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As a Blog Mastermind student, Yaro have mentioned to me regarding the use of podcast to produce an audio file in the blog post in one of his weekly e-lessons. He did mentioned about an open source application, Audacity, an award winning software that may be used to edit audio files during the production process.

I did not take what Yaro said seriously, until Steven Wong from Interneton9.com contacted me for a podcast interview. By the time I received the confirmation on the appointment for the interview, I have only 3 days to figure out how to produce a podcast.

I am going to share with you on how you can produce a podcast easily.

1. Get a headset. I bought a new headset, as my old one was really uncomfortable. It hurts my ears because of the design, although it has enough foam padding.
2. If you still do not have a VOIP (voice over internet protocol) software, you should get one. The most famous is Skype, but Gizmo can also do the job.
3. The problem with Skype: by default, it does not come with a conversation recording plugin or software. You have to download a separate plugin or software to do the job. I found out that PowerGramo does a very good job, and Freecorder toolbar for Firefox is a good option.
4. Get Audacity. Audacity won the SourceForge Community Choice Awards 2007 — Multimedia Category in July 2007. Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.

Some people advise me to download iTunes for editing purposes, but I will tell you later why I don’t like iTunes.

The preparations

1. Make sure your soundcard is working well. I have problems with my soundcard when I opened Audacity and Skype at the same time. It seems that when they both access my soundcard at the same time, Audacity turns my microphone to “mute”, and during recording, I can only listen the other person’s voices and not mine. So, what I did was NOT running both applications at the same time.
2. Use your Skype with PowerGramo plugin and try to record a conversation of you with somebody else. I only test my recordings with the “Skype Test Call” girl…



(By the way, PowerGramo is a small “plugin” to Skype, which can record all kinds of calls and SkypeCasts. I like it very much because it is really easy to use, and the free version can even record unlimited time of conversation for FREE!). And don’t forget to adjust the microphone volume for your Skype higher, as you may record a lower volume of your voice recording.

3. Make sure you have Skype installed first before you install PowerGramo. Installing PowerGramo will add one menu in the Skype menubar and an additional button for easy access to PowerGramo. After successful installation, every call and conversation that you have will be recorded automatically.



4. Audacity and PowerGrammo does not come with MP3 encoder by default. It means that both of the software does not export MP3 files directly, but instead uses the freely available LAME library to handle MP3 file encoding. You must obtain lame_enc.dll separately by downloading the LAME MP3 encoder, and then locate this file for both of the software. You only need to do this once. (I got my lame_enc.dll by just Googling for it). Here is the dll file.

If everything is working well, you should be able to record your conversation easily with Skype and PowerGramo.

File Conversion

After any conversation recording finishes, PowerGramo will automatically produces an audio file with a .Pga extension file that can only be played back with PowerGramo. The file can be really big, and you need to convert it to either MP3, Ogg Vorbis or WAV format, so that it can be played with almost all audio player.

Just click File > and select “Export Record as” either MP3, Ogg Vorbis or WAV format. If you have installed your MP3 encoder properly (the same LAME MP3 encoder with Audacity), you can choose your file exporting records, i.e. the sample rate, the channels and the MP3 bitrate for your produced files.

For example, a simple audio interview podcast can be exported with 44100Hz sample rate, (1) mono channel and 64 kbps of MP3 bitrate, while still preserving the quality of the audio produced. My native PowerGramo file which was around 200MB was compressed to around 35MB of MP3 file for around 70 minutes of recording. Some podcaster choose 32 kbps of MP3 bitrate to make the file smaller.

Editing

Audacity is the best audio editor around. It does the job perfectly. If you ONLY want an audio editor, (without the complication like what iTunes has), nothing come close to Audacity. For example, I use Audacity to amplify my voices, but not Steven’s as some of the listener complained that my voices were softer.

What about iTunes?

I downloaded and installed iTunes (as suggested by some of my friends). Even before the download started, I have encounter some challanges:

1. The installation file was too big, to just do some audio editing. (I don’t know about you, but 48MB is really huge, compared to Audacity, 2.12MB).
2. I don’t use most of iTunes features - like the playlist, the store, etc…
3. It eats up my memory. All of a sudden, my other applications runs really slow.
4. I don’t have / use iPod.

How to upload your MP3 file into your Wordpress blog

You need to have Audio Player Wordpress Plugin by 1 Pixel Out. Follow the installation steps carefully. You should be able to get your MP3 file running in your blog in no time.

The product? Check out my first podcast interview here.

Happy podcasting!

I have used few antivirus before. My first antivirus was Norton, which comes pre-installed with my Acer notebook 3 years ago. When the registration for Norton expires 3 months after that, I looked for an alternative - cracked version of Norton which eventually gone corrupt (as they detect that my antivirus was an illegal one), and I have to re-install my Windows.

I started looking for other antivirus, and proprietary antivirus was not an options, as I don’t like paying for a software. I used free version of AVG for a couple of years, until I found out that it has some limitation on removing one particular virus at that time (Brontok C, if you have heard of it…).

I then tried ClamAV, an open source antivirus, which did a very good job at removing viruses, but the lack of its ability to do some of the features that I wanted, has made me change to avast.

Until few days back, when I decided to blog about the best free alternative for proprietary software around the internet, I found out that Moon Secure Antivirus one of the option for you to use for your computer security.

The Software:

Developed by 3 developer, Moon Secure Antivirus is written for Windows (95/98/NT/2000/XP). It aims to be the best Free Antivirus for Windows under GPL license. It offers multiple scan engines, Net shield, Firewall, On access, on Exec scanner and rootkits preventions plus features from Commercial Antivirus applications.

The size of the installation package is 10.3MB, and after installation, the application occupies 18.22MB of your hard disk space. Installation process was flawless, although with another antivirus is running in the background (I forgot to disable my avast). After the installation, your computer will be automatically secured by the antivirus.

Problems arise when I get to know Moon Secure Antivirus more. Clicking Moon Antivirus folder from my All Programs button will only show “Uninstall Moon Secure Antivirus”, and you can only execute the application for a scan from the running process of your applications on the taskbar. Right clicking the Moon Secure Antivirus button will show this:

You have to update your virus definition database first, before you can start scanning for virus. Oh, don’t forget to disable any other antivirus that you have before scanning with Moon Secure Antivirus, as the process will be terminated prematurely, as it can conflict with other antivirus program. My avast stopped Moon Secure Antivirus scanning process while the latter do the scanning.

After the virus database has been updated, this screen will show:

After that, I did a scan on my hard disk. The graphical user interface (GUI) was very minimal, with only 3 menus in the menubar; Options, Logs, and Infected Files. I notice that you need to run the update before you do the scan. Otherwise, you may get an error message.

How good?

I can’t really tell how good the antivirus is, as after scanning all my hard disk, it does not find any virus. It passes the test with a test virus from eicar.org. It managed to disinfect the test virus, but not delete it.

One more thing. Using Moon Secure Antivirus as your computer antivirus will trigger off your Windows Security Center. It does not recognize Moon Secure Antivirus as a “valid” antivirus to be used for your system. Just declare to your security center that you are using your own antivirus and will be monitoring your computer yourself.

So, if you are looking for a free and simple antivirus solution, Moon Secure Antivirus can do the job well.