I got into setting up some Hazel file maintenance today. Hazel is a powerful app you can find at http://www.noodlesoft.com/hazel.php

It was a good episode of http://macpowerusers.com/2010/04/mpu-025-geeking-out-with-hazel/ that got me going.

I have my audio work files on a firewire based raid mirror. As I am regularly doing the audio production for http://cyberspeak.libsyn.com/ disk space becomes a concern over time. Yet I want to keep all the files. So I whipped up a hazel rule set that compresses all audio related files to zip if they are older than the current month automatically.

I have included screenshots here. The key is the subfolders rule. It ensures all the files under the Cyberspeak show get handled. Yet I make sure to exclude my show template from soundtrackPro and some music etc files. I show the rule for AIF uncompressed audio which is just replicated for each of the large file types I am concerned about.

Lastly I also use Chronosync from http://www.econtechnologies.com/pages/cs/chrono_overview.html This lets my system automatically weekly sync over my entire audio production folder and file area to another hard drive across my network. This ensures I have copies of all my work on effectively three different hard drives. The two mirrored drives from the raid then a third drive across the house.

I demonstrate one way I have used to reduce my work load. I use an Automator to set all the show tags, convert to MP3 then I just have to manually add the album art in iTunes. From there you can copy the file and upload it for your podcast distribution using your normal process.

I demonstrate one way I can emulate a mix minus setup when recording a podcast double ender. This lets the cohost on the other end of skype hear the host and sound fx he plays.

 

• http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/wta/
• http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/soundboard/

 

I have an issue with iChat on the Mac. When I select my audio interface where my mic plugs in I get all audio going through that interface in both directions. Meaning if I play any sounds iChat hears them all. This is partly a side effect of my having a mix minus setup going to an external mixing board. What I need is an interface that ONLY lets iChat hear my microphone and any other applications I specifically select.

I found that if I use my Wiretap Anywhere (http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/wta/) and setup an input with the interface my mic goes into plus say my Soundboard (http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/soundboard/) program and select that as the input in iChat then it works perfectly. Now only my mic and selected audio is heard by iChat.

I suspect that using WTA ensures that only the input side of my Griffin iMic (http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/imic) is being sent through the virtual audio interface to iChat. I use the outbound side to send system audio out to my mixing board. That is likely why iChat hears everything. It's grabbing both in and out of the selected interface. Using WTA seems to clip that. Regardless if I am right it sure solves my problem.

I show how I approach recording a podcast that has two hosts remote to each other and a sound effects track going "live to hard drive". We still end up with multiple tracks (three) for the ability to enhance each track as needed without modifying the others. I demonstrate the easy trick to lining the tracks back up in sync before editing.

We use Audio Hijack Pro, Soundboard and Mpeg Streamclip in our example.
http://rogueamoeba.com/audiohijackpro/ - $32 USD
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/soundboard/ - $29 USD
http://www.squared5.com/ - Free

This is the simple way I record just an interview with another person. I use Skype and Audio Hijack Pro ( http://www.rogueamoeba.com/audiohijackpro ) on OSX. This gives me two track files each with it's own custom preprocessing filters. That reduces work in post edit. Also makes it easy to do later processing on each person without affecting the other.