Podcasting was going well and dandy until I realized that a free SoundCloud account has a limited space of 2 hours. Thereafter, the site insists that in order to get more audio time I will have to upgrade my account. In other words, start handing down money to them. Although SoundCloud is a pretty cool site to post tracks and share them, the idea of paying for audio space does not dwell well in me. I therefore had to find another medium to project our podcast and so my journey began; a journey to find a decent webhost.
My problem had two impugning characteristics: I don’t want to pay money yet I would need a good amount of MegaByte (MB) space. Knowing that free webhosting comes with the payment of annoying advertisements, I wasn’t expecting the majority of them to allow a 30 MB limit per track. On top of that, even when I managed to reduce tracks to 15 MB the upload time was torture! That was too much for me, without hesitation I backed off from such webhosts. Of course, they all had the option to upgrade, but I will be facing a SoundCloud scenario once again.
To no surprise, most acceptable webhosts (free from advertisement) needed a “small” fee to function for the purposes I aimed at. Small in the range of $10 - $25 per month, but alas – paying money? Was it worth it? Probably for those sites yes but my concern was that they functioned a little too perfect. They offered way too many MB than I needed and too many extra features that I doubt I would take advantage of and hence wouldn’t have been worth the payment. With money being a constant issue, I was taken aback to the last resort, YouTube.
After going through the fascination of surfing the web for webhost that either offered too little or too much, and after trying out some of the plausible ones only to find out that my problem wouldn’t be fixed, one would think that there couldn’t be anything more to give me a headache. After all, the only actual work to do was to render the videos with an image and upload them trough the Hipster Kill Hipster YouTube account. Nope! It didn’t turn out so simple, as new accounts on YouTube aren’t allowed to have over 10 minutes of video time (by the way, the site doesn’t make you aware of this before loading your videos, but only after – a complete waste of time). After shaking my fist at the computer, I had no other alternative but to re-upload the videos to my own Youtube account (oramirezyup), add a playlist for Hipster Kill Hipster videos, and alas got the final product running. Success!
The following are changes and perhaps some explanations of our newly podcast medium:
- You will notice that I split the original podcasts into smaller parts. Now you can enjoy sections of the podcast without having the worry of not being able to listen to everything. I also tweaked some audio as I fear that the slightest sign of “copyright infringement” would cease the podcast to exist on YouTube.
- Primarily, the audio you hear is from existing independent bands of the Los Angeles area (unless otherwise specified) that we are confident won’t mind having parts of their audio played, especially when we give them all the credit as well as links to their sites. Secondary is music from way back in the day that I find ridiculous if anyone comes up and says, “Wait, that’s copyrighted! … Right?” Next in line are short (I mean short!) audio clips of actual “mainstream” bands (is that the right way to describe them?) which I find to go well with the topic of the podcast. Again, I would see no signs of copyright trouble as long as they are mentioned. Lastly is our own music, from random recordings to actual recordings, or my own made up music which I classified under Just Kicking Rocks.
- The images that appear are common on the internet. Images depicting low quality where taken by my phone.
This should settle a lot of confusion, but hopefully bring about even more puzzling thoughts! Either way, thanks for reading, ace!
P.S. The amounts spent on a podcast versus the amount of time we actually have has pretty much defined this as a monthly podcast.
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