Don't say I never do anything for you guys. Podcast is up. Who needs sleep anyway?

Really appreciate it, Andy!  Especially because I'm travelling uncharacteristically early this morning and the podcast is music to my ears!

6 hours ago, Demonland said:

Don't say I never do anything for you guys. Podcast is up. Who needs sleep anyway?

 

Hey guys, I'm up to minute 48 so my apologies if this gets covered a bit further on. To keep any disappointment in check @Demonland - remember that the style the Saints employ softens the impact key-outs or in-game injuries have. If the game was played at the 'G and the Demons didn't just play their second wet-weather game in a row, I'm sure we would have won by 6-8 goals by running them off their feet. 

It's also important to remember that for most of the last quarter they weren't really threatening to kick a goal. It was only after they got a little momentum with about 5-6 minutes left did they start to look likely. Which goes to what @george_on_the_outer was saying - Lyon sets up his teams so that they have a sniff for as long as possible. I think Goodwin coached really well to win the game, while also controlling the tempo to limit fatigue on our players. 

One thing I'm really happy with this year is that we're winning games through adopting different strategies. Last year we either won or lost playing 'our' way. We've won games attacking aggressively, by playing defensive forwards (Petty vs McCartin in Round 3), playing slow, defensive football (vs Carlton), playing an aggressive forward half press (vs Pies), and playing a rebounding game (vs Saints). 

Hopefully we can start to put it all together over the next 7 weeks in the lead up to the finals. 

I fixed an audio issue with the initial upload that had my audio channel a lot softer than Binman and George. It probably wouldn't be as noticeable with headphones (as I didn't pick it up at 1:30am last night) but it was on my car audio. I have equalised the audio so you might need to remove the download and re-download. Sometimes that doesn't work with Apple podcast so apologies if that's the case.

Thanks once again for the podcast. 
binman your passionate analysis (almost) palliates my MFCSS.   And your rebuff to Buckley has made my day.   Now we just need our team to prove you right.  🤗🤗🤗 ❤️💙❤️💙❤️💙

3 minutes ago, monoccular said:

Thanks once again for the podcast. 
binman your passionate analysis (almost) palliates my MFCSS.   And your rebuff to Buckley has made my day.   Now we just need our team to prove you right.  🤗🤗🤗 ❤️💙❤️💙❤️💙

If i had of listened to that clip before the show, as I should have, I would have been more prepared to rebut Buckley with something other that flabbergasted exasperation.

And I would have pointed out he should put his house on the lions if he is that confident they'll win and that we are do poor. 

Why?

Because we are 1.75 favorites for pete's sake.

And the lions are $2.10 outsiders.

Go figure.

I also would have pointed out that we beat a team only one spot below us on the ladder by 4 goals. 

Whereas the pies played a team six spots below them on the ladder and almost blew a healthy lead, achieved with one decent quarter of footy, to win by just 12 points.

9 minutes ago, binman said:

If i had of listened to that clip before the show, as I should have, I would have been more prepared to rebut Buckley with something other that flabbergasted exasperation.

That is the primary reason I sent it to you before the show. You had one job ... two if you count the stats files ... and then there are all the questions ... ok you had many jobs but you did not adequately prepare for that job. You will be docked some pay for this week's show.

13 minutes ago, binman said:

Because we are 1.75 favorites for pete's sake.

And the lions are $2.10 outsiders.

Some might call that easy money. And many no doubt have. They were $2.35 the other day.

Gamble responsibly.

I've been remiss in thanking our posters for their questions the past few weeks. Your questions and comments form a large part of our podcast.

So thanks to theses posters this week that posted questions/comments.

@Bigfoot @pewpewpew @Red and Bluebeard @Rednblueriseing @Lefty @buck_nekkid @spirit of norm smith @Kiwi Dee @monoccular @Titus Totty @smurf @Redjacket @Skrull @Royal Demon @mandeelorian @OhMyDees @layzie @DemonWA & @raDeelaide

Don't forget to leave us a 5 Star Review on Apple Podcasts and write a review and we'll read it out on the show.

