great at reading ads for the most part. But he is long on those ads. They get their money's worth off. He is really long on those ads. You know about what Leo was talking about that week. Yep, but it does do good ad reads. He's the first person I heard do really good and convinced me very early on without him actually trying to convince me 'cause he wasn't just hearing him do the ad reads for his shows when I started listening over 10 years ago. that when you're doing ads on your podcast, or even I think on a YouTube video, host-read advertising I think is still the best. It touches me better than you inserting a random ad here, like, "Let's take a break for a ad," and then here's a commercially sounding ad versus the host reading the ad and giving me their honest opinions. One thing I have to give the relay folks and the people over at Twit is they actually use the products, at least for a short time, I mean, I continue using them 'cause maybe it doesn't make sense for them, but they actually use the product. And it's nice not only knowing that you wouldn't be doing advertising for this product if you didn't believe in it I think it was a good product for your audience. But also when they actually use the product, come to mind to me, I listen to upgrade most weeks and they have only pizza ovens as a sponsor on a relay network. Well, it's fun listening to them talk about, especially Jason who cooks a lot of pizzas with his own pizza. I am nearly convinced to buy one and the only reason I have not bought it is because one, I'm not a huge fan of pizza. I might like it more if I made it. But my reason for buying it would be Lincoln's really in the pizza. I'm like, I'm gonna spend four or 500 bucks on one of these ovens and then he'll be done. He's like, yeah, whatever, I'm not, I don't forget pizza. I don't care about this. I think they're late too. They started like - but I think the one that I might would yeah I would be the multi fuel one So I would have an option to use you know wood or charcoal or okay. I think is the is a model I haven't actually looked at them. I just know they're not you know They're not terribly expensive for what you're getting I don't eat pizza like that But you can relate to the host that's reading the ad to you or talking to you about that about their experience Yeah, cuz they can use it right or you know, so all the ones I can't relate to a square space But this is a conversation for a different thing that you're relating to it. You may not like it You're relating to it though it builds that you know, you will not buy a space Well, I mean it worked on me enough for me to have tried to square space at some point or did it work on you enough? To get you to just go pay for the paid version. So you don't have to hear square space ads anymore Hmm now there's a psychological twist Like I will just do ads and more people I thought they pay us and you know, I was annoying ass I did try square space because because of a podcast ad though And to be fair is one of those situations and Leo has said this a few times in different situations of you know and Dave Hamilton on that geek gap says it all the time. My job as a podcast host is to one, try to find sponsors that are gonna be relative, relatable to my audience, that are gonna actually fit for what I think my audience is and what they're interested in. And two, to at least convince you to go look at their product. I don't have to convince you to buy it, that's their job, once you get there. All I need you to do is click on a link that will let them know that, hey, you got more traffic this month because you paid us for a sponsorship. Now whether or not to buy their product is strictly between you and the seller of said product at that point. And that's true, like I tried Squarespace because of podcast ads. And I tried it and you know what, Squarespace did not sell me on their product. I'm not mad at the host who do ads for Squarespace. But we won't do an ad for Squarespace probably. Not ever. Yeah. I will quit. Unless tomorrow they turn around and things are fully accessible and they actually made that commitment then we can have that discussion. But in the current iteration, no. No, no, no, I would quit. It looks like, listen man, they're giving us like, you know, $10,000 a show. It's like, man, I'm out. Yeah, no. You're gonna have to get, Marty come do technically working with you now 'cause I quit. Mic drop. I'm not gonna walk away. Maybe I should reconsider this because I just threw my mic down. (laughing) Okay, I'll do one more show. One more show so I can advertise my services so people can buy them from me. No, so I can get some of that ad money and buy a new mic that I just broke or put the money back in my account and I'll just put the buy a new mic. Speaking of microphones, you are using a Shure Beta A7A. I'm using a Shure Beta A7A on the most excellent outside of their branding thing all over the side of it. Rode Plus, PSA One Plus I think is what it is. We'll put a link in the show notes. But yeah, love the arm. It's been what, about a year? Coming up on a year? Coming up on a year, yeah. After I find the limit, we've just mentioned it. Go look into these arms. Yeah, I'll go look into these arms. See if I can borrow it. But yeah, I am still loving this arm. I almost bought another boom arm. The conversation needed going somewhere, but I almost bought another boom arm, which was the Elgato Low Profile Pro or Plus or something boom arm. And my thought was one, I don't, I think I have in my mind ideally how these arms look, like the low profile style arms look, which is instead of being like the ones that we have where you clamp it to the desk, you put the arm in, and the arm goes up and then comes across, so like a reverse L or whatever. The arm goes straight up and then you have the boom arm with the mic on the end of it that comes out across. Well, when you're on camera, that