Bryan Entzminger: The Art of Audio Editing

Tara Sands  0:02  
The sound of podcast. The show about podcast and broadcast starts now.

Matt Cundill  0:13  
We are going to be talking about something today that happens with every great podcast, including this one, editing even in this day and age of AI being able to have a hand in editing, there's still a need for two ears and a steady hand in order to make it sound great. There are also some great tools and tips you could learn from people like our guest today, Brian Ensminger has been editing and creating podcasts for over a decade, and today he and I dig into what works and what doesn't work. Take notes for this one. If you are just using zoom to script or Riverside to make your show, Brian is here to open up a whole new world for you. And now Brian entsminger joins me from Smyrna, Tennessee, not so far from Nashville. Wouldn't you get started in podcasting?

Bryan Entzminger  1:01  
So my first show would have been 2014 I think I launched it in like April of 2014 after like, two years of planning and not doing anything. So a bit ago, what were you planning? Just what would I talk about? How would I do it? So this would have been shortly after John Lee Dumas came on the stage, and I had already been listening to shows for a while, and I had a desire to potentially do something, but when I saw, Oh, he has a formula, maybe that's not right for me, but maybe I can pick that up, because I knew that, you know, I had some background in music, and I'd done some music production, not professionally, but I'd done some so I was reasonably okay with audio, or at least I thought I was time revealed some other stuff, but I didn't know anything about guest research or anything like that. So I really started with sort of, how can I pull this off? Being a complete idiot and knowing nothing about how to actually make a show.

Matt Cundill  1:55  
I think this is important, because when I started to look at Podcasting A couple years after you did, I didn't know who he was, and I didn't know about the impact that he had on so many people getting into podcasting, you know, EO on fire, just a huge behemoth of a podcast. He's, you know, a big personality. But tell me why so many people like that show.

Bryan Entzminger  2:22  
So for me, because I don't know that I can answer for everybody, but for me, at the time, I was really trying to learn more about business, about small business, that kind of thing. And it was a 30 minute episode that followed a formula where you could kind of almost download a bunch of information pretty quickly. And I learned pretty quickly, also that I could listen at 2x so I could I could double speed these things and really get a lot of that really quickly. And at the time, I think a lot of the shows that were sort of popular or up and coming were really kind of in that entrepreneur space. It wasn't like cereal wasn't out yet. So none of that stuff, true crime, there really wasn't much. So it was a lot of talk shows. And his was just consistent, different all the time. And I probably listened for a couple of years before I sort of fell out of love with it.

Matt Cundill  3:13  
One of the things that I attended at a Podcast Movement session was, I think it was a workflow exercise and how they put that show together. He did not provide the session. But there were, like, 11 things that it took to get a show together. And, you know, eight of them were pretty hard, and then the last three most people could do. And I thought, Oh, I think there's a business in here for people who can't get all 11 of these things accomplished in order to have a successful show, and I think that's something that you do. So tell me a little bit about the podcast that you make, what type of clients you have and what sort of work you do for them, sure.

Bryan Entzminger  3:50  
So my client base has declined pretty significantly over the last few years, as shows have dropped off and haven't really refilled that portfolio. So currently I work on a couple of shows that are basically turning a sermon into a podcast. So that's really not a ton of editing. It's a lot of post production in terms of audio quality and that kind of thing, and then creating some of the assets that go with that, so the short form, video that kind of stuff. Then I work on another show that's an interview based show that is not really an entrepreneurship show, but it really is a lot of that kind of can we learn about a topic? Can we learn about a person? And for that, I do primarily editing. She's a writer, so she likes to do her own show notes. She likes to do all of that kind of stuff. Tell me a

Matt Cundill  4:34  
little bit about the drop off, because I think a lot of people have sort of seen drop off in this particular space. Did everybody get into it at the pandemic and then do their three years and then get out? Or is it cyclical? Will it come back?