7 hours ago, Demonland said:

I fixed an audio issue with the initial upload that had my audio channel a lot softer than Binman and George. It probably wouldn't be as noticeable with headphones (as I didn't pick it up at 1:30am last night) but it was on my car audio. I have equalised the audio so you might need to remove the download and re-download. Sometimes that doesn't work with Apple podcast so apologies if that's the case.

Not sure what DAW you're using but do you ever use a loudness meter on your tracks?

1 hour ago, layzie said:

Not sure what DAW you're using but do you ever use a loudness meter on your tracks?

My mixer, rode caster pro 2, usually handles all of that and there is little to no post production needed. It's basically a fully integrated audio production studio. All the audio comes in on separate channels and mixes it all together and does the post production for you. My audio is one one channel and @george_on_the_outer & @binman audio comes in together on the their own channel through zencastr an online app for audio and video recording which also does pretty good post production and mixes of each track.

I also have another laptop setup which has Skype on it to take calls and that comes through on a separate channel and my mixer has a soundboard to play the voicemails. I can also hook up my phone to the mixer via Bluetooth to take calls or play sounds from my phone on a separate channel too but the Bluetooth connection can fail and while I was interviewing Steven May it did and I had to put him on loudspeaker and hold it up to my mic. Long story which I think I've written about on Demonland.

The issue I had this week was with my internet connection. We've been having spotty internet from Telstra the past few days and anyone listening to the stream last night would have heard the audio breaking up occasionally. The audio coming out on the stream was going through my mixer so that audio saved on my mixer would have been unusable. My audio going into the mixer on my channel was fine but the audio from my cohosts (coming in over the crappy internet connection) going into the mixer was the choppy audio that was breaking up. Neither binman nor george was hearing the audio breaking up on their end when either of them was speaking so the crappy audio was my internet connection. Incidentally they weren't hearing my audio break up over our connection when I spoke so go figure.

Luckily I connect with my cohosts online through zencastr which saves my audio (which isn't needed because I can just use the channel going directly from my mic into my mixer), it saves binman's audio from his end and George's from his end. All of our audio are separately saved up into the cloud and zencastr does it's own post production and I can download each track separately. The post production on zencastr takes awhile which is why I was up so late as I was waiting for it to finish and then download the files to me.

So despite the audio issues that anyone listening live would have heard I had 3 clean audio tracks from each of the hosts to use. I wasn't happy with the audio saved to zencastr from me as I think my audio mix from my mixer sounds much better than the post production of my audio from my mic on zencastr. I actually think my cohosts audio that is produced on zencastr is slightly better than the audio mix of their audio that comes from them to my mixer but it's not that much better to justify the extra time/work that is involved in putting all the files together. I try to start recording in zencastr and on my mixer at exactly the same time in case I have to mix and match audio from different sources. If the recordings aren't started at exactly same time there is a bit of stitching together to make sure all the audio lines up where it should and my cohosts aren't starting to answer a question before I've asked it. That can happen if not done correctly.

The issue that I had with the first upload of the show for download on the podcasting apps was because I didn't level out my audio in Audacity when I merged our audio together. Their audio used the zencastr post production and mine was from my mixer. Both are at -16 LUFFS. My mixer and Zencastr must do something different in the post production and the result without me doing further post production when I joined them together was what was initially uploaded to the server with my audio being much quieter than my cohosts.

It was very late and the audio sounded ok in my headphones. I noticed that the audio waveform was smaller for my sections but it sounded ok to me at 1:30am and I wanted to get the podcast out so people could have it in the morning and i wouldn't be able to tinker with it until later in the day and at the time I didn't think I needed to anyway.

It wasn't until I was driving to work and listening to it in the car through the Apple Podcast app that I realised just how soft my audio was compared to the audio from my cohosts. I then went back and equalized/normalized the tracks (in audacity).