boom can be in the way of your camera. Like the way mine is positioned right now, it would absolutely be in the camera shot and not be attractive. And I would also be a sim 'cause now I'm giving road free advertising, which I'm doing on my podcast today. I don't want it to be on television like that. Right, or with that meeting that I have with that all important client. Right, right, and I'm just, you know, this big giant road and just sticking out there. Plus, you know, from a podcast standpoint on the side note, Mike does have an affiliate link for ZZown. So we know-- I know, I accidentally just logged into that account while I was trying to find Mike ZZown's order history. I was like, "Oh, I have an affiliate account. I should just look at that." Yeah, we will drop a link in the show notes to the road podcaster. Nope, not the road podcaster, the road PSA one, bull arm, whatever, and click on the link. If you wanna buy some music gear, go check out ZZown's, they have pretty nice pavement plans if you're trying to get things on budget and get some decent gear instead of buying cheap $13, $19 hour, which they're going for right at the moment that you signed Amazon arms. They're gonna break on you in a couple of years. Been there, done it. So, they're that aspect of it. Now, however, these low profile arms, I did not buy the Elgato one, and it's because I heard two people who are podcasters say the exact same thing. I won't call any names, and I'm not gonna besmirch the name of Elgato too much either. But they both said the same thing, which is, after a while, the arm kind of starts to droop and not maintain its rigidness. This road, I can move it anywhere, sometimes to a point that I push it up out of the way for early for a second, and then I'm looking for my microphone, because, oh, it's not there, because I moved it. But when I move it, it does nothing. It doesn't come back, it doesn't droop down, it doesn't fall. I haven't tightened up or loosened anything. Everything just worked. So decided not to buy that Elgato arm. Also, I'm a little predisposed and not to want to spend my money with Elgato because so much of their software for media content creation isn't accessible. So I feel a little better not having spent the money with them also. Just putting that out there. Although I am looking at a much more expensive boom arm. So please don't pick on Michael's affiliate, man. (laughing) 'Cause he needs to recruit some of that money. Man, I'm not even buying it yet because apparently sweet water doesn't carry them norzies out. So like there's not even an option for a baby plant. and we're looking at three or $400 for a polymer, which I don't actually need at the moment. Like I can work around the camera. One day maybe, one day. But I got a network and give it by. And now I told you this has somewhere to go, but I forgot. Oh, oh, I do remember why I was going with this whole sort of number of what microphones we're using. I am really interested in trying out this Shure NV7 XLR USB microphone. I know that you would have told me that Marty has one. I think that's the one he has. When they talk to him, I'll ask him again, or I find it in a recording test. I think I was supposed to call him and ask him too, but I kinda forgot. Things happen. Marty, call us. I think you get a free shout out on the show. And be sure to check out Marty and Michael on people on Tuesdays. I'll just go ahead and interject that there too. There we go, see, this is our ads. I wanted to get back to before we go into the microphone and just question real quick. And it kind of works out this way, 'cause we are running our own ads for other shows that I'm involved in right now, and muteacb.community if you want to join us live to get on the mailing list so you can join that. But where I was going with that is there is a podcast, I don't know if you've listened to it yet, it is on my list of things to start listening to. And if either one of us remembers, we'll leave this in, even if we don't, but we should come back talk about overcast set up because I have some questions for you and maybe we can share some ideas now that I am kind of getting along with overcast. But Host Red Ads, I think is the name of the podcast. I'll put it in the show notes is Leo's wife who organizes the relationships with the advertisers that they have on Twitter. And Marty suggested I give that a listen to and I think you did too. Interesting that they're using SoundCloud to host that, but I think that might be for the social aspect of it, which I should play with a little more. Yeah, I found that interesting too that you use SoundCloud for that. I figured probably what happened is, although your reason actually makes more sense to mine, which is like, oh, Well, Lisa just want to do a podcast which you recorded and just throw it up on sound clocks. You know, I'm saying we don't complicated Drupal CDN P parsing system they got going on over there But being able to easily share or just kind of have sound cloud push that up maybe in some different ways might be the reason For it is a pretty good show and that is where I've gotten a lot of good information on not just how to develop those Relations like there's a once you did about how they onboard a new advertiser That started me just from a business standpoint of living in like okay I got to get a onboarding process in place for new customers that really makes sense like isn't you know Halfway done or me trying to remember all of the stuff I need to go through And it started me down a journey really investigating different tools like do I want to continue to use this tool? Does it make sense to use that tool? What's ultimately has kept me in to do is because of the external connectivity to do it's like if nothing else I can get stuff In and at least on my Mac consistently I get notifications about a task including why I don't do them But I can't say I didn't get the