Bryan Entzminger  4:47  
So I don't know that I can say whether or not it's cyclical. I think it probably is. I think what we're seeing right now is listening seems to be increasing. If I follow pod news or some of those shows. Shows, time spent listening seems to be on the increase, but new shows and new episodes are on the decline. So it's probably a little bit of a demand reset, where maybe there were more shows than needed to be, and also probably some people had some life changes. So the shows that I worked on, I've worked on four different shows for a production company as a sub. And then I had another client that had a couple of shows, and both of those people, over the course of about 12 months, the production company, she stopped her operation because there were some life changes she needed to shift. And so all of those shows fell off because I wasn't working for her anymore. So they went somewhere else. And then for the other client that had a couple of shows, he felt like he felt like he just needed to go in a different direction. So these were both shows that started 2017 ish, 2018 somewhere in that time frame, and they ran for five or six years before they sort of dropped off. And it was a very natural like this show probably just needs to end. I don't have the love for it anymore. Then that kind of thing, and those two things together, losing effectively six shows over the course of 12 months put a pretty big dent in what I was doing. And then as a result of that, those didn't really come back, and I really didn't refill, because I didn't want to build up another portfolio of work where it was a lot of work for a single client, where if they stop, I lose a significant portion again. So I've been kind of in a holding pattern for the last year or so trying to figure out, okay, what do I want to be when I grow up? Now, right?

Matt Cundill  6:30  
First time I started to edit audio, there were reel to reel tapes, razor blades, and you know those white chalk marks and so forth. But what were your first editing tools on a computer for audio.

Bryan Entzminger  6:42  
Yeah, so if I think, well, even before podcasting, it was pretty much Garage Band. I was a Mac guy from the mid, mid to late 90s, somewhere in that time frame, I switched over to Mac, and so it was really kind of garage band. And I probably went for a year to a year and a half as a podcaster, continuing to work in garage band before I made my first software switch to something else. Think it was twisted wave, is what I went

Matt Cundill  7:10  
to, wow, like, you're like, the only other person I know who knows twisted wave?

Bryan Entzminger  7:16  
Oh, yeah. Well, I looked at audacity, and I just didn't like it. But twisted wave offered that same it was a destructive editor, which is not something I'm a super big fan of, but it was fast, it was easy. It was like $30 to buy it because at the time, they didn't have a subscription, so I just bought the program outright, and then I could do all my processing and dump the files straight from there.

Matt Cundill  7:36  
So I'm still using twisted wave. Are you really? You know, it was actually the reason why I moved to a Mac. And there was a voice guy named Jamie Watson, and he said he uses a Mac and he uses this particular thing to be in voiceover. And I was doing a lot of voice over work at the time, and I learned something very quickly about podcast production, and that's not very good at it. I don't know a lot about compression. I've never been to school for it, but you know, my friend Evan, who I hired in 2009 he knows everything. He will always know a lot more than me. So I said, Evan, you will produce my podcasts. And he has ever since, and I've never really left twisted wave. It gives me just enough to, you know, to teach me what to do. It's easy to use to record voice, which is often, you know what I'm recording when I'm on the road, I'm going to record my tracks for my podcast. I'm just super, super comfortable with it. And to your point, Audacity is free, but it's clunky and cumbersome.

Bryan Entzminger  8:33  
That was my experience. Now I know that there are other editors that just love it. I just didn't, and I think that's fine, right? That's why they have different programs out there.

Matt Cundill  8:42  
Tell me about Hindenburg, because I know at one point or you may still run a Facebook group that helps out him. You know people who use Hindenburg? I know journalists love it. I know James critland at pod news has has used it quite often.

Bryan Entzminger  8:56  
Yeah. I mean, I still love Hindenburg. It's still pretty much my daily driver. I have some other stuff that I work with and with now from time to time as well, depending on what I'm trying to do. But it's basically software that's built for radio or podcast production. So it's designed for voice first. It's really designed to help put together narrative or storytelling or news type stuff, but it can do interviews just fine. So all of the editing, all of the cuts and the pace and the moving things around that you might need to do that's all front and center. And while it's pretty capable from an audio engineering like all of the fancy routing and all of the weird stuff that nerds do, it maybe doesn't do 100% of that, but it does enough of it that is basically designed to help you get from I have this thing that I need to get out the door to. It's ready, and it's good enough to go on the air as fast as possible. And I've found it to have, still probably the most intuitive workflow when it comes to actually cutting, because a big part of what I do is really the technical edit. I'm not from. My clients, I'm not typically going through and saying we should remove this entire section, because this question you asked is dumb. It's their show. They get to choose what stays in. But I go in and I remove the fillers and the long pauses and all the weirdness, and it's just so fast and so easy because it's all just front and center.