Normally this is all handled on board my mixer. I use zencastr to connect to my hosts because it sounds much better than when we used to connected over Skype. I don't usually use the audio that is saved on zancastr because I'm more than fine with the sound from my mixer even though both Binman and George come in on the same channel through zencastr. Sometimes there is a discrepancy in their audio levels but it's nothing major and if it is really bad I can always use the zencastr tracks and level them out.

Zencastr is a good fall back for these issues and I always like to have multiple recordings on different devices. I record on my mixer, on zencastr and locally in audacity on my computer if one or more fails.

If one of my cohosts have dodgy internet then I would be in trouble because then their audio saved to zencastr would be crap and their audio coming through to my mixer (and in turn to the recording on my computer in audacity) would be crap too. The only way around that is to have each cohost save their audio track directly on their own end either on their computer or on a recording device and then send me the audio file but that creates more work (I'd then have to do my own post production on each track) and perhaps an extra cost of an audio device for each cohost.

Anyway I hope you read the wall of text because it took me a while to write it. 😜

21 hours ago, Demonland said:

I fixed an audio issue with the initial upload that had my audio channel a lot softer than Binman and George. It probably wouldn't be as noticeable with headphones (as I didn't pick it up at 1:30am last night) but it was on my car audio. I have equalised the audio so you might need to remove the download and re-download. Sometimes that doesn't work with Apple podcast so apologies if that's the case.

the audio is working nicely for me. thanks for the podcast. loved it.

14 hours ago, Demonland said:

I've been remiss in thanking our posters for their questions the past few weeks. Your questions and comments form a large part of our podcast.

So thanks to theses posters this week that posted questions/comments.

@Bigfoot @pewpewpew @Red and Bluebeard @Rednblueriseing @Lefty @buck_nekkid @spirit of norm smith @Kiwi Dee @monoccular @Titus Totty @smurf @Redjacket @Skrull @Royal Demon @mandeelorian @OhMyDees @layzie @DemonWA & @raDeelaide

Don't forget to leave us a 5 Star Review on Apple Podcasts and write a review and we'll read it out on the show.

Thank you for taking and answering my question. Love the podcast. It's a staple of my week.

18 hours ago, binman said:

If i had of listened to that clip before the show, as I should have, I would have been more prepared to rebut Buckley with something other that flabbergasted exasperation.

And I would have pointed out he should put his house on the lions if he is that confident they'll win and that we are do poor. 

Why?

Because we are 1.75 favorites for pete's sake.

And the lions are $2.10 outsiders.

Go figure.

I also would have pointed out that we beat a team only one spot below us on the ladder by 4 goals. 

Whereas the pies played a team six spots below them on the ladder and almost blew a healthy lead, achieved with one decent quarter of footy, to win by just 12 points.

@binman's Kane and Bucks response was some of the best Demonland podcast content heard in years. Maybe clips should be sprung on cohosts more often, @Demonland?

11 minutes ago, gs77 said:

@binman's Kane and Bucks response was some of the best Demonland podcast content heard in years. Maybe clips should be sprung on cohosts more often, @Demonland?

I will have to take one for the team and scour the internet for more David King and Leigh Montagna content during the week. It will be like shooting fish in a barrel if we lose.

Top podcast again this week fellas. I like Angry Binners.

Edited July 11, 20231 yr by pewpewpew

29 minutes ago, pewpewpew said:

Top podcast again this week fellas. I like Angry Binners.

14 hours ago, Demonland said:

My mixer, rode caster pro 2, usually handles all of that and there is little to no post production needed. It's basically a fully integrated audio production studio. All the audio comes in on separate channels and mixes it all together and does the post production for you. My audio is one one channel and @george_on_the_outer & @binman audio comes in together on the their own channel through zencastr an online app for audio and video recording which also does pretty good post production and mixes of each track.

I also have another laptop setup which has Skype on it to take calls and that comes through on a separate channel and my mixer has a soundboard to play the voicemails. I can also hook up my phone to the mixer via Bluetooth to take calls or play sounds from my phone on a separate channel too but the Bluetooth connection can fail and while I was interviewing Steven May it did and I had to put him on loudspeaker and hold it up to my mic. Long story which I think I've written about on Demonland.