notification Yes, yes, so envy something. Why has your interest bite? So One because I really like my sure beta 87 a I had this microphone years ago I got rid of it when I was transitioning because I was Basically scaling down to where I needed the USB mic cuz I didn't have an interface I didn't want to buy a new interface and you know just cost cutting measures at that point So I got rid of that microphone ultimately ended up back with the exact same microphones I probably should just kept it and put it in the bag Because it's still my favorite microphone There are some that I probably would like as much but you're like three times the cost of the beta 87 a and they don't necessarily Sound three times as good to me So like the Neumann KMS 105 is one of those that I have been interested in because it does sound good It's a little bit, you know a little bit more of that warmer tone that you're dealing with the beta 878 But not you know, $600 good to me, you know over what the beta 878 over what the 878 is Wasn't it Marco that did a demo of all these different microphones like in the group? Yep, we'll drop a link to Marco's big mega podcast microphone review Good content. He has been updating it - there's a new microphone. He's put up there I think there's a couple of new microphones. The new one that he is now using is, I think it's Earthworks, is the company that makes it. So they actually, and he, you know, that's turned into a pretty good thing for me. Actually had those people sent him a microphone to test out and he, you know, reviewed it compared to some of the other ones. And then the one guy buying one, 'cause he liked it. But again, you know, we're talking like 700 bucks. That sounded a lot of great to me. But what has me interested in the NV70, I do have my AT 2005 here. I don't really want to buy another one of those at some point. And just being fair, fair's fair. Like I have one, I actually have an old 2100, not a 2100X, but a 2100, the original. The mini USB. Yeah, that one. Yeah. That one, yeah, yeah. So I have one of those that I honestly just didn't want to be bothered to ship it back and pay for the shipping and do all of that to have them fix it again, because it would be the second time I've sent a microphone back to Audio Technica. Now I haven't had any problems with the AT 2005, it still works perfectly fine, but considering that one, I do like good audio. Sure makes good microphones. and the NV7 from a few listens I have given to it just randomly. I haven't done extensive testing or extensive listening to anyone else's, so I'll just kinda glance in here and there, it does seem to provide a pretty good sound with a little bit more kind of echo rejection. And what I'm thinking about is not so much my everyday mic. That's gonna be the mic that's in front of me right now, but when I'm traveling because of that USB connectivity, I will be able to take that microphone and probably get a little bit better sound than I'm getting than I would get with the Audio Technica mic in random locations, like say a hotel room that doesn't have enough soft things around it, so you know, sound is bouncing all over the place. And it's probably also to be honest with you, 'cause I just want to buy something. (laughing) Look, it's a Shiro mic, it's dynamic okay, but it's USB and XLR, so it's flexible, so you know, hey, why not, I like this microphone, I have not bought it yet, and I probably won't buy it, but I am very interested in it. I won't throw my Audio Technica out the window, but if something happens to it, that would probably be the next mic I would go to, especially for travel. just so you have a backup when you're traveling. Yeah, or if I show up somewhere and I need to do like two guests, like me and another person I'm recording at the same time, so at some point I probably will pick it up even if I don't, something doesn't happen to the Audio Technica just to give me an additional backup when you're traveling, the worst thing is, I'm sitting here now and if the sheer worst would go out, I could reach over and grab the Audio Technica, and I'm good. But if I'm traveling in the Audio Technica all of a sudden and working, I don't have a backup, there's nothing else to go to. And a part of what we're doing with technically working right now is being consistent. We have published a show every Monday We have not missed a day yet. With that one random, get any feedback about that episode. The one episode Mike dropped in on me doing a long demonstration of our launch bar. I haven't heard anything from anybody but-- I haven't gotten any feedback on that. So if you have feedback, email us or reach out. And if you're reaching out to us and you're not getting us, because honestly I haven't tested the email, and I think I forgot to set it up yet again. Let's reach out. Can I just make you an admin? I will walk you through that process. process because you can add me without having to give me a license. And that could be helpful for someone. So yeah, I might just do that and then you can set that up. So if you reach out to us, we guarantee we will have email set up because we're going to record this. So by the time you see that it did. Otherwise, you know, some of us, some listeners know us personally. So give us feedback on what you thought about Tomasi's episode. Other than that, this sounds like the same show you guys were already doing. Yeah, I know. First of all, Mallory asked me, she goes, "Why are you guys recording again?" I'm like, "Because it's that time of week." We're consistent, we're doing it, and hopefully people are enjoying it. Downloads are going up, so that's one stat to keep track of. And interesting things that are gonna be coming up in the near future with some other things that I'm involved in. Mosse, I am curious though, with your overcast, how do you have your playlist set up? 