Sharing Nicely

We just put up the first UNU-MERIT podcast. It’s a recording form the mini-conference for Keith Pavitt that was held last week. It features three (long and academic) presentations by Giovanni Dosi, Luc Soete and Bart Verspagen.

The XML feed is here.

Giovanni Dosi’s presentation (mp3, 20MB) is long, but lots of fun. Check out the little bit about airplane physics and neoclassical economics. And I hope the EU does not hear his statements about their Science Policy projects.

This is our first attempt at podcasting, and I don’t think the content is perfect, but we used it to set-up the basic infrastructure and will start doing more targeted (and editorial) recordings soon.

Our basic set-up:

• We record audio straight from the PA in our conference room onto my Apple laptop. The Apple PowerBook does have a mini line-in port, which allows me to use the line out from the amplifier.
• I edit the files using Audacity (I use 1.3 beta), which is open source and comes free of license costs. It has a few bugs on the Mac (it crashes the User Interface manager occasionally, which can be a bit irritating, because it also stops the clock display) but it lets me cut and paste very large files and I managed to export them as MP3.
• I try to modify the files to decrease their size before saving them. I reduce the bitrate of my recordings to 16bit and the sample rate of the project to 11025 Hz. I experimented a bit with the various MP3 bitrates and 64kb seems fine for voice recordings.
• The files are still relatively large (about 20MB for one hour), but manageable for most users in developed countries. I wonder if streaming or very-low-quality MP3 is the best solution for low-bandwidth users.