O'Reilly Digital Media

Related link: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20051220221237711

In Wireless Hacks we cover using Bluetooth and PPP to communicate over the GPRS/CDMA/EDGE connection of a cell phone, but we did not talk about networking of two computers.

This article at the excellent Mac OS X Hints website covers how to set up two OS X machines to network with a PPP connection over Bluetooth. It should be fairly easy to do the same thing with two Linux machines and Bluetooth.

Related link: http://www.anandtech.com/displays/showdoc.aspx?i=2400

The last time I bought a new monitor, I was running a Mac IIci. That refrigerator-size screen was top-rated back then (1998), but lately it seemed blurry. Or maybe that was my eyes, after eight years of soaking up its retina-burning radiation. I had taken to running the 19-inch screen at just 1,024×768, which made things more legible but required lots of window shuffling.

Then a 3D graphics enthusiast tipped me to the Dell 2005FPW, a 20.1-inch widescreen LCD that reportedly uses the same LG/Philips LCD panel as Apple’s $799 Cinema Display. My wife’s Dell laptop has a beautiful screen, so after some more research (read: searching for reviews that gave me “permission” to make the choice I wanted to make), I bought the Dell. Even with tax, it cost $300 less than the Apple. If I’d bought back in November, I could have saved even more. And amazingly, the shipping was both free and fast—the monitor arrived about 30 hours after I ordered it. Apple took weeks to ship my G5.

I was pleased to see that the Mac recognized the monitor’s odd 1,680×1,050 resolution right away, even though that combination hadn’t appeared in the Monitors menu before. (Apparently the monitor introduces itself to the computer, because a 2005FPW color calibration profile showed up as well.) I’m really enjoying the new desktop space—both physical and virtual.

Some other nice surprises: The Dell has four USB jacks and four video inputs (DVI, VGA, S-video, and composite), along with a front-panel button to switch among them. (The Apple has a single video input.) The extra input let me hook up the old beige G3 I keep around to run my Korg OASYS-PCI soundcard, which never got OS X drivers. I also plugged in the composite video output from my camera—just because I could. After some futzing with the Dell’s onscreen controls, I figured out how to keep it from stretching the non-DVI video inputs horizontally.

The Dell also offers amusing picture-in-picture and picture-beside-picture modes, though I haven’t been able to get DVI and VGA signals to share the screen. Oddly, the display also rotates 90 degrees. Maybe that’s helpful for reading legal documents or long Web pages? Or looking at tall photos? I’m an audio guy, so all I can say is I like it so far.

Speaking of looks, many people have complained that the black plastic Dell doesn’t look as nice as the aluminum Apple display. That’s true, but hardly worth 300 bucks in my book. After taping my logo over Dell’s and downloading a bunch of crisp 1,680×1,050 wallpaper from Interfacelift.com, I’m liking the looks even more.

Now that I have the G3 back in the lineup, though, I’m really noticing its noisy power supply. Please leave a comment if you know of any alternatives.

Other successful upgrades, anyone?

Related link: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/8788

Part 1 of this series is here, Part 3 is here.

In Part 1 we looked at the revenues and costs of a moderately successful indie album release, and saw how hard it is for a record company to make money selling CDs. The promise of digital downloading is that it offers dramatically more efficient distribution. But a look at a comparison scenario using iTunes shows that the label may end up worse off.

In our first scenario, the label lost $11,600 (before overhead) on sales of 30,000 CDs, based on a low end mainstream marketing budget. For an indie, 30,000 units sold is an achievement. But it would still need to sell a few more thousand to break even, and wouldn’t earn serious money unless it had a hit (especially since more marketing will be required to drive more sales). Alternative indies make do with lower marketing budgets, and try to compensate with heavy touring and other tactics.

Now we’ll run a comparable project through iTunes. My numbers here are based in part on an article at musicbizacademy.com by entertainment lawyer Diana LaPolt:

iTunes Scenario: Label’s Gross Revenues Per Album¹

Wow, looking good so far! The label makes $3.83 per album as opposed to $2.95, even with a wholesale price of $6.44 instead of $9.50. It looks like we’re seeing the magic of zeroing out all the manufacturing, shipping and handling associated with physical product (and last I heard, Apple doesn’t charge for favorable positioning).