'Cause my playlist, I have three set up right now. I have casual listening, which is, I'm doing something, I don't gotta pay attention to it. This might be audio drama, it's kinda like, if you just have a TV on in the background for people who do that. That's my casual listening. I have news, that's what's going on in the world. Often my day starts in that one, and I need to add and remove some podcasts in that one. And then I have tech, which I realized the other day I've spent zero time in because I go into double tab or I go in, I have DTNS and news. And I know, I think even I've personally talked about overcast, I don't know if we've talked about your playlist set up on the show before. So yeah, I have to use overcast and playlists. How do you have your playlist constructed? Like are they automatically just pulling in a new show from this feed? They pull in new episodes from selected shows. Gotcha, okay. 'Cause I thought that's the primary, I think easiest way to set it up. Yeah, that's how I have mine set up for the most part. I only have a couple of playlists. One is tech and I realize that I, one, I need to reset it up because a lot of the feeds that were in there are no longer there, such as DTNS was in there, going in there every day. But I have not added the Patreon feed there. I'm a few shows going in there that are, you know, basically tech related news. DTNS, I think I would actually move to a news playlist. I am working on, and I say working on because I've been cleaning up feeds that I don't ever listen to, like they're there, but I don't listen to them. and there's a tip for anybody. If you ever feel like you're either overwhelmed by the number of podcasts you subscribe to, or you realize I have this feed and it has 134 episodes and I haven't opened it probably since the first week that I subscribed to it, do an export of your XML file and save that somewhere, because then you can always go back and pull those shows back up if you determine you want to get them back, but then just start playing out what you don't think you're gonna listen to. But I need to, with you also, 'cause I think you have some jokes I need to also add, I need to subscribe to, to start building out actual news playlist. So in that playlist for me would be like DTNS, probably something like security now 'cause I don't have enough security podcasts I consistently listen to that I will make their own playlist for them. So just general news, 'cause to me security news is news. 'Cause you need to stay updated on this. I need to stay current. You need to be current. I need to be current on what's going on but then oftentimes it has a wider reach. It just talks with the topic of security but it has a wider reach into the tech industry. But most of my playlist are set up. The ones that I do actually have that are active right now are the tech one and then I have an inbox playlist this was not a legitimate attempt to duplicate the Castro feature. It was a playlist for me being able to say, "I wanna add specific episodes." That one is actually manually controlled, so it was not automatic at all. I manually add episodes to the inbox playlist so I can sync them to my watch, which is still such a terrible experience and I don't actually end up doing it too often. But that is the reason that playlist exists. The other thing I have done in Overcast is shows that I know consistently I am going to want to know when there's a new episode and listen to it once. Sometimes I'll turn on notifications for certain shows. I do have no silence or whatever the terminology is so that something goes to the notification center, but I don't see it on the lock screen, it doesn't throw up a banner, but when I'm checking notifications, I'll see like, oh, there's a new security, no, they finally posted the new security note, so, okay. Also, I have pinned a few shows to the top of Overcast. So before I get to, you know, the unplayed episodes of any feeds in Afrobido quarters, they are, you know, want to be laid out. Security now is pinned at the top, DTNS is a Patreon feed, it's pinned at the top. What else is pinned or something? I was pinned at the top, I don't have my phone. Mine are unmute and DT, no, unmute and double tap. I don't want to right now. Yeah, I should probably pin double tap because I do tend to not listen to that. I fall behind with that on some occasions and sometimes I'll skip a show because the title is not enticing. Here's a tip for people starting podcasts, try to get your titles to be intriguing so that people will listen to your show. Did you notice I played with the title for last week? Nope, 'cause I didn't stop till I was out. That's really interesting that you bring that up 'cause I did play with the title last week. I should tell him and then I'm like, no, I'm like, but you know, that's what we would normally do is try something and then reach out and say, hey, did you notice that I changed this? Nope, 'cause I've been doing cleanup and I have not. I saw that song, ooh, the newsletter, that's where I saw it. I do read the newsletter when you see that out. And we've been consistent with that too. I'm starting to enjoy that. We need to start automating some of that. We will get some of that stuff automated. So Mike's using Cindy to send out his newsletter. You should go over to youromate.com/tw and subscribe. Get a lot of weekly newsletter, which is updates of what's going on. But I do open those and take a look because sometimes I don't know that Mike has published something Also, I can see what Goofy Tyler gave my show last week. (laughing) I'm a terrible podcaster because I don't listen to my own show, but I just did it, so I really don't want to listen to it. It's not so much I don't want to listen to. It's like there's so much other stuff to listen to. It's from podcasts and audio books and stuff that I just don't, it's like I did this show, I don't wanna talk about. - And family, you gotta listen there too, like to be real. I