I turned down the opportunity today to be interviewed by a 9 year old girl for the 4-H Network News. This was at the Jefferson County Fair. I said no because I have had a small part in their program from its inception and definitely don’t offer a “man on the street” point of view.

This is a program that is run by 4-H youth and has the rough edges that you’d expect from kid produced audio and video. Today one young man showed me a video introduction that he made for a piece on training dogs. He was so proud of the fact that he only spend 10 minutes on a 25 second video segment. That is amazing. What’s amazing is that a 15 year old is so comfortable with high end video production software. It wouldn’t fly in a TV studio but that’s not the point. The video was shot today and will be on the web this weekend. It’s immediate and it’s real.

I’ve seen the program take off and soar so it’s sometimes difficult to realize how ground breaking this is. We have kids producing news and documentaries with passion and increasing skill. We have kids, who might otherwise be bored by small town life and turn to drugs, who are creating a community resource, learning marketable skills and having a lot of fun in the process. And they’re doing it at the speed of youth.

Here’s an example.

powered by ODEO

About a year ago, Pamela Roberts, the County 4-H Coordinator took a web design class from me. In week 4 of and 8 week program she was sharing her knowledge with the kids in her program. I said, why don’t you try Blogger. Two week later there were 5 4-H youth actively posting. Six months later they were actively podcasting and video podcasting on what has become a network of over 20 interconnected blogs. What Pam started has been helped buy the intensive efforts of the Internet Club leader, Jack Olmstead. Every time I stop by the 4-H office there’s something new to see.

While the program is part of Washington State University and the kids have free access to new Macs running Final Cut Pro and all of Apple’s production software, their web presence is all basic. They run their community news from Blogger. They use YouTube and Google Video. They use Odeo and Audio Blogger for getting their media out. These are all simple and free services and they work better than I would have ever thought.

As a “Web Professional”, I, of course, need to research and find the “best” tool for the job. They just grab what’s handy and run with it and spend their time creating content without getting hung up on what’s trendy or “best.” This is a great lesson in “just do it.” Nike marketing hype aside, that’s great advice, that these young people don’t even know their offering. They just do it, with incredible support from their program leaders, true, but they are offering the best kind of advice, that of example.

Flash offers a feature called Progressive Download. That means that your music will start playing as it is downloading. To do this without Flash you would normally need a streaming server. With Flash, your music will stream through your Flash player. This has two advantages. First, and believe me on this, Quicktime streaming is a royal pain to set up.

But the most important reason to stream with a Flash player is that your music will be more available to more people. If you use Quicktime, Real Media or Windows Media, your visitor will have to have the appropriate player installed. They will with Flash, too, but chances are very good that they have Flash installed already. Macromedia claims that over 96% of web browsers do. I like those odds.

Flash can handle several audio formats, but for web work mp3 works best. So, to start with you need to convert you music to mp3. I use iTunes. There are certainly more capable and sophisticated programs, but iTunes is easy to use and does a decent job. Since this is streaming web music it is probably going to play through computer speakers, which won’t play at audiophile quality anyway.

Following the same logic I use what Apple calls Good Quality encoding, 128 kbps. To set iTunes to import music this way, go to Preferences > Advanced > Importing. The settings are:

If you are using music that you’ve already imported, simply select the song and in the Advanced menu and chose Convert Selection to MP3. Even if it is already in mp3 format, iTunes will resample it to the Better bitrate.

Your song is now in your iTunes library. Unfortunately iTunes doesn’t want to export individual mp3 files to another folder, so you will have to get it manually. It’s in the ~/Home/Music/iTunes Music folder. If you ripped it from a CD, you’ll find it another folder under the artist’s name. If you used a single from another source it is under Unknown Artist. Or you can just search for the song using Find or Spotlight.

You will probably have to rename the music file with a web server friendly name by replacing spaces with an underline or dash. Ex = my_song.mp3 or my-great-song.mp3., but you already knew that.
If you want to use the entire song, you’re ready to upload it to your server. If you want to offer just a selection, you need to trim it. Again, there are lots of tools you could use. My favorite is a little shareware app called MP3 Trimmer. It makes it easy to trim a selection and can do fades, joins, and volume gain.