The issue I had this week was with my internet connection. We've been having spotty internet from Telstra the past few days and anyone listening to the stream last night would have heard the audio breaking up occasionally. The audio coming out on the stream was going through my mixer so that audio saved on my mixer would have been unusable. My audio going into the mixer on my channel was fine but the audio from my cohosts (coming in over the crappy internet connection) going into the mixer was the choppy audio that was breaking up. Neither binman nor george was hearing the audio breaking up on their end when either of them was speaking so the crappy audio was my internet connection. Incidentally they weren't hearing my audio break up over our connection when I spoke so go figure.

Luckily I connect with my cohosts online through zencastr which saves my audio (which isn't needed because I can just use the channel going directly from my mic into my mixer), it saves binman's audio from his end and George's from his end. All of our audio are separately saved up into the cloud and zencastr does it's own post production and I can download each track separately. The post production on zencastr takes awhile which is why I was up so late as I was waiting for it to finish and then download the files to me.

So despite the audio issues that anyone listening live would have heard I had 3 clean audio tracks from each of the hosts to use. I wasn't happy with the audio saved to zencastr from me as I think my audio mix from my mixer sounds much better than the post production of my audio from my mic on zencastr. I actually think my cohosts audio that is produced on zencastr is slightly better than the audio mix of their audio that comes from them to my mixer but it's not that much better to justify the extra time/work that is involved in putting all the files together. I try to start recording in zencastr and on my mixer at exactly the same time in case I have to mix and match audio from different sources. If the recordings aren't started at exactly same time there is a bit of stitching together to make sure all the audio lines up where it should and my cohosts aren't starting to answer a question before I've asked it. That can happen if not done correctly.

The issue that I had with the first upload of the show for download on the podcasting apps was because I didn't level out my audio in Audacity when I merged our audio together. Their audio used the zencastr post production and mine was from my mixer. Both are at -16 LUFFS. My mixer and Zencastr must do something different in the post production and the result without me doing further post production when I joined them together was what was initially uploaded to the server with my audio being much quieter than my cohosts.

It was very late and the audio sounded ok in my headphones. I noticed that the audio waveform was smaller for my sections but it sounded ok to me at 1:30am and I wanted to get the podcast out so people could have it in the morning and i wouldn't be able to tinker with it until later in the day and at the time I didn't think I needed to anyway.

It wasn't until I was driving to work and listening to it in the car through the Apple Podcast app that I realised just how soft my audio was compared to the audio from my cohosts. I then went back and equalized/normalized the tracks (in audacity).

Normally this is all handled on board my mixer. I use zencastr to connect to my hosts because it sounds much better than when we used to connected over Skype. I don't usually use the audio that is saved on zancastr because I'm more than fine with the sound from my mixer even though both Binman and George come in on the same channel through zencastr. Sometimes there is a discrepancy in their audio levels but it's nothing major and if it is really bad I can always use the zencastr tracks and level them out.

Zencastr is a good fall back for these issues and I always like to have multiple recordings on different devices. I record on my mixer, on zencastr and locally in audacity on my computer if one or more fails.

If one of my cohosts have dodgy internet then I would be in trouble because then their audio saved to zencastr would be [censored] and their audio coming through to my mixer (and in turn to the recording on my computer in audacity) would be [censored] too. The only way around that is to have each cohost save their audio track directly on their own end either on their computer or on a recording device and then send me the audio file but that creates more work (I'd then have to do my own post production on each track) and perhaps an extra cost of an audio device for each cohost.

Anyway I hope you read the wall of text because it took me a while to write it. 😜

Thanks for the detailed explanation Andy, I know it probably means zilch to most listeners but I love this stuff. I often forget about platforms like Zencastr and how convenient they are for this kind of thing, I’m pretty old school and set in my ways when it comes to recording/mixing/mastering doing it all in a DAW. My informed/hack comments below:

One thing you could do as a fail safe option for the phone to mixer interview is get a 3.5mm jack to XLR cable and plug into the mixer. You’d need to have a free XLR input on the mixer but it’s worked pretty well for me in interviews, if you have a phone with USB-C or thunderbolt you can get adapters pretty cheap. Impressed that the Rodecaster has Bluetooth capabilities though!

