by cameronreilly | Jan 30, 2015 | Mac, Podcasting, technology
If you have ever wanted to feed your system audio into a Skype call – for example, you’re recording a podcast and you want to play a clip from a song or a movie or a voicemail from a listener and you want the other person on your call to hear it and you also want it to come through cleanly on your recording – then this might help (assuming you’re on a Mac).
I’ve wanted to do this for ages and just figured it out. As it turns out, it wasn’t difficult at all and I should have taken the time to work it out ages ago. So I’m writing this for anyone else who might go searching for a solution.
Here are the apps you’ll need to install:
1. Audio Hijack
2. Soundflower
Steps.
1. Set up a new Audio Hijack session we below. So what you’ll end up with is two audio inputs – your mic and your system audio (or you could make the second one an app, like iTunes or Chrome, etc) feeding into your headphones and then through to Soundflower.
2. Once you’ve done that, open up your Skype settings and set “input” to Soundflower.
Once you’ve done that – you’re set.
Turn on Audio Hijack my clicking the round button in the lower left corner.
When you want to feed your secondary audio source into Skype, just click the secondary source node in Audio Hijack and set its status to “on”.
When you have finished with that piece of audio, turn its status back to “off”.
That’s pretty much all there is to it.
Using Audio Hijack and Soundflower to feed System Audio into Skype
by cameronreilly | Nov 26, 2014 | advertising, Apple, Australian media, iPhone, media 2.0, TPN
Today is the tenth anniversary of my first podcast – G’Day World #1 in 2004.
It wasn’t only MY first podcast, it was a milestone in a number of ways:
- It was the first podcast ever produced in Australia (AFAIK)
- It was the first podcast produced over Skype (AFAIK)
- It was the first podcast to include live guests (AFAIK – but that didn’t happen until a couple of weeks later when I interviewed my mate Buzz Bruggeman)
- It was the first podcast on The Podcast Network, the world’s first podcast production business that I co-founded in Feb 2005.
Podcasting has come a long way since 2004. Back then I was predicting that it would become mainstream within a decade. Has it? I’m not sure how you measure “mainstream” – or even it that’s a worthy metric at all. It certainly hasn’t taken over the world. And I still meet people who have never listened to one and don’t really know what a podcast is.
But here are my thoughts on the matter.
- The most recent stats I’ve seen suggest there are about 225,000 active podcasts being produced (but I’ve no idea how they arrived at that number or how credible it is). That probably means there are millions of listeners at least.
- The advertising industry still isn’t on board. I produce one of the top podcasts in the world and I don’t have potential advertisers beating down my door. We did sell quite a bit of advertising in the early years, 2006 – 2008, but the GFC hit and that all disappeared – and hasn’t returned.
- The technology has improved a great deal. Back then it was pretty hard to FIND and SUBSCRIBE to podcasts. Even after Steve Jobs announced in May 2005 that the next version of iTunes would have a podcast directory (and sent me an email about it), it was still a clunky process to find a podcast, subscribe to it and get it onto your iPod. These days of course there are a bunch of iPhone and Android apps that make it simple and quick.
- The business model for podcasting is emerging as listener donations. On my Life Of Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte podcasts, we get regular listener donations. Nowhere near enough yet to make a living out of it, but we hope to change that with our new series that starts in a couple of weeks. I prefer the donation or subscriber model to advertising as it gives us greater independence. We aren’t relying on sponsors to continue their support. If we get them, they will be cream. I know a couple of guys who make a living out of their podcasts, so I know it can be done. This wouldn’t have been possible 10 or even 5 years ago.
- While the models for listening and monetizing podcasts has evolved, the technical side of setting up and running a premium podcast hasn’t. There are certain services like LibSyn and Blubrry that provide some options, but their premium services are out of the price range for the average podcaster. If the small podcaster has a chance to get up and running and making money out of their show, we need better tools and guides. I’m currently writing such a guide that is based on my experience over the last year building the Caesar show. I hope to get it finished in the next month or so and think it will help a lot of podcaster take their shows to the next level. Disappointingly, ten years later, iTunes still doesn’t allow podcasters to charge for their shows, meaning we have to jump through way too many hoops to do that ourselves.