Now let’s factor in the marketing expenses (radio promotion, publicity, advertising, etc) and estimate the take from sales of 30,000 albums–with, of course, no returns:

iTunes: Label’s Net Revenues, 30,000 Albums Sold

A profit! $14,805 to put towards rent and salaries.

Except… There’s a new factor with downloading: Digital delivery unbundles the album format, allowing the purchaser to buy only the songs he or she wants. How often do people buy an entire album on iTunes? I don’t know, but on average they buy some fraction of total number of the songs.

Let’s see what happens if our 12-song album sells an average of six songs to each customer, which actually seems optimistic to me, at 64 cents wholesale (based on iTunes’ 99 cent/song retail price):

iTunes: Label’s Net Revenues, Avg. Customer Buys 6 Songs¹

Oh oh.

This is why record companies want you to buy albums. From the consumer’s point of view, it stinks to buy a whole album if you only end up liking a few songs. But from the label’s point of view, selling singles is a lousy business.

And of course it gets worse if people buy fewer songs from the album. At an average of three songs per album, the label loses $72,022. At one song, they lose $87,843.

Again, they will make a profit on a hit, but labels have similar up-front investments for dogs and for hits. The rule of thumb in the traditional record industry is that you’re doing well if one out of ten of your artists sells enough to pay for the other nine who lose you money. You can see why artists’ royalty rates work out to be roughly 10 cents on the dollar–the other 90 cents is paying for the other nine albums.

From the artist’s point of view: Your advance is recouped at the royalty rate. So if your record earns $1,000, your debt to the label goes down by only $100. It’s kind of an owing-your-soul-to-the-company-store thing. Producer Steve Albini runs those numbers in “The Problem With Music” at negativland.com. See also Moses Avalon’s Confessions Of A Record Producer.

1. After a challenge from teejay (see below) I’ve corrected some of these figures.

2. A typical album retails for $9.90 on iTunes, a single is 99 cents, and Apple takes 35%.

3. Artist and producer royalties are based on 130% of the wholesale price. As in the CD scenario, I’m assuming a 12% royalty for the artist and 3% for the producer.

Next time: According to the Long Tail hypothesis, good filters are critical to making downloading work as a business. We’ll look at the value those filters will have to add.

Part 2 of this series is here.

So far, many of the arguments on emerging music business models seem to me to be based on speculation and assertions. So I thought I’d sit down and do some actual math. I based it on two scenarios for a moderately successful indie album: physical CD sales vs. iTunes downloads.

It’s scary.

Let’s assume the following:

• 12 songs on the album
• very low recording budget of $10,000 (major label budgets are well into six figures)
• artist royalty rate of 12%, producer royalty of 3%
• mechanical royalties (which go to songwriters and publishers) are 8.5 cents per song, the statutory rate
• 40,000 CDs pressed, 30,000 sold (a good sell-through)*

First, the CD scenario. These figures are partly based on an article in the Aug, 2005 issue of Nashville’s Music Row magazine (subscription required), which, BTW, has excellent technology coverage.

CD: Label’s Gross Revenues Per Copy

So if there are only 25% returns from stores, the label makes $2.95 per CD, or $88,400.00 on net sales of 30,000 CDs.

Unfortunately, that figure is before promotional and other expenses, such as radio promotion, publicity, advertising, etc. In the mainstream record business, achieving sales of 30,000 units could easily require a promotion budget of $100,000 to $300,000. Let’s assume the label is aiming for the mainstream and spends $100,000:

CD: Label’s Net Revenues, 30,000 Sold

A loss of $11,600. It would be worse if we included overhead, if more albums were returned, or if the recording budget were higher–and even with a recording budget of $0, the label would still be in the hole. You can see why record company people say over and over that it’s a hit-driven business. Non-hits don’t make money.

If our label is an alternative indie, it obviously can’t afford to risk six figures to earn revenues like these–the break-even promotion budget on this project would have been $88,400. Alternative indies have to find ways to run very, very lean, such as relying on lots of touring by the artist, good will with influential press, and street teams of fans to spread word of mouth. Even so, it looks like a business to be in for love, not money**.

*You may object that the assumption of sales of 30,000 is unfairly low. Actually, it’s hard to achieve sales like that. Most alternative indie albums are lucky to hit 5,000 to 10,000 copies sold, and there are untold numbers that never break 1,000.

