Last weekend, 15. + 16. October 2011, the first austrian podcast barcamp (#pccvie) took place in the charming sektor5 coworking space in Vienna. We had really inspiring discussions with many local podcasters and technicians, for some detailed reports in german see Podcastcamp 2001 by Nico Grienauer and Podcast Barcamp: Ein tweetiger und booiger Rückblick by Robert Lender.
I just want to add some thoughts to the discussion about enhanced podcasts and will list some practical tools.

Enhanced Podcasts

It seems that more and more podcasters try to create enhanced podcasts, where additional metadata like chapter marks, hyperlinks or images, ...

After a long, nice summer and few blog posts, it is time to present the current team behind auphonic. At the moment we are two core developers and maintain strong collaborations with three institutions here in Graz.

UPDATE: please see About Us for the latest version!

Core Team

Georg Holzmann

Georg is an audio engineer with passion for machine learning, signal processing, everything related to audio and computer music, open source software, web development and much more.

Discussions and repeating questions from podcasters led him to the idea of an automatic audio post production web service, this was the birth ...

After recording a podcast or speech audio, it is usually necessary to modify the recorded levels. This post illustrates how to normalize the subjective loudness and how to compress the dynamic range (= difference between the loudest and softest sounds) of an audio file.

Loudness normalization is one of the most common misunderstandings in audio post production. Many people use peak normalization, which ensures that the maximum peak (= the maximum value of the audio data) reaches a specific level. However, the human perception of loudness does NOT depend on peak levels, therefore peak normalization is mostly useless. Recordings should ...

Many different audio file formats exist for storing recorded audio data on a computer system. This post compares multiple file types and gives suggestions on which formats and bitrates one should use, especially when producing podcasts or other online audio.

We also added two listening examples to compare MP3, AAC and Opus files at various bitrates.

If you just want to see some practical tips, skip the description and read the conclusion.

UPDATE 2017:
The original article was updated to include the new Opus audio codec, concrete bitrate suggestions, audio examples at various bitrates and other recent developments!

Types ...

Some weeks ago I presented auphonic to the advisory board of the Science Park Graz, the local version of the Austrian incubator network AplusB.
Fortunately I am happy to announce, that the jury enjoyed the project and therefore auphonic is now part of the Science Park.

What are incubators?

AplusB (Academia plus Business) is the Austrian hightech incubator network. These incubators are linked to academic institutions, in my case the universities in Graz, and they support the development of technology-based projects for a period of 1.5 years.

Here a more detailed (and little bit cryptic) self-definition from the ...

As a Python or Django developer, various WSGI and webservers are available to deploy an application. A very fast, lightweight and relatively easy-to-install solution is the combination of Nginx, the high-performance HTTP server, and uWSGI (see benchmark of python WSGI servers). Furthermore, virtualenv and Fabric are invaluable tools to handle Python dependencies and to automate deployments.

This tutorial describes how to setup a Django 1.3, Nginx and uWSGI stack. My OS at the time of this writing was Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

Installing all requirements

First install all the handy python tools, if you don't have them already (maybe ...