Matt Cundill  10:16  
So this is a good time to ask, because I remember in September of 2019 somebody told me, have you seen this? It's called the script. And I said, Oh no, I haven't seen it. And I tried it, and I sent it to James crindland, and I said, have you seen this? And he goes, No, but I'm going to use it. And it was where you could remove the words from the transcription, and it would edit the show. And I said, I think that's really going to be a bit of a game changer for many people who are scared off by like the wave forms, which I was, I ran many, many radio stations, and I never once edited a wave form until I sat down to start doing podcasting in 2015 but today, when you go through and do that, is it as effective to remove those filler words, or to have, you know, the computer to take that stuff out. Is it perfect? Is it good? Because I really love doing it by hand. Yeah.

Bryan Entzminger  11:06  
So I guess what I'll share is take this with a grain of salt, because I am an editor. I truly, truly hate what descript does to recordings. There are a couple of shows that I'm in the process of picking up as a secondary editor for the technical edit, and we're talking like 45 minutes. It's already got a story edit done with all of the de umming by descript, and I probably spend two and a half to three hours just realigning all of the bad cuts from descript. This is no reflection on the people that are they're really good at what they do, but it's the breaths are cut off or the pacing doesn't work, because descript maybe understands the words but doesn't understand the the emotion. I spend hours on a 30 to 45 minute show making the timing work. So I I mean, at some point I may talk to them and say, Hey, like, I could probably be faster if I just cut these myself. You know, you do the story edit. I don't want to take that over once the story edits done. Maybe, is there a way that we can leave out this part? Because it is like hundreds and hundreds of cuts to fix. I try to

Matt Cundill  12:14  
explain that to people. And again, I'm not saying that these things are bad, because I think they've saved a lot of time, but I also know some people will ship their audio overseas, and it comes back, and all they've done is run it through the script, and then they're handing back this product to people. Be wary of that. People, if you are doing that, you're going to get back exactly what Ryan was talking about, which is some some weird cuts. But I equate it to being a chef, and I can go, I want to go to the market, I want to pick the ingredients, I want to cut it up and I want to cook it. You know, my way, if you're using something like a tool, like like a descript, it's kind of like getting all of your ingredients pre packaged and you're just throwing into a pot and letting it go. Yeah, I

Bryan Entzminger  12:54  
think for the person that's thinking about descript, if you're an indie podcaster and you're crunched for time and you don't have a budget for an editor, it might be a tool for you to check out. If you've got something that you're building that you're really want to be proud of, you want it to stand the test of time, I would not recommend it, right? That's just the way I think of it. Learn to edit, yeah, or hire one. Yeah. Do that too, because I love it when people edit their own stuff, right? That that helps you become a better podcaster, because you hear the 10 to 15% that the editor is cutting that never makes it to air

Matt Cundill  13:31  
inside things like the script, there are some very, very handy tools that I never thought would ever, would ever show up. I think studio sound can be quite nice, especially if you've got a problematic recording, because it happens to all of us and stuff like that. But you know, the equivalent to out there, there's, there's some plugins, and this is where now I only carry about four or five plugins. Again, like I said, I'm not the best producer in the world. I'm not even sure what plugins necessarily do, but I know, for instance, with isotope. So isotope, I bought it a number of years ago, and it does de clicking, because nobody wants to hear voiceovers with with clicks in. It takes out room noise. Those are some of the basic ones. But what are some of your favorite plugins?

Bryan Entzminger  14:12  
So there are a couple of what I'm going to call kind of a one knob tool that I really like there don't work 100% of them is dx revive from ascent eyes, which is a bit of an, I think there's an AI element to that. I think it's kind of recreating the voice, but it's really powerful, and it has the ability to sort of tailor the output. And then another one that I really like, that Jesse McCune told me about, is super tone clear, which is, it's kind of a three knob thing. It's got voice ambience, which would be background noise, and then reverb or echo. And so you can sort of dial in how much you want of those, so you can sort of remove some of that stuff. And both of those work real time. So they're pretty good at that. I still have the iZotope suite. I have the ACON digital suite. I use those from time to time. And for me, a lot of times it's about choosing the best tool for the job. But if I was an indie podcaster just getting started, or I just just had the budget for one, I'll call them kind of sort of premium tools, I would probably look at DX revive or super tone clear as sort of that first I want to get rid of the background noise, and I want to get rid of the echo. And those will, I think gets you the most bang for your buck right off.

