A Bit Behind the Scenes

I’m not sure if I’ve gone over this previously, but we hear about sound quality on a regular basis, so I just wanted to take a moment to let everyone know we are devoted to continually improve the quality of RBtL.

As it stands, nearly 15-20 hours go into work a week on the show. I know on any given week I myself spend 7-10, and I can imagine Matt spends about the same.

During the week, I spend a few hours thinking of future episodes, topics, or question for this week’s episode. I spent some time reviewing other blogs, news, and trends (although I’d do this even without the show), and I can easily spend a couple of hours emailing and checking up on Twitter for the show.

Recording usually lasts about 2 hours, from setup to finishing.

Editing almost always takes 2-3 hours.

Additionally, when it comes to guests, we don’t ever have complete control in the final audio. We’ve made tremendous achievements with some accidental and crazy mishaps over the past 3 months, especially.

If you listen to shows with just Matt and myself, you can usually tell the audio quality is quite good for a podcast. It may not be professional studio level, but we’re happy about it.

However, each person is responsible for recording their own audio. This helps us avoid the interference from the internet and whatever medium we’re using to chat. This is the drawback of being specifically online (although being able to interview anyone, anywhere, obviously makes up for this by leaps and bounds).

This responsibility becomes an issue with guests. Matt and I have done this more than 22 times now, and have a system down. We ask quite a bit of our guests, and they always do an incredibly wonderful job, and we are always thankful that they can donate any time. Through this process, we want to cut down on their hassle as much as possible. While we ask that they record their own audio with GarageBand or something like it, there simply isn’t always the time or availability.

There almost always is however—yet technology still messes up. Things crash, etc.

Luckily for ourselves and our listeners, we always record a backup copy. After episode 5, any episode you’ve heard with bad sound quality has been a backup recording. And it’s always been because of an unforseen mishap.

We are always sorry when these things happen, but never would we want to stop a show, impose upon our guests for even more time, or discard a very interesting conversation we’ve already had. So we go through, edit the individual recordings we do have into the backup (which actually takes more time) and put it up.

I assure you though, we plan to do better. We hear the requests, and we are on it. Every episode I edit, I learn a little bit more about the software I’m using, and I’ve easily made some mistakes when it comes to volume levels, etc. And honestly, sometimes it is just laziness. After a long edit, I’m ready and excited to get the show up.

But, to stop this post from being any longer, the point is—we’re always trying harder, and you can be sure we’ll keep trying to take those extra steps, spend a few extra minutes, and hopefully—eventually maybe have some sponsorship so we can afford new equipment.

So mostly, I wanted to give an overview of the backends of the show. Thank you all so much for listening, and please keep the fire under us! But trust us, our passion is going nowhere.

As always, we’re always open and reading suggestions on how to improve. Better equipment—check, we’re working on that. We’ve had a few other suggestions and are checking up on them as well. (We had a friendly email from a former audio engineer, however something appeared to have happened to his email address). Never the less.

Thanks as always and best wishes,

Aaron