Ah yes, Audacity and normalisation. I know that Spotify’s podcasting platform automatically normalises uploads to -16 LUFS so I’m guessing Zencastr must do something similar? I love Audacity as a free program but you literally have to do everything yourself and the Equaliser is so limited in that you can only make 1 change and hear the results of it at a time, forever going back and forth. I love to use ‘EQ sweeping’ techniques while hearing the audio so that’s always a pain when using Audacity for me. I hear you though, at 1:30am you do everything you can to get the ep out and be done with it!  

The car stereo test is usually the best measuring stick, sometimes you need a good test in an everyday environment.

Recording over Skype or Zoom sounds garbage, would honestly rather record a phone call.

When I did more interview recording I was so paranoid the computer would crash I would have a phone voice recording running as well. Never needed it but peace of mind is worth it sometimes.

All in all it sounds like Zencastr has been an excellent investment and sounds like a very impressive platform for what it can do.

17 minutes ago, layzie said:

Thanks for the detailed explanation Andy, I know it probably means zilch to most listeners but I love this stuff. I often forget about platforms like Zencastr and how convenient they are for this kind of thing, I’m pretty old school and set in my ways when it comes to recording/mixing/mastering doing it all in a DAW. My informed/hack comments below:

One thing you could do as a fail safe option for the phone to mixer interview is get a 3.5mm jack to XLR cable and plug into the mixer. You’d need to have a free XLR input on the mixer but it’s worked pretty well for me in interviews, if you have a phone with USB-C or thunderbolt you can get adapters pretty cheap. Impressed that the Rodecaster has Bluetooth capabilities though!

Ah yes, Audacity and normalisation. I know that Spotify’s podcasting platform automatically normalises uploads to -16 LUFS so I’m guessing Zencastr must do something similar? I love Audacity as a free program but you literally have to do everything yourself and the Equaliser is so limited in that you can only make 1 change and hear the results of it at a time, forever going back and forth. I love to use ‘EQ sweeping’ techniques while hearing the audio so that’s always a pain when using Audacity for me. I hear you though, at 1:30am you do everything you can to get the ep out and be done with it!  

The car stereo test is usually the best measuring stick, sometimes you need a good test in an everyday environment.

Recording over Skype or Zoom sounds garbage, would honestly rather record a phone call.

When I did more interview recording I was so paranoid the computer would crash I would have a phone voice recording running as well. Never needed it but peace of mind is worth it sometimes.

All in all it sounds like Zencastr has been an excellent investment and sounds like a very impressive platform for what it can do.

Unfortunately the Rode Caster Pro 2 got rid of the TRRS cable input to hook up a phone in preference to the Bluetooth connection. The Bluetooth connection is great but it has failed me one too many times and I just don't trust it and can never ever trust it again for an interview. Even if a future software update fixes it I just can't trust it. I haven't even found anything online to suggest others are having the same issues as me. There is no other work around with this mixer to hook up an iPhone another way including the 3.5mm jack to XLR and work. I've tried as have others online.

Fortunately I kept my Rode Caster Pro 1 which has the the TRRS input and I will be bringing out the old mixer for any interviews that I do in the future.

Thanks for the podcast guys. As always, some much-needed cool and calculated observations. 
 

@binman it was interesting to hear your thoughts on young Koz. A lot of game-watchers (including Andy) have observed some very lacklustre moments; the half-hearted efforts, the suburban league-esque toe-pokes, the futile speccy-attempts and a general case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time when a pack-sweeper is needed etc. 

I can accept to a degree that he is performing a designated task, and that fatigue is also a factor in some of these instances. What I’m having trouble accepting is that they’re a factor in all of these instances. 

