Here’s what happened over the last week which took me from starting to plan an entertainment podcast to having one up on iTunes within 7 days:

- During the week of March 19th-23rd, I discussed the idea of doing a podcast with one of our reporters, Andrew Beam, who is a big music fan and was very interested in getting something like this up and running.

- I gathered two Sennheiser microphones that we had around the office for our Sony HD camera and an M-Audio USB audio interface that I had (http://www.guitarcenter.com/M-Audio-MobilePre-USB-Portable-Audio-Interface-701368-i2344777.gc) and hooked the setup into my laptop to see if it worked.

- After only testing to make sure that Audacity recognized the input from the mics, I gave the equipment to Andrew with the plan that he would try it out for a few days and we would work up a plan while he started reaching out to some local bands and entertainment outlets to see if they’d want to sit down for an interview.

- Things ended up moving much faster than we had originally had anticipated when Andrew found a local musician who was excited to do the podcast but was heading out of the area after the weekend. We ended up forgoing much of our initial planning and scheduling the interview for that Sunday, which Andrew did a great job with, even though he didn’t have any mic stands at the time - http://ow.ly/i/wPM3.

- After the interview, I went through the recorded audio and realized that, besides the fact we had a guest that moved away from the microphone a little too often, the audio didn’t sound as clear as I had hoped.

- While browsing the web trying to learn about podcasting, I found a program called “Levelator” - www.conversationsnetwork.org/levelator - which I used to save me a lot of time that would have been spent even out audio levels throughout the hour-long podcast.

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