Inspired in part by Shae’s recent experimentation with podcasting (though still not sure if we can forgive the lounge music), and the fact that a customer asked me to set up a podcast for them yesterday, I decided to re-release my ‘American Reality Radio’ series as a podcast.

Podcasting is of course the latest internet craze so I am unashamedly jumping on the bandwagon, but in many ways I like to consider my ‘Reality Radio’ series to be way ahead of its time, even though I do say so myself!

Some seven years ago I went to America on vacation to hang out with my friends (that included Erin who was then living in Mass) and I wanted to try and record the experience somehow. The problem was I had very little money at the time, and there was simply no way I could afford a video camera. I did, however, have a hand-held cassette recorder so I decided to record sound clips and fun stuff with that then in the evening that same day I sat and edited the recordings, mixed them, then encoded them into ‘RealAudio’ format and threw them online for my friends back home in the UK to listen to. I even created a website exclusively for the purpose too!

The thing is, I look back at that process now and I’m just amazed that it was even possible! I had a PowerBook 1400 C running Mac OS 8 which is absolutely good for nothing nowadays. I seriously used that same PowerBook as a doorstop last year! I attached the tape recorder to the PowerBook using a phono cable, then with Macromedia SoundEdit I began importing and editing the audio. After I had chosen my clips I hunted around Erin and my other friends CD collections looking for tracks to add to the ‘shows’. Ripping a CD track is effortless these days, but back then there was no iTunes or anything like that, so once again there was a long winded process to get music from the CD into a format that SoundEdit would allow me to integrate into the shows.

After the show was edited I would leave the Mac alone for a while to encode it to RealAudio format and compress it to a size that was small enough to stream over a standard dial-up internet connection. I had to learn how to buffer stream the files which needed to compress down to less than 3 or 4 Mb each. Then I would write the webpage, create the graphics, add the links to the stream file then email all my friends the address of the latest episode, as well as RealAudio who also listed the show.

In hindsight it seems like an enormous amount of effort to go to in order to share a few funny moments with friends. But in when I listen back on these shows I am really glad I did, and glad too that I didn’t have a video camera to record hours of video that I probably would hardly ever have watched. The shows trigger my memories and bring a smile to my face each time I listen to them.

Of course, back in 1999 podcasting didn’t exist, there was no iTunes music store to share my work and MP3’s weren’t heard of, let alone MP3 players such as the iPod. Ironically if I had created these shows some 4 or 5 years later I have no doubt they would have reached a far greater audience.

So it might seem a little fruitless to share the shows now in a ‘podcast’ format, but after setting up a customers podcast yesterday I figured it wouldn’t take me long to quickly create re-release the show in todays more easy podcast form. Maybe some people will find it and enjoy them, maybe they won’t, who knows. The shows and the original website I created have been online for some seven years with very little change in that time, and while I may have created them just for me and a few friends, it doesn’t seem outside the ethos of the original idea to release them as a podcast for whomever else might want to enjoy listening to some random English guy explore American life with his buddies on the East Coast.

EDIT : My ‘Reality Radio’ Podcast is now available on iTunes. Do a search for ‘Simon Jones’ or ‘Reality Radio.’

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American Reality Radio
The XML feed for my Reality Radio Podcast archive