Matt Cundill  15:23  
What's the ratio of audio to editing? So if I were to give you an hour's worth of audio to edit, how long would it take you to edit it doing the professional job that you do?

Bryan Entzminger  15:33  
So it depends a little bit, of course, but it's typically about a three to one. For me, it can vary a little bit, and part of that has to do with how much repair, like, how much time do I have to spend trying to make, usually, the guest's voice sound Okay, before we can go on and actually start making the cuts.

Matt Cundill  15:50  
What is the biggest repair that you're making these days?

Bryan Entzminger  15:54  
Two of them typically, well and they're tied together. Typically, it's a guest that doesn't have headphones and is using the laptop mic sitting on a desk or a chair in front of them, two to three feet away. So you've got the room noise, you've got the echo. And sometimes you get the if it's a zoom recording, you get this sort of cut up zoom thing where sometimes you can kind of hear the other person echoing back through the speakers. If it's not perfect, it's doing an incredible job at what it does, but trying to clean those up. And then sometimes it's just like, here's the timestamp. This is the one I couldn't fix. I'm sorry I tried really hard.

Matt Cundill  16:27  
Is there such a thing as a zoom recording that you've listened to that you haven't said, Oh, that's a zoom recording.

Bryan Entzminger  16:35  
Maybe the first one I'd ever heard before. I knew there's probably some. But like, even, even on a podcast episode. Now I can typically tell if it's a zoom recording. There's just something about how it sounds. You're like, Yep, there's another one.

Matt Cundill  16:47  
So when you're done with it, do you cover that up, and it doesn't sound like zoom anymore, right?

Bryan Entzminger  16:52  
So the I can make it sound better, but what I can't do is replace what's not there. And zoom is an incredible conferencing platform. It doesn't really do pro audio, especially their recording engine is lower quality than their streaming engine, so I don't know how technically you want to get in here, and they've probably made some changes, but if you're streaming the 48k version to somebody, what they're hearing in their headphones is actually better than what's being recorded on the computer, because it downgrades the quality of that recording. It sounds thin. It sounds thin a little bit grainy. It's missing the airiness at the top. It's a little bit wooden and a little bit synthetic. That's how I would describe it.

Matt Cundill  17:34  
When we finish and provide a finished product for a podcast, what are the standards that we should be looking at? Because I've, you know, I got into this years ago, and some people are I upload a wave. I'm like, don't do that. I'm going to make it 32 bit. And I'm like, don't do that. So ideally, on a finished product, what are some great specs?

Bryan Entzminger  17:55  
So typically, I just stick with the really boring mp three quality. I do stereo. I prefer stereo just for the music, and then, honestly, if it's an interview, I like to pan the voices just like one to 2% to either side, as long as there's not a video, if there's a video component, then it's straight down the center. But if it's just audio, because that tiny bit of separation triggers your brain, and you can kind of recognize when the voices shift. So I do typically do stereo, and I'll do either 128 or 192 kilobits per second for the quality, 44.1 sample rate, 16 bit audio, mp three. I've done AAC in the past, but I just don't think it's worth being weird, because not every platform still will honor that they all should be able to. It's a standard that's been out for, what, 25 years. It's not new, but not every platform does

Tara Sands  18:44  
sound design of the sound off podcast is inspired by mega tracks, the sound of entertainment, providing music and sound effects for radio podcasts and media professionals. Mega tracks is your one stop shop for library and custom tracks. Start your music search now at Mega tracks.com the sounding off newsletter delivered free to your inbox featuring Matt's media hacks, hot takes and retakes. Okay, so this

Matt Cundill  19:15  
one I know a lot of people are interested in, and I know because I'm interested in it, and it's luffs. And you go to Apple, and you go to Spotify, and Spotify says, well, keep it around 14 lufts. And then you go to apple and say, well, we want it around, you know, minus 16 luffs. And I'm like, well, that's, that's really about the phone. That's really about, you know, for the experience of having an iPhone, minus 16 luffs is going to be ideal. First of all, what is luffs? And how do we how can we set it so we put out something that right level of loudness for a podcast? Yeah?