only listen to it 'cause I edit it. Sometimes I'll go back and listen to a couple of minutes of it just to make sure, because Marty has called me out on a couple of episodes where I mess up and edit and I only publish my channel or Demossy's channel. I had a really good conversation about audio today. That was fun. If I edit, I will go listen to it when it's published. Like the first, again, first few minutes, just to make sure, like, okay, this did come out right. But because I trust Mike to know what he's doing when he's editing, like, and I know he's not gonna do anything goofy, like, I don't need to babysit him, so I don't listen because, you know, I have more other stuff to listen to. I literally just did the show, and Mike's editing has gotten so good to the point that like, early days of DM, I would listen to the episodes, and I'm like, "Oh man, we should have did this," or "You should have cut that out," or something like that. And Mike would probably do the same thing to me, like, "Oh, your cuts were a little rough there." And I was like, "Damn, man, I was in hurry." Yep. - But yeah, that's that. I think we're editing it on it. Were we in Reaper or Amadeus then? I don't, I will have to go back and look. I think we may have been in Reaper. If we even talked about it. Well, I'm sure we talked about it, but. Yeah, I think you may have been using Reaper on Windows, possibly, but I don't really remember. You know, we could have had some early episodes done in Amadeus, 'cause I'm not sure, I don't remember exactly when we started using Reaper. I know we started right around the second time 'cause Garth content is what it was just into, or not say push this, we gotta show it to Reaper, like, oh, okay, here's a, 'cause I had been eyeballing, what is it, Logic Pro for a long time, just because it was like a more full-featured, you know, multi-track editor, which is a thing that I wanted, but Logic was also 200 bucks, and Omaki's also not designed for podcasters. Apple seems to want every update, we can't get more features that podcasters rely on, so let's not spend that money. But yeah, Reaper has turned out to be an amazing thing. And anything from the conversation about Reaper and audio editing that anyone would share, or you can't share, or? That I need to slow down, maybe listen to what Mallory says, and pay attention because if you didn't know in Reaper, you can tap F4 and that brings up a list of actions. And you can pretty much search, I think where I was looking at to make macros. So to combine actions together to do my own things based on keystrokes that I set up. That's another thing that I appreciate Jacob for bringing it up. 'Cause he made a mention on Double Tap last week that a lot of his key map entries are accustomed to what he does and what he needs for his workflow. So for example, on the Mac, if you press Command + Shift + J, that will give you the beats and time information and you do it twice and it gives you the hours and minutes, right? Well, you can go up into the view menu and go to ruler and under ruler, set that two minutes and hour, or minutes and seconds. So that way when you press V-O-J-J, it will give you information about, or I'm sorry, when you just press V-O-J once, it will give you information about the hours and minutes and seconds. And that's what I need as a podcaster and that's how I set mine up. Well, he has this set up because it's a command that he uses quite often because he needs to know that information to just J. Why do you need to use command shift? yes, everyone else has that by default, but you can go in and set that to something different. And I think that's something that I have to realize too is a lot of times I'll just stick with the defaults and don't think about, hey, instead of spending 45 seconds with F12 trying to remember to shift comma, comma, why not actually set up your own keystrokes that mentally to you make sense? Like I always go to nudge the comma and period, why do I need to add this shift? That doesn't make sense. We'll set that up 'cause you can customize Reaper that way. Yeah, I think I've done some of that at times in the past, I think on a previous install, I didn't back up my Reaper stuff and I didn't wanna go find it. I hadn't made that many changes, but I have made that change with the roller before because like you, like I just need the time of where I'm at, not the beats and all. 'Cause I don't, you know, that's music and I'm not doing music, I'm doing podcast. But yeah, I think the OSAR key map is a very good starting point. And I think when you're learning Reaper, and that's the difference is like, when you were, when I was learning Reaper at least, it for me made sense to stay with the defaults of the OSAR key map that came along with OSAR because one, when people were giving instructions or doing tutorials, that's the key map that they were drawing from. They weren't necessarily, you know, calling out the necessary action they would say, you know, you want a nudge by pressing these keys, which made it easier for me to make that transition really get to learn Reaper. I think once you're at the level that you are with editing and as much editing as you do, it behooves you to actually go in and really customize the key map to make it make sense for you and make sure you always export a copy and back it up or put it in Git. Yeah. - So you have it. I brought it up to Jacob. I said, it's ironic. I can automate with Hazel all day long and, you know, automate text expansion, but I never really put into consideration to automate what I'm working on every day, Which would save me a lot of time and energy. A lot. I think it's just that expectation of either you went in and customized something before, which may have happened and then like, you broke some more stuff that I'm working, or again, just coming from that, I'm still learning this aspect as opposed to now you're kind of really a