UO Second Age

I'm thinking of doing a UOSA Podcast maybe once or twice a week.

The goal would be to create an informative/funny/random experience for the players of UOSA to consume.

Each episode will have a loose topic to talk around and will run for about 1-2 hours. Mostly it will be a skype call in type of thing.

I haven't refined this idea at all yet, but the old mental hamster wheel is spinning over it.

Anyone have any idea's/input? I'm also a total audio/recording noob, so if anyone has advice on that, or knows any easy programs to use, please let me know

Hey, I do a lot of work with voice audio engineering and I listen to a ton of podcasts.

First comment: cut way back on the frequency. Twice a week is way too much even for journalists who run huge websites. I don't believe there is enough content for that kind of frequency, unless it was just a bunch of flaming. One every two weeks is standard for most journalist podcasts.

Secondly, i assume the audio quality of most of the participants will be rather poor, unless everyone owns a condesner microphone with a pop filter. How are you planning to mix down and compress the audio?

Yes. I don't even play UOSA anymore, but I love reading pretty much anything about UO, so I'm sure the same would go for listening.

Deja vu...

My sister is 10.

Chris Hansen with Dateline NBC is trolling you....

I would call in

Do it!

I say go for it as well.

It will no doubt be extremely hard though.

I don't imagine there will be much to talk about outside of who ganked who during the week. Something like this would have been awesome to do when the frequency of game changing patches was higher. As long as you try to keep it professional it should be somewhat of a success at least.

I would definitely listen to this. I agree with featheon to some extent. Twice a week is too much, however weekly seems to be the standard for gaming podcasts (I listened to a lot of WOW podcasts when I was playing, they were all weekly)

I'd also limit to an hour. If your clever, imaginative and creative I'd also limit audience participation to a minimum. More often than not, the audio quality of call-ins is not very good. However, I have seen some success using iPhones voice recorder.

If you want a really well-done (in my opinion) podcast as an example, check out The Instance podcast. It's a WOW podcast, but they do an excellent job of breaking it up into different sections for different topics.

Some interesting topics would be:

PVP Tactics
Template Advice
Guild Gossip
RP Corner
Lore & Shard History
Interviews with Devs/High Profile Players

While nearly all of these things can be found on the forum, if you can put the information forward in a concise, professional and yet entertaining manner, I think it could be successful.

Thanks for the input fellas

Yes one a week/hour long shows would probably be the best depending on how this thing evolves.

I downloaded audacity and have started tinkering with it. I'll do my best to focus on audio quality. Right now I have no plan for compressing the audio files, can someone recommended some free software for that?

As for the call in's, I'm hoping people have half way decent microphone's and we can simply do skype to skype calling. I've had some pretty good quality s2s calling and I'm fairly confident in it.

Maybe there is some audio cleanup software out there that can reduce annoying noises if they should arise.

If free software doesn't cut it, then ill buy something nice.

Caption Awesome, the topics you suggested are perfect. I'm sure I could get people to gab a ton about these things.

I'd listen to it. My advice is don't make it to long. Focus on content for new players as well as UO vets.

That should keep the ball rolling. Once per week or once per 2 weeks is more then enough imo!

If no one else wants to do it, Rose, if you send me the sound files I can mix and master them for you.

Rose, I'd gladly try to contribute something once a week or bi-weekly if needed.

The number one technical concern, the reason most podcasts are simply unlistenable, is the audio leveling. How many podcasts have you heard where one voice is in the -20 dB range and one Mic is clipping. Each microphone needs to be recorded to an individual track when it is sent to be mixed down. The compression is not like zip file compression, but loudness compression, like on the radio where there is very little dynamic range. You basically want everything loud so that nothing is quiet. That makes the audio listenable in more devices.

There are plenty of topics for the premier episode. I would suggest a panel of hosts with a topic sequence something like this:

Why T2A era? OSI memories
The politics of "era accuracy" (what it should mean as a policy for bug abuse, etc.)
PvP tactics and ethics (ghosting, for example)
Interview with member of the administration (could be done in advance email and discussed by panel)

That's an hour.