Bryan Entzminger  19:49  
So, I mean, there's a Pandora's box, right? Because, to your point, you have Spotify at minus 14. And we'll talk about the different standards. So first, what are. Luffs. It stands for loudness units full scale. So if you're familiar with audio, you're familiar with the concept of a decibel, which is the measure of loudness. And for our purposes, it really doesn't matter what that is, but from a playback system standpoint, zero would be as loud as it can possibly get. If you get over zero, then you're creating some kind of problem. And what they're saying is that the luffs, or the perceived loudness, should be approximately 16 luffs, or decibels approximately lower than that zero, right? So that's sort of that's supposed to be your average. And there's some variable specs as far as how much it should be allowed to go up and down. And the idea there is that it's loud enough to be reproduced in a louder environment, like a car when it's driving, maybe not an airplane, but it's loud enough that you don't have to push your system so loud that it will create mechanical or electronic noise when you're listening to the audio. It's based on how people hear rather than the way audio used to be measured, which was basically measuring voltage. Decibels are measured in more than one way. One way is voltage, one way is sound pressure level. And this was a way to understand based on how humans hear, How loud is this perceived to be by, sort of the in quotes, average human and so that then is what becomes the spec is sort of how loud is the whole thing. But there's more than one standard to your point, right? So Spotify is asking for minus 14, or 14 loudness units, less than zero as your average. Now that doesn't mean it can't go over that, and it doesn't mean it can't go under it's just saying on average, it would be this apple is asking for minus 16. The American Audio Engineering Society, and I think they broke off. There was a joint standard at one point, but the AES is actually asking for dialog to be at minus 18. So even two loudness units lower than Apple, what I do is I just target the middle, which is minus 16, which is apple. It's also typically the biggest consumption platform in terms of actual episodes downloaded, and depending on whose stats you look at, actual audio amount consumed. So I feel like I'm covering a pretty good base there, and that just is sort of the default that I go with. If I were to change and move away from that, I would probably go with the minus 18 to give myself a little more headroom and to be aligned with the Audio Engineering Society, rather than the marketing group from Spotify that maybe just wants theirs to sound a little bit louder, because two decibels is not enough to be perceived like you don't listen to that. Go, ooh, that's louder. You listen to it, you go, ooh, that's better, because louder to your ears sounds better until it breaks up. So I think that's just a loudness war play. That's my perspective on Spotify.

Matt Cundill  22:46  
Do you think Spotify does that because they've got all, like an entire library of music,

Bryan Entzminger  22:52  
that's probably part of it. And I think their their target for music is like minus 11 loudness units. But I think people push that right because the loudness wars didn't go away. They're still pushing for it.

Matt Cundill  23:04  
Yeah, I get radio spots that arrive here for podcasts, and I'm like, Yeah, this is minus 11, minus 10. This is going to be a little bit loud.

Bryan Entzminger  23:12  
Sounds about right and true peak is it like point one over or something? And I think a big part of this actually came out of television back in the 80s and 90s, where the way that they were measuring commercials would come in, where they measured at the loudness or at the standard, but they were actually significantly louder in terms of how you perceived it. So that's why this became something that got pushed into things like podcasting and TV production or radio production.

Matt Cundill  23:38  
Yeah, so for those who are listening or saying, what are these guys talking about? Sometimes you listen to an ad and there's dynamic audio insertion, or dynamic ad insertion, and sometimes the ads a little bit quieter, and sometimes it's a little bit louder, and it's, you know, everyone here is trying to marry it all together, so it works. So when I produce a spot minus 17, minus 16, and sort of cross my fingers and hope that nobody really recognizes that it might be, you know, different than the podcast that might be produced. So what we're trying to really accomplish here is a great listening experience for the listener. It was an easier time, by the way, back in the 80s, and I know a lot of people have noticed it with streaming services. Now, you know the movie's on, more and more people are just reading the captions, because the sound is really all over the place, because there are so many platforms you can stream it. Here, it can be on television. Here, it could come from Amazon. It can come from from Apple, and there's not a lot of alignment anymore, no.