professional Reaper user in a lot of ways. Like the amount of editing that you do and as good at using the features of Reaper to enhance your editing, you're past the point of having to stick with the defaults, because if someone tells you, oh, well you just want to nudge this over, well you're gonna know what nudge is. Like you're not still learning about nudging items, which may have been a thing, I'm just using Nudge as an example. But that could have been a thing when, you know, we both started using Reaper that I didn't know about what a lot of this terminology meant because I had never actually used a DAW, like a full blown DAW. Everything I ever used was a very simple, in most cases, single track editing software like Amadeus where they didn't have terms, like, and I remember having a conversation with Tamir over at Sweetwater one day about why my audio was not going out the way that I wanted it to, or why was it not cutting out a specific channel that I wanted to do this interface, or how could I, I don't remember exactly what it was. There was something I was trying to do with the board, I wanted to record something or not have something recorded. And I was in Amadeus at the time. And if you're calling out for me to do Amadeus, are you sure that you armed the track? And I was like, what do you mean? Am I giving Amadeus a gun? That's the right way. What do you mean? Right, didn't know any of this, right? So coming in to Reaper now, I understand what it was then. 'Cause he explained, you have to arm, in most DAWs, he's like, I'm not familiar with Amadeus, but in most DAWs, like a logic or whatever, whatever, you have to arm a track in order to record it to it. Like if you don't arm it, it does not record audio to it. So that started me on a journey. And when I got to Reaper, there still was terminology I had to learn, which is kind of universal across all digital audio workstation applications, which is what DAW stands for, people. But I wasn't using the DAW. I was using just a very simple editor, which is a great app. It's no shade being thrown on the dance pro at all. Served me quite well for several years, but the one thing I did was multi-track recording, and that's not something that everybody did. I hacked it one time to make it work. It was super difficult. So I think that's part of the reason that maybe you keep doing what you're doing because what you're doing is working. And because you weren't willing to make those changes. And I think that applies across any kind of, you know, any kind of work that any of us do. You start out, you learn something one way, and you keep doing that because you're efficient doing it, even if they're not realizing that you are adding more cognitive load to what you do, because it's not as efficient as you can make it if you were to take the time to customize it. But you are able to reliably reproduce the same outcome every time. So you stick with that. Yeah, I mean, that's why my audio still goes to alphonic to get normalized. That's why I still pay Alphonic monthly. I mean, I like Alphonic, but there's tools that I could use locally to, I finally installed Map Whisper. So I'm gonna start playing with that. I haven't got the license yet. I used it to translate audio from Marty in a ad that we're creating because script talk is coming to a mute and do a presentation on Tuesday, the 18th of April at 10 a.m. Pacific time, 1 p.m. Eastern, acb.community for more information. And telling us about what script talk is and how you can use it to read your medication. Well, Marty recorded part of that And I'm like, I will come up with a part that I can record and put something together. Because you know me, overcome it, and then try to figure out what I'm going to do later. So what I did is I'm like, well, this gives me an opportunity to install Mac Whisper. So I grabbed that clip of audio that he used. Ultimately, I could use, because he did a pretty good job. It's like 29 seconds, which is like perfect for what I'm shooting for. And I sent that into Mac Whisper, and then I got the transcript. And then I dropped that into Mac GPT and said write a two-person script. And it gave me something. So I might reach out to Marty and have him voice the parts that it gave me. 'cause that, I mean, it gives me that two-person script or we might just run with what he has or I might have two ads because he already did one and then I took that one ad and turned it into a second one that we could use and put a rotation. Yeah, so that's the thing. Like I've thought about that too with off-hundred. Like right now my default seal is to go to off-hundred. With audio that I know is going out for the world. It is mostly for me because I'm not confident enough with doing my own compression and noise leveling to know that that stuff is where it needs to be. Even though I pay for it too, which reminds me of GoCheck on my pricing. But I pay for a tool and I've been consistently paying for it. And I use it, like I've used it to clean up audio, but I don't use it to its full benefit where I could probably output using RX, I said so, you know, a pretty good, you know, or a excellent recorded, you know, edited show or whatever with RX without having to go to a cloud service to do it with alphatic and still use some of the same automation stuff that you're using now. Like, you know, we render a project out and once it's rendered, you know, it gets moved to this folder and then that stuff happens, et cetera, et cetera. It's easier or not necessarily say easier, but you know you're gonna get consistent output going through all of it. And it adds to the message kind of difficult to walk away to. Yeah, like Whisper. Whisper was keeping me there. Maybe if I had first motivation, I might explore it. But that's what I told him, Jacob, that's what keeps me there. But that, and I know what I'm gonna get out of it. I know what I'm sending to it. So I know what to expect to get out of it. And it's gonna be consistent with any audio that I post. But I might hopefully move some more of that locally because Reaper over 6,000 actions available. I don't know about that. Yeah, it's really deep. Reaper's a great app. The only thing I've, the only knock out, honestly heard against Reaper from people generally who do a lot of editing is, download the interface, visually download the interface. It's about the worst thing. Because everybody I know that's blind, it uses Reaper and is a audio, any sort of semi-professional ProSomber, whatever word you wanna use, up to the pros, like we all love it because thanks to Osara, which Jamie, I'm just saying like you guys really need to set up GitHub sponsorship or something. 