Okay, now you really are ready to upload. The other half of the process it to add a Flash player to your page so your visitor can enjoy your music. Of course, you can build your own Flash player. There are several tutorials to follow. There are also several ready made options that you can just drop in place. For free you might try: XSPF Music Player, FlamPlayer or the Hoover MP3 Player are three good choices. Since it’s pretty easy to create Flash players, there are lots of others available.

As with most programs, if you are willing to put out a few dollars you get more features and support. I’m a fan of the Wimpy Player, which I’ve used on a couple of sites. As of this writing, it comes is four versions, two that even play video. Try jazz singer Jenny Davis’ site for a one player per song example.

I have one request. Please include volume, or at least on/off controls with your music. All the players offer the option and consider it a service to your visitors to use them.

Which ever option you choose, the website should give you copy-and-paste code to embed the Flash player on your page. Enjoy.

I’ll skim over Odeo’s listening features. They are nice but my interest is in creating not consuming content.

Odeo has a well organized podcast directory, with a pretty good collection of titles. You can easily subscribe to content on the Odeo site and then synchronize your subscriptions with iTunes. It has a lot of competition here. Even though podcasts are still a new phenomenon to most people, there are plenty of good ways to subscribe. With feed readers, online aggregators and iTunes it needs more to stand out. As nice a job as Odeo does of presenting podcasts, its just another directory. It may or may not appeal to you. Fortunately, Odeo does offer more.

The current web fad seems to be social networking sites and Odeo plays that game. You can create a profile and read the profiles of other users. There are the expected Top lists and recent additions. There are also channels, contacts and subscriptions so you can be social. All seem well implemented.

Odeo has a Widget. From the website:

The Odeo Player is a free Apple Widget that makes it easier to listen to your favorite shows. If you have an Odeo account, the Player gives you quick and easy access to the shows in your Queue. If you don’t have an Odeo account, just enter a custom feed to hear your favorite podcasts.

Nice but still just a Widget. What Odeo offers that make it special are some easy-to-use tools that allow you to easily create your own audio content, or Odeo content.

Want to be able to receive an audio email? Odeo has a copy and paste Flash player that you can drop into any web page. It will take audio input from your visitors computer, rip it into an mp3 then email you a link to the message. Nice.

Want to create your own podcasts? With an iBook or Powerbook you can go the the Odeo site, click a button and talk into your Mac’s built in microphone. Odeo creates a podcast, stores it on its site and gives you code to copy an paste into your site. If you don’t have a microphone you can even call a 415 area code number and record you phone call. Both methods limit your to three minutes, which is a very short time to get a message across.

Odeo is easier than creating podcasts on your own computer. I haven’t seen any desktop tools that make the process as simple. Even with the new podcasting feature in Garage Band, you have to record your piece, transfer it to iTunes, convert the file to an mp3,find the file on your hard drive, ftp to your site, then post the link to your blog. If you don’t use a blog with built in RSS generating capacity you also have to have another program to take care of that step. While none of the steps is that hard, it isn’t the easiest way to podcast. Of course, you get a lot more control with by recording yourself. It’s the typical tradeoff of simplicity vs. features.

If you do want to record your own files and post them to a server, Odeo is happy to create a channel with your content. So you aren’t limited to the ultra basic web based recorder or the three minute recording time.

Part of what makes the Odeo process simple is that the files are on Odeo’s server. You can download them if you want but it’s much easier to just use their service. Odeo embeds a small Flash player on your page that handles the podcast streaming. I find the player attractive. Hopefully Odeo will offer multiple player options as it does for email audio messages.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the website has some serious shortcomings. The Odeo people obviously think that the service is so easy to use that it needs no instrucions or tutorials. Not a good assumption. If I hand’t gotten such a strong recommendation to try the service I would have quit before I figured it out. When I showed Odeo to a friend, she also got confused.

The secret to using the site is that you need to subscribe before you get any meaningful information. Once you do and wait for an email that you have to open to confirm your subscription, then some useful but inconsistently applied navigation appears. There’s still no help links or documentation pages. There are simple lists of Tips on the each Create page, but they aren’t very thorough. Separate and more complete documention would be nice, as would the ability to navigate the site from any page. Don’t look to the faq. It has no technical information. I seem to remember seeing that it’s possible to record a two-way phone conversation but I can’t find out where I read that.

Conclusion: good product, poor documentation and terrible navigation. I understand that there are a couple other similar services. I’ll check them out before I recommend Odeo.

Odeo.com