Bryan Entzminger  24:30  
And even worse than that, I think, is that there doesn't seem to be adherence to the standard of what the loudness range is. So a movie might deliver their dialog overall at a certain level, but if it's very, very wide, if the yelling is really loud and the whispering is really soft, there's no way to set that for a communal listening and watching experience if there's other stuff going on in the house, so you end up riding the volume knob all the time. I'm a captions guy at this point. It's not that I can't hear. I hear just. Mind, I think. But eventually I just gave up, because the mumbling and the whispering just can't hear it.

Matt Cundill  25:07  
A lot of new podcasters will come to me and they say, oh, I want a podcast. And they're thinking video first, and they've got the cameras ready, and they want to edit the video, and they edit the video, and then they will just sort of provide an mp three or an MP four and say, Okay, well, put this in as an audio podcast. How am I supposed to look at that, that I'm just sort of receiving this video first. What can I do with an MP four to make that sound as strong as possible in the audio world? In terms of, well, they've produced a podcast, they've done their show, their couple talking heads, they give me an MP four for the audio as a final product. And they're like, Oh, can you just sort of move this over into into Apple and Spotify?

Bryan Entzminger  25:50  
Yeah. I mean, I guess not knowing more about what they've done, if they don't want any edits done to it, I think it's really about, can I make the loudness and can I make the voices sound as clear and as present as possible, as consistent as possible, and deliver that in the mp three format, right? So converting from MP four to mp three, not a huge deal. It's lossy to lossy. So it's not super ideal. It's not that big a deal, right? You're not gonna, you're not gonna lose followers over that. But if you've produced a video where there are visual elements that maybe have volume changes that go with them, that make sense on video, that can be a lot harder for audio only, I think audio only tends to be a more forgiving medium, but only to the point that it's actually produced well. So, I mean, the simple answer for me, having not tested this, is, if the levels are all over the place, that's probably the use case for a phonic right? Because what that's designed to do is identify when the tonality of the voices changes and try and level each segment out so that you have a consistent level. Now, I don't like that. It uses a lot of limiting. I would prefer to use compression. But when it comes down to it, that might be the easiest way to deliver something that meets a spec and is reasonably

Matt Cundill  27:11  
good, alfonic. I'm going to put that in the show notes of this episode, and I do have it on the list of something that I am to try because somebody suggested it recently.

Bryan Entzminger  27:21  
Yeah, I tried that on. They have a noise reduction feature now as well. And there was something that a friend sent me that his client was working with that had just some really consistent noise. And it was, it was terrible. None of the tools, like I have hundreds of dollars worth of tools that I use, none of them could get it. So I tried loading it to a phonic and it wasn't transparent or clean, but it was able to get it to where it was intelligible and usable. So it might be something that's worth checking out. Sometimes you

Matt Cundill  27:51  
have a podcast called Bad podcast pitches, yeah, I love it. I mean, it tells me about what a nice person you are, because you're not there to shame anybody, and you're not outing anybody. You're just sharing what you have

Bryan Entzminger  28:05  
no and actually, the whole foundation of the show is I wanted to make a show to try out new features like recording live audio and some of the newer things that are happening within the podcasting space that are out in the open, not proprietary to a particular platform, and I needed something to talk about as like, I keep getting these pitches, so I'll read them and I'll comment on them, and hopefully it'll be at least marginally useful for somebody. And if not, I'm at least putting in the reps and developing the workflow so that if somebody comes to me and says, Hey, I want to do a basically live to drive type recording or live stream and record it, but audio only, I can help them, like, put together a workflow that delivers audio that's approximately right. I can't predict it's going to be 100% right, but the levels are good. The audio is reasonably good, and it's as close to push button as you can get. And also use some AI tools and, like, learn some new stuff.

Matt Cundill  29:00  
Yeah, I love that you're doing a podcast just to, you know, try stuff out. That's actually what I started to do with this podcast, was, let's see what I can learn by doing this. And here we are, all these years later. But bad podcast pitches, I noticed it's like, oh, you can find us on fountain and you can find us on true fans. And you know, both these places, you know, they're innovative, they're innovative places. So what are you trying out with with both those places, specifically?