- In terms of marketing and delivering a podcast, iTunes is still the kingmaker. It accounts of about 90% of our downloads and I’m sure that pretty true for most podcasts. Why haven’t Google, Microsoft or Yahoo done more to promote podcasts? I don’t know.
- Has my decade of podcasting been a good thing? Yes. Not financially – but certainly it has in other ways. Most importantly, I wouldn’t have met my beautiful wife Chrissy if it wasn’t for podcasting (we met at Napoleon conference in Corsica in 2008) and we wouldn’t have our baby Fox. I’ve made many wonderful friends around the world who came from listening to my podcasts. I’ve made friends with other podcasters who did a show on TPN back in the day, including David Markham and my current co-host Ray Harris. I’ve interviewed guests from Noam Chomsky to Ray Kurzweil, from Leo Sayer to Jeffrey Katzenberg. It’s been a wonderful adventure.
I maintain today, as I did in this SMH article in 2008, that radio is boring. Every now and again I turn it on in the car and it bores me to tears. It’s still the homogenous shit it was ten years ago and that inspired me to create intelligent content. Yes, there are exceptions – the ABC in Australia, NPR in the United States, etc – but commercial radio is a wasteland of nonsense. Radio listenership in metro Australian cities are in decline but not by much (about 1% per year over the last five years). Will that change when podcasts are available built-in to cars, as Stitcher is promising? Perhaps. We’ll have to wait and see what the second decade of podcasting delivers.
by cameronreilly | Jul 16, 2014 | Evernote
If you’re like me, you read a lot of books on your iPad and make lots of notes. Wouldn’t it be great to have a way to use Evernote to review those notes on a regular basis?
Here’s the method I’ve been using for grabbing Kindle notes. If you tend to read in iBooks, check out the Digested app.
1. Go to your Kindle Highlights page.
2. Click on the book you want to review in Evernote.
3. Then click the “You Have XX Highlighted passages” link.
4. Click the Evernote Web Clipper in your browser. That will being up the clip menu. I save all of my book highlights to a Notebook. You can also use tags if you prefer to organise your notes that way.
You will end up with all of your notes available to quickly review in Evernote. If you’ve got a lot of books in Kindle, this might take a while. But if you then continue to do this after you finish a new book, it only takes a minute.
Amaze your friends at parties with your ability to quickly pull up pertinent points for a debate!
by cameronreilly | Jun 26, 2014 | Evernote, Marketing
Is Evernote being evil? Or is Meko just really clever? Or is it just a strange coincidence?
Here’s my story.
A couple of weeks ago, my lovely wife brought me home a can of Meko coconut water. It’s really great stuff. Like… seriously. I had a foodgasm.
A week later I was in the supermarket and wanted to buy more. But I couldn’t remember what brand it was. Nothing in the coconut water section looked familiar, so I bought one can of two separate brands – neither was Meko. Both tasted AWFUL.
The next day, my lovely wife bought me another can of Meko. This time I snapped a picture of it into Evernote so I’d remember the next time I was doing the shopping.
A couple of days later, I’m in Facebook and I am presented with an ad for the Meko Facebook group.
Coincidence? Or did Evernote let Meko know that I snapped a photo of their product?
I brought up this issue this morning on Laurel Papworth’s hangout, and a few of the viewers pointed me to Evernote’s privacy policy.
It states (in part):
Does Evernote Share My Personal Information or Content?
Evernote is not in the business of selling or renting user information, and we only disclose information when:
-
We have your explicit consent to share the information.
-
We need to share your information with service providers who process data on our behalf in order to operate the Service and/or complete your payment transactions; and these providers are subject to strict data protection requirements.
-
We need to share your information with service providers to fulfill your product or service requests, including sales, delivery and support for certain products from the Evernote Market.