**Harvard Business Review sells an informative case study (PDF) on Nashville-based Compass Records, which covers Compass’ success at becoming viable, followed by its struggle to grow.

Next time: What do the numbers look like for iTunes sales? Hint: They’re not better.

Related link: http://noisetheatre.blogspot.com/2005/09/field-recording-resources.html

I still get a lot of mail about my stereo voice recorder reviews, and our recent review of the M-Audio MicroTrack — a 24-bit, handheld stereo recorder — shot to #1 on Google two days after we published it. Clearly, people are interested in mobile recording. Here are some additional resources I’ve found useful.

• Playing the Field Electronic Musician magazine’s cover story comparing six tapeless field recorders takes an unusual hands-on approach.
• Transom, an inspiring site about producing radio shows, has equipment reviews and insider advice. I interviewed contributor Jeff Towne for my recent article on podcasting and found him quite helpful.
• Field Recording Resources: This brief list of links leads to several gear and technique sites, as well as the fascinating…
• One Minute Vacation, a weekly 60-second field recording from somewhere in the world.
• Sound Professionals is an online store with a huge variety of custom microphones. I’m having a hard time deciding which to buy first!
• Microphone Madness has another great array of field-recording mics.

Got more portable recording resources? Leave a link.

Related link: http://www.musicgremlin.com/

The MusicGremlin moves us closer to the celestial jukebox: it’s a portable music player that downloads and shares music wirelessly, with no computer stuck in the middle of the process. It could be the next iPod–unless the next iPod is essentially a MusicGremlin.

Here’s how MusicGremlin Inc describes it:

…a WiFi digital audio player pre-loaded with an embedded direct-to-device content service. The first of its kind, MusicGremlin’s integrated offering allows a user to acquire and wirelessly share digital music from the palm of their hand. Users will be able to download music from a catalog over two million available songs over-the-air and on-demand.

Sounds great, and like the logical next step. You’d have to assume that Apple is already thinking along these lines, though. AppleInsider had this item a year ago:

A patent application submitted to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and recently obtained by AppleInsider, appears to portray an Apple iPod with wireless capabilities, including the ability to broadcast music to other devices…

And then there’s Apple’s recent acquisition of PortalPlayer. From the AP report:

PortalPlayer Inc. shares jumped in trading on Thursday [Dec 8, 2005] after an analyst upgraded the stock, and speculated that the company may be involved in the release of wireless iPods in 2006…

In which case, good luck MusicGremlin…

But whoever takes this to market, they’ll have big obstacles to overcome. Rafe Needleman at Release 1.0 (free membership required for full text) highlights those obstacles, including getting onto non-open or non-free wireless networks (such as at Starbucks), and getting enough players to consumers to achieve critical mass:

…the real, crushing, No. 1 challenge for this company: Apple. IPods account for 75 to 90 percent of all MP3 players sold, depending on which research you believe. It is the company that defines the agenda for media players.

Of course, as Needleman points out, Apple could just buy MusicGremlin.

Related link: http://www.musipedia.org/

Finding music online, or really in any large collection, has nearly always been limited to keyword searches. This means that the searcher is at the mercy of the person who writes the description in the track catalog. Sometimes we want something that sounds LIKE something else, or has a characteristic, or SOMETHING that can’t be captured in the keywords. You know – like how it sounds?

There are a few services out there now that demonstrate audio data-mining. Comparing wave forms and coming up with matches based on the actual sound, and not the tags or description. You get some interesting results this way. Looking up a sound at FindSounds www.FindSounds.com lets you search first on keywords, and then once you find something close, you can search on sonic similarity to that sound. This kind of data mining can become part of the creative process, as you find sounds that are similar that you would never have listened to based on a keyword search. For instance, I searched for Lion – found a reasonable Lion roar sound effect, and found a sonically similar file which turns out to be the sound of a pinball machine flipper triggering. And I can actually hear the similarity.

You can see how you could apply this kind of wave form datamining to music as well, although this kind of waveform analysis is not very musical. It would probably do a reasonable job of returning files that had some sonic resemblance – but what if you wanted a song that had a melodic resemblance? Or even better – have you ever thought “I know how it goes, but I don’t know what song it is…” I want to hum a few bars of the tune, and have the search engine tell me what song it is.