With regard to the point you made about Montanya’s “point”, I do see many instances where he is placed inconveniently in regards to the fall of the ball, while simultaneously well away from any position that could be deemed as “protecting the corridor”. There does seem to be some leeway in his role to be “creative” when it’s needed. Is it his creativity that needs some scrutiny?

This creativity-allowance is best on display when he flies for yet another unrealistic speccy (and I use the term “unrealistic” because so often they aren’t even close to being successful grabs). I’m having trouble believing that his coaching staff, in combination with his supposed-discipline, are behind these attempts. The downside of these flies (and we are consistently getting two per game) is not the slightly awkward moments they create, but that they effectively take him out of some crucial seconds of the game. The more galling instances of these also see him spoiling our taller forwards’ opportunities for a more realistic chance of a mark. 
 

In the scheme of things, maybe this is more of a “bugbear” than a genuine issue. But my god does it siht me. 
 

As for fatigue, well, his lacklustre moments have been present since round four. And while he does rack up the pressure-acts stats, it’s his efforts around the loose ball that I’ve observed with a degree of frustration (the goddamn toe-poke). I also am sceptical of the “pressure act” stat at times. They can sometimes flatter the player - case in point, James Harmes, who had the 2nd highest number of these against the Giants, but otherwise generally struggles to make our starting line-ups these days. 
 

Look, you’re a far more generous defender of the players than many here, and it’s ultimately the admirable path, but there was no concession in the slightest that Kozzy could improve in some areas. Is there even the slightest grumble in there? Are you suggesting there isn’t the tiniest fire that’s created all the smoke? Even if that fire is located somewhere near the coaching staff?

Anyway, the kid has all my support. Just want to get the best out of him. 
 

 

 

Edited July 12, 20231 yr by Mel Bourne

25 minutes ago, Demonland said:

Unfortunately the Rode Caster Pro 2 got rid of the TRRS cable input to hook up a phone in preference to the Bluetooth connection. The Bluetooth connection is great but it has failed me one too many times and I just don't trust it and can never ever trust it again for an interview. Even if a future software update fixes it I just can't trust it. I haven't even found anything online to suggest others are having the same issues as me. There is no other work around with this mixer to hook up an iPhone another way including the 3.5mm jack to XLR and work. I've tried as have others online.

Fortunately I kept my Rode Caster Pro 1 which has the the TRRS input and I will be bringing out the old mixer for any interviews that I do in the future.

So even if you plug in from the phone to an XLR input it won't work? Dang.

I've realised that what I actually did was a 3.5mm to 6.35mm Y-splitter TRS cable and plugged straight into the XLR combo input on my interface but if the above didn't work this probably won't either. 

1 minute ago, layzie said:

So even if you plug in from the phone to an XLR input it won't work? Dang.

I've realised that what I actually did was a 3.5mm to 6.35mm Y-splitter TRS cable and plugged straight into the XLR combo input on my interface but if the above didn't work this probably won't either. 

It does not. I can't remember (and I will try it later) whether you could hear any sound from the phone (ie: music playing) or not but it certainly does not allow calls to be heard by my cohosts on the other channel.

2 hours ago, Demonland said:

It does not. I can't remember (and I will try it later) whether you could hear any sound from the phone (ie: music playing) or not but it certainly does not allow calls to be heard by my cohosts on the other channel.

That is a major pain.

Definitely test if you can hear music or another audio source coming through. One other question, when you tried the XLR cable was it to 3.5mm into an adapter for lightening or was it just an XLR to Lightening cable? 

The other thing is I've got an Android phone, Apple may have their own little nuances with this stuff. 

 

19 minutes ago, layzie said:

That is a major pain.

Definitely test if you can hear music or another audio source coming through. One other question, when you tried the XLR cable was it to 3.5mm into an adapter for lightening or was it just an XLR to Lightening cable? 

The other thing is I've got an Android phone, Apple may have their own little nuances with this stuff. 

 

It was XLR to 3.5mm with a lightening cable attachment into the phone.

I will test the music/other audio out but I have a feeling that that doesn't work either. Will get back to you.