Bryan Entzminger  29:27  
So a couple of things. One is, they're just new apps that offer things like both fountain and true fans have the ability to communicate with creators through the platform. There's more to come on that I think at some point, both of them have the ability to send donations if you want to. Both of them have the ability to deliver both an audio experience and a video experience through the same podcast. So you're not creating two separate feeds. You're not loading one to YouTube and linking to it. It's the same experience, just one with video. One without it's pretty boring, because it's my face, but it gives you the ability to do that. And so I wanted to try some of that stuff out. And then I also wanted to see, okay, if I'm doing this live as audio, there's not really a live chat thing. So how can I integrate a chat room, which, of course, nobody visits, because it's a small show. Nobody cares. I get that it wasn't supposed to be big, but it's just trying all of those things out. So then, if somebody comes to me and says, Hey, I want to do a show that I stream live audio, but I publish audio and video in the same feed, so people can pick and choose, and I want to have these things and go, Okay, pod home. FM is where I'm hosting it. And, you know, here's a place that you can do that. They've got the back end server to handle all of that stuff. You don't have to be super techy. It's a little nerdy, but not super techie. And like, this is a way that you can put it together, is really kind of what I was doing.

Matt Cundill  30:43  
So that's something I'm probably going to want to try at some point.

Bryan Entzminger  30:47  
It's fun to learn new stuff and fall on your face. And I've published a couple where the audio wasn't great, but I sort of made the commitment to myself that I'm going to try and dial in the settings on my rodecaster so it can be as close to air ready as possible when I get done. Now that I'm trying to do video, I'm marrying the video and the audio up, so there's a little bit of post production. But the idea was really just, can I record it live, clip the top and tail, upload it and go.

Matt Cundill  31:10  
So I've had the fountain app now for a few years, but I've been using it as the end user. And I don't have a live show, but I have listened to shows that have gone live on there, and I thought, Ah, this is the future,

Bryan Entzminger  31:22  
I think so I'm hoping that Apple picks it up, because I think it would be huge with Apple, because they don't really have a radio offering that I'm aware of, and this could be super cool. And it's right in the fountain app, but it's also in true fans, right? I use fountain, but again, just as an end user too, I'm not using them for hosting anything.

Matt Cundill  31:41  
And I do have Sam Sethi to come on this program to talk about true fans. Oh yeah, because he's, I mean, the last time he was here was a couple years ago, but he has done so much work with this, and he's updated it so much I can, I can barely keep up. So the right thing to do is to just bring him on and he can update us on it. And I became a fan, by the way, of your show, just through it. You might have got that five minutes before the show. Oh, Matt Cundill is now a fan

Bryan Entzminger  32:07  
of the show, yeah. I mean, and as a podcast host, like, first off, it's great to get those little notifications. But also, when it publishes that with true fans, it's publishing it to the feta verse, which is be like Mastodon servers, that kind of thing. It's nice to have that little note that goes out and says, hey, somebody followed your show, because maybe somebody else follows Matt and thinks, oh, I should follow this show too.

Matt Cundill  32:29  
One of the things you also did with bad podcast pitches was you engaged one of those famous promoters I did. Yes, yeah. So, I mean, listen, we all get these. Would you like iTunes, following, increasing, magical, more followers, more, all sorts of things. But what happened when you used a promoter with bad podcast pitches? Yeah, so I'd sort of