Well, now you can. Thanks to the Alexa Web Search Platform we have the wonder that is Musipedia. You can search through their growing library of songs based on MELODY as well as keywords and search phrases. The melody input is based on something called “Parsons Code” which is a very simple encoding of the melody which only records relative pitch movement of the notes. It completely ignores rhythm. There are only 3 symbols – ‘U’ for up, ‘D’ for Down, and ‘R’ for repeat. Everything is relative off the first note, which is notated with ‘*’. So, the first famous 8 notes of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in Cmi, 1st Movement, 1st Theme is notated as ‘*RRDURRD’. This returns a surprising number of melodically similar pieces. I’ll leave their discovery as an exercise for the reader.

However, this isn’t the same as “Hum a few bars and I’ll sing it for you.” But don’t fret – at the top of the page you will see a link entitled “Search by Whistling”. Yes indeed, whistling, humming, or even playing a keyboard into your computer will work. Hum a few bars into your computer, the tune you hum is recorded, analyzed and a Parsons Code returned that you can then search with. This recorder/analyzer is a Java app, so it requires a policy file be put in your C:/Directories and Settings/Username/ directory. They give you instructions on the site, and even give you a link to the policy file that you can just download and save.

So while technically you CAN hum this, I found I got much better results by actually whistling – but that’s good enough for me as you can see in this slightly reduced screen capture of my efforts.

I can see this being applied to Sound Effects, where the mouth-made sound effect is captured and analyzed and sonically similar effects in the library are returned via a FindSounds type data mining interface. I mean, most sound guys can hardly talk without interjecting sound effects into their speech. It’s what makes us sound guys to begin with. Or maybe that’s just me.

This is still in its infancy, but I can see the Star Trek future where I say “Computer, find me a tune that sound like this… ‘la dee dum dee da’”, and Majel Barret’s voice will tell me just what that tune is, and give me options for many other tunes that sound similar. This is some very cool stuff.

Whistle while you work…

Related link: http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/index.php

Back when I worked at a big L.A. recording studio, I fell into a strange pattern where I’d get off my 12-hour shift, drive home, and then read audio magazines before falling asleep. (I also got a number of parking tickets, because I often couldn’t remember what day of the week it was, running me afoul of the street sweepers.) I was immersed in music, but neglecting my own.

I thought about that “shoemaker’s children” irony recently when I realized that I was spending a lot of time crafting the O’Reilly Digital Audio site (and this blog), but very little updating my personal sites. What if I could automatically feed my O’Reilly blog into my home page?

Turns out it was easy and free. I just filled out a form at Feed to JavaScript (Feed2JS) and popped the resulting line of JavaScript into my site, Batmosphere.com. Feed2JS also has an interactive page where you can customize the look of the feed using CSS. The service is developed and hosted at Maricopa Community Colleges, although the PHP code that runs it is also available as open source, so you can host it yourself if desired.

As an example, here I’ll embed Derrick Story’s latest blog:

Electronic music maestro Jim
Aikin and I were discussing some potential articles for the O’Reilly
Digital Audio site recently, and the conversation turned to composing in
the computer age. Jim wrote,

I’ve been listening to a lot of electronic music podcasts lately,
most with 4-on-the-floor kickdrum and few with anything resembling a melody
or chord progression. I’ve tried writing that way, and it just doesn’t
work for me.

I replied, “I’d noticed the same thing while listening to podcasts, mod
files, and my own pre-MIDI Ableton Live stuff. It’s hard to explore
harmony when you’re building songs out of loops. I finally realized what was
missing.”

Jim noted,

Ultimately, music is engaging because it tells a (nonverbal) story. It takes
us on a journey. (No coincidence that the first modern opera was about Orpheus.)
In order to construct a journey without the semantics and syntax of chord progressions,
you need to substitute some other sort of semantics and syntax. This is possible,
but difficult.

Don’t get me wrong; I love making music with loops. In fact, the very
first interview I did for my book, The
Art of Digital Music, was with Ableton masterminds Gerhard Behles and
Robert Henke. I followed that by interviewing premier “loopologist”
David Torn and numerous
video game composers and sound designers, who live or die by the quality of
their loops. There’s a whole chapter called “Support Our Loops.”

I even composed the entire hour-long soundtrack for the book’s accompanying
DVD using only loops in Live. But afterward, I experienced that strange feeling
I’ve had sometimes when listening to ambient music: I’ll have a
sudden urge to get up and put on some music, but then realize that music is
already playing.