-
We need to share your information with resellers of a Premium Service or product in order to ensure accuracy in the payment for such Premium Service or product, the management of your account and the delivery of your purchase and related support services.
-
We believe it is necessary to investigate potential violations of our Terms of Service, to enforce those Terms of Service, or where we believe it is necessary to investigate, prevent or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud or potential threats against persons, property or the systems on which we operate the Service.
-
We determine that the access, preservation or disclosure of information is required or permitted by law to protect the rights, property or personal safety of Evernote and users of the Service, or is required to comply with applicable laws, including compliance with warrants, court orders or other legal process.
-
We do so in connection with the sale or reorganization of all or part of our business, as permitted by applicable law.
So I don’t think they have a policy of sharing the content of my notes with advertisers.
Was this all a coincidence? Or am I Meko’s target audience? Did their Facebook targeting work?
I’m a 43 year-old cigar-smoking father of three. I doubt I’m their target audience. Now, if it was my little sister (okay, she’s 35, but she’s still little IMHO) who does yoga, works for a circus and lives in Byron Bay – sure. She’s the target. Me? Not so much.
I live in Evernote. It’s perhaps my favourite technology brand (or competes for number one with Apple). I’m an (unoffficial) Evernote evangelist and have been since I started using it in 2008. I’ve got ~10,000 notes in it. I’d be very upset and concerned if they are being evil.
Laurel’s opinion seemed to be that I’m just naïve if I don’t think they are selling my data.
What do you think?
by cameron | Apr 25, 2014 | technology
A couple of things happened yesterday that reminded me of this old Microsoft “Steve Masters” video from 2001.
First, Chrissy had an appointment with an obstetrician at the hospital to go over the plans for her c-section in a couple of weeks. Rather than book a firm date, he said he’d have to get the theatre to check their schedule and call her next week to confirm a date.
Next I had to get a new iPhone and as I walked out of the Apple store, I connected it to iCloud and within seconds I had my contacts and calendar up and running.
If you haven’t seen this video before, or if you haven’t seen it for years, then it’s worth a look at Microsoft’s vision back in 2001. Back in the day I showed this to clients so many times, it drove me nuts.
Looking at it again 13 years later, it’s obvious that while we’ve realised a little of this vision – the downloading of contacts and calendar over the cloud to the phone, the voice commands and the doctor using a tablet – most of it still seems futuristic. Considering that in 2001 one of the most popular mobile phones was the Nokia 8250, which had a single colour display, the idea of full colour, cloud-connected phones was pretty out there.
Of course, only six years later, this object d’art made its way into our hands, the future seemed much brighter, and it seemed like Steve Jobs had been paying more attention to Microsoft’s little video than Redmond had themselves.
By comparison, the state of the art Windows Mobile phone at the beginning of 2007 was the HTC S710. Oooh, slide out keyboards!
Anyway, back to Steve Masters – we are still waiting to see it being a commonplace event where the doctor’s receptionist can look at the schedules of other associated clinics online, or automatically send you a car, get you to approve insurance claims over the phone, etc. I’d much rather see the tech industry focus on connecting those kinds of dots than coming up with another bloody iPhone game or note-taking tool.
by cameron | Mar 25, 2014 | Apple, Evernote, Hazel, Mac, technology
I’ve got an old scanner (Canon MP250) and I wanted a way of automating the process of scanning documents and getting them into Evernote.
There’s probably a way of doing this all in
Keyboard Maestro, but I couldn’t work it out quickly enough. It’s my first time using KM and I’m still a little confused by it. But I know my way around
Hazel and I used
this Applescript from Macworld as a cheat.
So, when I hit my hot key, KM opens up Image Capture, scans the document and puts it on my desktop where Hazel picks it up and imports it into my “!Inbox” notebook in Evernote where I can process it later, and then deletes the file from my desktop. KM then waits a minute and kills the Image Capture app.
Keyboard Maestro
Hazel
Hazel AppleScript
tell application “Evernote”
activate
create note from file theFile notebook {“!Inbox”} tags {“scan”}
end tell
