Podcast Troubleshooting

So, something went wrong or is going wrong? Troubleshooting tips are here:

• no audio?
  • is the battery dead on the microphone? If you turn the microphone off and then on again, you should see a brief flash of red if the battery is fine; if you don't see this at all, the battery is completely dead. If you see a constant red light this indicates the battery is close to dead.
  • is the microphone cable plugged into the wireless transceiver?
  • is the wireless receiver cable plugged into the podcasting box?
  • are you plugging in a mixing board or another audio device? Make sure you are using a balanced stereo audio mic-level input (Can someone help me verify this?) If your input cable is different, you might get no audio, or badly distorted audio.
• I don't have a USB thumbdrive and my event is in five minutes!
  • the box captures whatever audio signal it gets regardless of whether you start a podcast capture with the USB SmartKey. So, if you turn on the microphone, the box will capture whatever you say as a large MP3 archive (a big 24 hour archive beginning at midnight). You'll have to manually chop the file up later, but you always get an archive. Of course, the box has limited storage space, so once the box fills up with newer archives, older files are deleted. You can download these files by accessing the file with this format: http://192.168.240.109/archive/2005/12/05-00:00.mp3. This allows you to download the file created at midnight on December 5th, 2005. Unfortunately if the box is rebooted during the middle of this capture, it has to create a second file beginning at the time of boot, so if this is the case, you cannot determine the filename and will have to contact Chris Dawson to get the file. It is also not necessarily a good idea to download a file while it is being created, so you might want to wait until the end of the day before attempting download of the file.
• I'm not seeing the file up on the FreeGeek Everything Podcast
  • It takes a bit to publish the file, depending on the size of the file, and the current load on the FreeGeek network. If you are asking this question five minutes after the podcast episode been created, in the immortal words of Ace Ventura "Just wait longer."
  • You can grab the file from the box's internal podcast feed. You'll need to look at the XML and figure out which file is yours, but it will be there as long as the capture worked without other issues.