One of the things that drew me to synthesizers from piano was the ability to
sustain notes indefinitely and explore evocative harmonies. In describing why
he liked Fatboy Slim’s music, composer Mark
Isham said, “One of the great compositional elements a composer has
to work with is harmonic strength—chords that go exactly where
they need to go, and go there with purpose and direction and with satisfaction.”
With that in mind, I’m looking forward to constructing richer musical
journeys in my upcoming projects.

So, what’s right with loops?

I listen to a lot of political podcasts because, frankly, I’m a politics junky. And I have come up with a few ideas as to how to improve them. Before that, however, I have to give a little bit of background on the current state of political podcasts. The format of these shows fall into one of two camps. One format is the complete show, like Meet The Press. And the second is to break a show into it’s individual stories, and example of that is the News Hour with Jim Lehrer podcast.

Some shows provide a podcast extras segment that gives you some additional material. An example of that is the Washington Week podcast which uses the extra segment to ask the interview subjects on the show some more questions from the listener.

None of the current crop of politiical podcasts that I listen to use the AAC format to embed links or images into the stream. And I haven’t seen any video politics podcasts.

So, while I appreciate that I can get these shows in my iPod just like a TiVo I think they could be doing more. Let me get on my soapbox for a minute or two and present some ideas:

First, break the shows up into individual stories. Why? Because it allows me to pick and choose what I wish to listen to and ignore the rest. And because we will be able to write software that can use the keywords associated with each story. Then I could create podcast playlists that would take politics stories from a variety of sources and combine them into a single feed.

Another reason to break the show into segments is to allow people to link to a particular story without having to say, “Download this show and go to 7 minutes 30 seconds…”

Second, use the enhanced AAC format to embed links into the shows. In a single five minute interview there can be a lot of references to different policies and events and links to details on those would be great. In addition a link to the transcript would also be appreciated.

Third, to create a five minute interview for a pre-recorded show they will do a one hour interview, and edit it down to what they put on the air. I’d like to be able to hear the one hour interview in it’s entirety. Not only would it be more informative, but it will help create a better audio archive of newsmaker interviews for the ages.

There is a lot more that could be done with podcasts, and these are just a few starting points. What is clear to me is that providing more depth of content in podcasts will increase the listener base and thus increase the potential market for podcasts. And that creates a tide that will lift all of our boats.

What are your ideas for making better political podcasts?

Related link: http://www.passalongnetworks.com/corp_press120505.html

When you hit a party catered by an outfit called Debbie Does Dinner, you’re
bound to be surprised. As I strolled toward the buffet of unpronounceable appetizers
last night, I saw two executives who seemed to be laser-tagging each other with
their PDAs.

Stopping to rubberneck in the dim light, I learned that the men were actually
Kurt Thielen and Dave Jaworsky, the president and CEO of SoniqCast
and PassAlong Networks,
respectively. They were attempting to duplicate their feat from earlier that
day at the Digital
Living Room 2005 conference—wirelessly transferring a song between
their handheld Tao Wireless Media players. In itself, that’s an interesting
trick, but the real breakthrough was that initiating the transfer simultaneously
sent a payment to the record label. Apparently, yesterday was the first
time that a paid, personal, wireless transfer process had been demonstrated
publicly.

The Tao Wireless
Media Player includes a 20GB hard drive, Wi-Fi detector, FM transmitter,
and—appropriately for its socializing theme—dual headphone jacks.

The Tao player, which should be available later this month, is also a collaboration.
It’s built by a company called Giant, best known for its FRS two-way radios.
SoniqCast wrote the software and PassAlong supplied the digital rights management
(DRM) for music files.

PassAlong has an intriguing system that reminds me of Weed,
the service that rewards listeners for sharing files. From what I could grasp
(give
it a shot), members earn points when they pass a music file to someone else
and the recipient buys it. Those points can be used to buy more music from PassAlong.
The Tao player also supports buying audio files from Audible, such as spoken
books, and can be configured to load itself with, say, spoken versions of the
Wall Street Journal every morning.

The player had more tricks behind its glowing orange screen. (Thielen told
me SoniqCast planned to introduce a color-screen version with photo support
next month at CES.) Not only can it connect to other Tao players and Wi-Fi-equipped
computers, it can also download audio from the Internet via public hotspots.

