Interview with Tim Ferriss "The 4 Hour Workweek" and being a Sound Engineer/DJ

I've just published my Productivity Show interview with Tim Ferriss, Author of "The 4 Hour Workweek".  Nice of him to say yes and give me some time.  And in fact, it's a good use of his time, by being available for 30-60mins to a potential audience of 500,000 and more, on The Podcast Network.  He asked a few big authors what the biggest use of time, for the smallest return is....Book Tours and Signings.  Not because they don't want to get out to the people and fans, but the time it takes, to get to a venue, do the book signing, and get back home, or on to the next venue.

So blogging and podcasts are two efficient channels for selling more books.  We talk about this on the show, and it was also talked about in Leo Laporte's interview of Tim on TWIT - The TechGuy.

And you know what, a busy person always has time.  Credit to Tim for saying yes, and making himself available and being supportive.

I had more trouble with the technology than the guest!  I record in CallBurner, over Skype.  That's the good bit.  CallBurner records easily, and in high quality, both an mp3, and and 2 high quality WAV files, one for each voice.  I usually copy the mp3 recording into WavePad, save it as a WAV, drag it to The Levelator (and have a listen to Doug Kaye's excellent talk on The Secret Lives of MP3 Files), which magically brings the voices up to the same level, and makes the recording louder. Convert back to mp3, and publish.

However....WavePad, loses the last 10-20secs of the mp3 file when I initially convert it to WAV.  Weird. I usually paste in the missing last 20secs and edit it.  But this time, I thought I'd play with the high quality WAV recordings on both our voices.  Loaded it into Audacity, combined the two channels/voices, into one mono recording, and then convert to mp3.  But, I can't get the mp3 to save in Audacity, at the right frequency.  It keeps saving at 32KHz, which doesn't work on some flash players.  I'm not the only one with this known problem,   And WavePad wouldn't read the Audacity output WAV or from The Levelator's WAV.

So back to the ordinal mp3 recording, which is lower quality.  I'm also experimenting with plugging my headset and mic into the USB port, instead of the sound card, which I think is creating background noise.

Jeez, when I've made my million's with Tim's help, I'd love to spend all day making podcasts and fiddling with sound!  Oh, and recording just like a real DJ in realtime, and mix the sounds in live on CastBlaster or WildVoice.

Comments

[shannon]

Well done Tony! Can't wait to listen to the podcast. Can't help but wonder though, we you initially contacted Tim, did you use the model he prescribed in his book for contacting high profile people ;)