'Cause I can't contribute any code to you. I'm not gonna learn Python that much. But I would absolutely contribute some money over for OSR. I'm just saying, put up a PayPal link or something. Buy me a coffee, something. Cash app. A Striplink. Something. Do Striplink, 'cause then you can use cash right there, see? Yeah, I mean do something is what I'm saying. Like I'm trying to give you some money, but you know, make it easier for me to give you money and also tell other people like, hey, you know, instead of giving me that 15 bucks for whatever you owed me 15 bucks for, you know, go over here to this place and give these guys 15 bucks, 'cause they're doing, give these folks. Guys for me tends to be a all-inclusive term, not necessarily limited to males, but I'm gonna work on that. But give these folks some money for what they're doing over there. But I've heard that for people in a lot of different ways of interfacing, but they're also cited, and it's like, well, you can customize the interface. You're like, yeah, but logic just works. So just say that you really like logic, and just keep moving. You don't have to move the interface is ugly. But you can customize it, though, right? It's not super hard. There are things out there that exist. So Mac GPT. We've been getting into a lot of GPT stuff. We're not gonna make our whole show about AI, as you can tell, 'cause we've all been recording for, huh, about 45 minutes, wow. Yeah. But we have been using some new tools. Mike got a magazine, what did you get? So Mac Whisper, for everybody, we'll put links to show notes in this, but Mac Whisper is using Whisper AI, which there are some cloud implementations of it, but essentially you can just run this on your computer to do transcript. The person, the people who put it together and came up with the idea and got the actual, command line tools put together for Whisper, we're looking for something that they could use to transcribe interviews with locally on their machines. So, you know, that's how Mac Whisper itself ever came about. Mac Whisper, the application is just somebody who wrote a nice GUI interface that is accessible as far as I can tell. Yeah. My usage of it, that, so you don't have to go through the command line and try to type in a whole bunch of, you know, flags and stuff like that. It is to, I would say Mac Whisper is to the Whisper command line to what Permute is to FFMA. Right, so you can just go in and tell it what you need to happen versus remember what commands to type or put in text-explaner. And it works fairly well once you get used to the interface and it's not even a difficult interface to get used to. And so yeah, I use that. I am just using the free version right now and actually that did pretty good. So I'm kind of impressed. Yeah, it was pretty good. Same guy. The English small is the one that I downloaded. Yep, I still have that one in the song 'cause it's the fastest one. With the paid version, you do get the English, I think it's multi-language large. You get both English and multi-language, medium and pro now. No, there's not an English pro, large I think. There's a, nope, nope, it's a multilingual, so it's an English medium, and what we're talking about is like the accuracy versus speed of the process, so the small one, it doesn't take a blast of words. It's really fast at coming back with a transcript, right, it's transcribing your audio into text, but it is less accurate in, say, the large model, which includes all languages, so it's like three gigs, download, and it's gonna be slower, but it's slower because it is taking more time to process the audio to be more accurate. So, you know, if you need something that's real quick and dirty, 'cause you're gonna toss it in chat, GPT anyway, it's small, definitely works. If you were actually trying to transcribe, Like one way that I'm probably gonna start using this is to transcribe recordings from Zoom, right? I do a consultation with somebody and I need to go back. So to be sitting here taking notes that honestly people, I don't go back and look at all the time anyway. Unless they're the key critical piece of information that I have forgotten that I'm like, okay, I did write it down. So let me go find it in drafts. Just transcribe the meeting, you know, take the meeting, drop it in there. And I will transcribe that using a large model because I want it to be as accurate as it can possibly be at that point. So I don't care about how long it takes because I'm not sitting there transcribing it. And that's why I'm not paying anybody to do it either. Because you pay one for those and it's like 18 bucks And then you can just let it run and not worry about it because your computer's gonna be on you're gonna do something else anyways I got a m2 man. I can run the world with m2 Jeez, no apples don't these chills is ridiculous in the matter I did I am literally if you if anybody does listen now ever listen to I'm gonna say early to mid-episodes Probably although not all the web today because our time we got to the end of the DM series I was on a Apple silicon computer anything prior to that you have probably heard me say well never buy a MacBook Air Not