It remains to be seen how easy these transfer and payment processes really
are. (The demo I was watching failed.) But it made me ponder how technology
has made the music experience more and more solitary. Now that musicians have
the tools to be one-man bands (as well as one-man recording studios), we collaborate
less. Now that listeners can carry thousands of songs in a pocket and listen
to them on headphones (often jammed deep into ear canals), we tune out the sounds
around us.

The Tao Wireless Media Player may be the first portable player since the boombox
to restore the social experience of recorded music. Or it may fizzle, as have
so many overly sophisticated products before it. But now that the ability to
transfer music wirelessly between portable devices is here, I’m betting
it will spawn new applications and social networks the inventors can’t
have imagined.

What new sonic worlds do you think two-way music players will open?

Blogs, podcasts & e-newsletters make it easy for anyone to be a journalist. But just as the debut of desktop publishing led to some very ugly documents, these newer tools are spawning some very sloppy journalism, which does no good for the reputation of participatory media. Here are some tips on how good journalists do useful work:

1. Respect the value of people’s time. Anyone who publishes is making a deal with their audience: This will be more rewarding than real life would have been. Know your point, get to it quickly, and make your content dense with value. We live in a narcissistic age, and free access to world-wide distribution is not helping. We all need to remember: It’s not fascinating just because I said it.
2. Have a strong focus, and relate everything to it. A good focus is a simple idea that people care about–in a newspaper story, it’s the lede. It’s a hard discipline to learn, but you can really only get one good idea across in any one article or program–everything else either supports and develops that idea, or it conflicts with and confuses it. Think of Beethoven’s Fifth as a model: the whole first movement is based on four notes.
3. Look for the heat in your subject. Appeal is emotional, not intellectual. Even theoretical physicists get excited more by primal motives like pursuit, struggle and triumph than they do by abstract concepts. This primacy of emotion is routinely abused in mass media–hence the prevalence of sex, death, greed and vanity–but you don’t have to go that far, just look for what people will really care about in your content and use that as a guide. For example, this headline and first sentence draws you into a recent Scientific American blog about a primitive member of the genus Hibbertopterus:
   

   Supersized Water Scorpion Strolled Scotland’s Shores
   The other day I had an unfortunate run-in with a cockroach in my apartment…

4. Whatever your subject, write about people, physical objects and actions. These are what engage the imagination and the emotions, and concentrating on them has the added benefit of aiding clarity (see next item). Avoid abstractions, generalities, jargon and clichés.
5. Use plain speech, and talk like a real person. Too many people have been trained to use big words and complicated sentences to build an edifice to hide behind. If a simpler word can be used with no loss of meaning, use it. Same goes for fewer words vs. more. If you can’t say it plainly, that may mean you don’t understand it well enough yet.
6. Avoid adjectives and adverbs wherever possible. They seldom have any impact. It works much better to find the right nouns and verbs. As Mark Twain said, “If you find an adjective, kill it.” Try it, you’ll be amazed at the difference it makes. Compare “The widow Douglas was sanctimonious and hypocritical” with the way Twain wrote it in The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn:
   

   The widow she cried over me, and called me a poor lost lamb, and she called me a lot of other names, too, but she never meant no harm by it.

7. Opinions are not facts, even your opinions. Opinions make personal journalism lively. But be sure you know the difference between opinion and fact, and make it clear to your readers as well. It’s all too easy to jump to conclusions when you’re predisposed to believe something. This is the source of deluges of unreliable information on the Web.
8. Identify your sources. Just asserting a fact is unpersuasive–even in ALL CAPS with lots of exclamation marks!!! –and it contributes nothing to a discussion. Your audience needs to know where this information comes from, so they can judge its credibility.
9. Identify interests. If someone appears to be an expert, that’s one thing. If they also have a financial or other interest in you believing their version of reality, that’s another. Be skeptical. Good journalists have to assume that everyone, even people they like, may be lying.
10. Fact-check. Reputable pro media outlets use professional fact checkers, and they still manage to make mistakes frequently. People may be citing you as a source, so try to get the details right. Related to this: spell-check!

——-

BTW, O’Reilly editor & blogger David Battino has a good in-depth article on producing podcasts in December’s Electronic Musician, with a companion web-based guide based on a podcast with composer BJ Liederman (of NPR themes fame).