Dan and I recorded Episode 3 yesterday. While Dan was in his usual place at his home in Merseyside, things were a bit more complicated on my end. Here’s a little glimpse behind the scenes of the chaos that I call “producing a podcast”: I am currently staying at my parent’s place in Duisburg and I had brought my recording setup with me to hastily assemble it in my old bedroom for the recording of the show. In absence of suitable furniture to put all the stuff onto, I spend over an hour sitting on the floor amidst a great chaos of cables, having the microphone propped up on a chair to talk into — it wasn’t comfortable at all, I tell you. If you click on the image to the left you can see the whole mess in all its glory. The things I do for this project…

On top of all that I also had trouble with Skype. I couldn’t for the life of me get the damn thing to accept the microphone input from the mixer. Since I could record fine but Dan wouldn’t be able to hear me, I had to use an USB headset with a second mic to get Skype to send my voice signal to Dan. That’s why I’m wearing headphones and a headset around my neck on the picture. What a mess! I have no idea why I had this problem now all of a sudden since everything used to work fine for weeks beforehand but maybe I made a mistake connecting it all back together this time. Anyhow, we recorded a great show and as soon as I’ve got it edited (probably by Monday evening) I’m putting it out.

Update:

In other news, this site is now also available under the .net, .org & .de variations of the domain name, enabling me to pull a Dvorak and plug it as “linuxoutlaws-dot-org-slash-blog” whenever I feel like it. Well, that’s about as much features as I can come up with at the moment…

I have just finished editing our first introductory episode and it’ll hit the feeds as soon as possible. We are definitely looking at a release date some time this week. If you come across any stories you’d like us to cover on the podcast while you’re waiting, please tag them with for:linuxoutlaws on del.icio.us and we’ll get them. We definitely appreciate any story ideas you send us since we are hoping for an active dialogue with our fellow Linux users. Once the podcast has started for good, you can also check out all the stories we did talk about at del.icio.us/linuxoutlaws.

Dan and I just recorded the first episode of the show earlier today — I think it went rather well. The audio quality seems to be excellent from what I’ve listened to so far and apart from some slight floundering on my part it sounds like it could actually turn out to be a listenable podcast. I plan to edit the show this week and release it as soon as we get the theme music worked out. Don’t quote me on this, however. Who knows what’ll happen during the editing process…

To sweeten the wait a bit, here’s an exclusive preview of the album art for you. I hope you like it. I sketched it myself, scanned it and redrew it by hand in Inkscape. The background is a touched-up shot of the Australian outback from my travels earlier this year.

Just wanted to let you all know that we are still on track with our production. The plan is to have the first episode released this month. I recently tested my recording setup and I think I have now tweaked everything to my satisfaction. I also just send Dan the guitar and drum tracks I have recorded for our theme since he has kindly offered to come up with a bass rythm for it and mix it all together on his setup. If everything goes according to plan, I am also thinking about doing the first recordings in the coming week so stay tuned for more news and eventually the first episode of Linux Outlaws!