as my primary computer. Maybe if I had enough disposable income and I needed just a quick knock around computer to grab, you know, for me to record a podcast or something like that, okay, I'm never buying MacBook Air to be my primary computer, that's not a thing. I still stand by those words because this is not a normal MacBook Air. I'm just saying. It's not the normal MacBook Air. This is not the MacBook Air of the day when that was recorded. Uh-huh, this is not the Mac. I did not foresee this. Like I knew Apple was working on their own chips, but I did not foresee this. Like I'm sitting in front of a MacBook Air and it is my primary computer. And honestly, like the only reason I would upgrade to a pro is if one, I started traveling a ridiculous amount and I was having to do a lot of rendering, et cetera. Or if I were looking at a way to possibly just get more ports, which I would resolve that problem. Oh, I'm about to do doc. That's how I wanted to open the show. I got here anyway. So I'm a professional people, I know how to do this. I wanted to start the show with that and then Lincoln gave me with that dope thing. So that threw all that off. See, that's what we were talking about, now we talked about it, so we gotta keep going. I just thought about it too, I just referenced the goat thing. Yeah, so I just made a note keep the goat in see look. I'm a professional I know what I'm doing sometimes I did buy new doc. Oh bought the OWC Thunderbolt hub They need to work on their branding. I'm gonna You know, I'm gonna stop saying I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna start composing emails with chat GPT There you go. It's all you have to do is write slash Uh-huh. Yep, and I'm gonna introduce companies to Desiree by way of saying listen I have afraid it was really good with marketing a copy of her on his email The reason I'm suggesting her is because I get confused by some of your product naming not to really be able to you know Either legitimately know what I'm buying sometimes or to be able to explain to someone else who wants to think about Which one of your products it is? So I'm gonna come back to that comment Mike made about slash GPT in a second So what I did buy here is and it was all sale. They had a pretty nice mark March madness sale I bought an open box. I think it's Thunderbolt 4 hub. I'll put a link in the show notes for sure 'cause they got some confusing products. But this one gives me, in addition to the Thunderbolt port, that connection to the computer, gives me three additional Thunderbolt 4 ports. So USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports, which is awesome because that means I can plug in anything. If I have more Thunderbolt stuff, I got more ports, but they also work just regular USB-C. Gives me, I think, three A ports. That are USB 3, whatever the fastest speeds are. SD card slot, Ethernet jack, which is why I bought it. Gonna be honest, just had an Ethernet jack on it. Get a bit of Ethernet jack. Headphone deck, which might come in handy at some point. I wanna do some weird audio wrapping stuff. SD card slot and I think HDMI, but I don't remember. I don't pay attention to HDMI 'cause I don't care about it. But that's it. I picked it up for about 140-ish bucks it was on sale for. And the primary reason I bought this, Mike remembers that I own the, he doesn't probably remember the name of it. He knows only a Thunderbolt hub that I bought that I was very happy with a couple years ago. the elements, the CalDigit elements Thunderbolt 4 hub. Yup, I remember that name. Three USB, four USB A ports and three Thunderbolt ports and that mission to the one port that's connected to the computer. Also people need to stop that when you go look at like these docks or these hubs and like, you have four Thunderbolt ports, no you don't, you have three because one has a connected computer, that one at that point is useless. I'm still, I still like the hub, I still think it's a good solution. Two things for me though, number one, on more occasions than I'm happy with, I probably shouldn't say this 'cause I'm gonna tell people, "Hey, if you're interested in buying this, reach out." But for some reason, I occasionally get the notifications when I plug something in, like, "Oh, USB devices have been disabled "because one of your devices is drawing too much power." Now, I honestly think that's a macOS issue and not an issue with the hub, 'cause I didn't see this prior to upgrading to Ventura. And it also still seems to be working. This hub does plug into the mall, so there's no reason for you to be like, "Oh, you're drawing too much power." Like, "Where am I drawing? "I'm not drawing power for you, Matt. "Like, where are you doing?" Don't judge me on my power usage, macOS. Like, whether you're trying to be a nanny now, you're gonna tell me how much. I'm the one who plays this like Bill, you know, don't play with me. But the real reason I switched. You go do whisper for a little bit. Right. So, but the reason I bought the upgrade is because I was at a point where I was going to have to replace the, the ethernet adapter that I have been using and looking around, I was like, I can buy this and then add this cell. And it was like, Oh, well, you know, there's an ethernet port built in. It is. And you still get some extra USB, I mean, Thunderbolt ports on it. So it's kind of like you're waiting and you're not giving up a Thunderbolt port, which is what I'm currently doing, giving up a Thunderbolt port on my hub from CalDigit to have Ethernet. Episode Notes Notes go here Support Technically Working by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/technically-working Find out more at https://technically-working.pinecast.co This podcast is powered by Pinecast. Try Pinecast for free, forever, no credit card required. If you decide to upgrade, use coupon code r-431b7d for 40% off for 4 months, and support Technically Working.