Bryan Entzminger  32:55  
forgotten that I'd done that, and it was a pretty big part of, like, two months of my life. So this guy reached out to me and said, Hey, I want to prove myself to you. I'll give you three days for free. And so I sort of put him on hold, and I contacted pod home, which is the media host I've gotten. I said, Hey, this promoter that reached out to me, I'm pretty sure that this is just fake downloads. Do you have the ability to help me understand my analytics if I engage this guy? Like, oh, yeah, totally. We can do that. We'd like to know too. So I said, okay, that part's good. I said, Okay, now, if I engage this guy, and these are fraudulent downloads, which spoiler, I'm pretty sure they were, but if, if this is happening, I don't want any of the other shows that are connected to my Apple account to be affected. So I took the time then to move that off onto a new Apple account. Totally segregated that, and then I engaged this guy in about three or four days of promotion. I don't remember the exact timeline. My show was like number two in a subcategory, and it was getting about 50 downloads a day. So it went from call it 20 downloads a month. Small show, no surprise, like I'm just making it for me. All of a sudden, it's getting 50 downloads a day, and it got up to, at one point, the number one place in the sub category in apple. Now it wasn't like a show up on the home page. This is a great show type thing, but it hit the I'll give you number one ranking in apple. So it hit that. But then I said, Okay, let's go ahead and stop this and watch what happens, because the feedback I got from pod home and what I was seeing in my analytics led me to believe that this was maybe a couple of devices, or one device just sort of rotating through and downloading and then deleting and downloading again to manipulate the stats. So I let it go, and after about five days of not promoting it, my downloads were back to about 20 to 30 a month. So I suspect I may have picked up a couple of subscribers. And I don't know if that's because this person was promoting, and people just went to that sub category and said, I'll check it out, and lost their minds and subscribed. I don't know, or they were interested in the fact that I did this promotion and said, I want to stick. Around for more, but I did all of that, and then I published the results, and I basically went through it, and when the guy reached back out to me and said, Hey, you want to use my services like No, you said you would give me real, organic audience of my ideal, my ideal listener, there's zero way that you could have gotten from zero to 50 downloads per day of new people in three days with no idea what my show is about. Obviously, he didn't know what my show was about, or he wouldn't have promoted it, because it's about bad pitches, right? It was one of the examples I was using. So, like, there was obviously something going on. So, you know, he was very courteous and said, Hey, if you don't, if you don't trust me, that I don't want to work with you. I'm like, Yeah, that makes sense. But for me, I'd always suspected this was the case. I'd always heard this was the case. I was under no misgivings that this guy was probably not legit, but it was really interesting to see that, honestly, 50 downloads a day is what got me into that category. Now this is not to shame anybody who's used a promoter to do this kind of thing. Maybe there's some good that could have come out of it. It just wasn't what I was looking for.

Matt Cundill  36:05  
I think in Apple, you need to complete the show, and you need people sort of following it. And so, you know, with with 10 devices, they can just sort of play your show, run it to the end, get another device follow that's the sort of activity that they're looking for in order to do that, and it's not really based on downloads anymore. They've moved away from that. I would be interested to know the country of origin, or the city of origin where the downloads took place and the browser traffic.

Bryan Entzminger  36:33  
Yeah, I didn't see a ton of browser traffic, which was not a surprise.

Matt Cundill  36:37  
Well, it was throughout, it's through Apple then, right?

Bryan Entzminger  36:41  
Yeah. And interestingly, it wasn't enough to really give me any good analytics from the Apple dashboard. So those 50 downloads, I think it translated to like 20 listeners, or something like that. And of course, there's this kind of increasing hockey stick of growth after that happens because it looks like a new listener every time. So it looks like you're adding new listeners, I think. But, yeah, I don't remember the country of origin. The back end did not show within apple. Didn't show exactly the same thing, but they did deliver on the number one ranking in a sub category. So if that's all I cared about, they would have done that, and I would have had that. What are your thoughts on Spotify,

Matt Cundill  37:22  
doing video, and also for Apple, doing video, because you can put your video in there

Bryan Entzminger  37:27  
if you want. I love the ability to distribute video via RSS. I'll say that so it may not be the most perfect experience for the end user, and it's certainly higher bandwidth than audio, but I love that it doesn't have to be tied to a single platform like YouTube. I have no hate for YouTube, but I also don't like the idea of constantly having to chase the algorithm, because the YouTube model is to insert the algorithm in the middle of your relationship, so that the relationship I have with my listener is never one to one. It's never they've subscribed to my show, and they're going to get every episode, and they can choose if they want to see it. No no, unless they go seek me out. YouTube chooses what they see, which is fine for finding a new show, not great for building a long term relationship with a creator. I love that it's been in Apple all along. I hope that they they adopt the same way that true fans and fountain, fountain, yes, the way that they're doing it, where it can be delivered by the same feed. So it's not two separate shows in Apple anymore. It's one show with two delivery mechanisms, or two two experiences. The thing that I don't like about how Spotify is doing. It is if you upload your video to Spotify, it disconnects from the audio that you uploaded from your media host. And so unless you're using Spotify for your hosting, you lose all of the things that could have been connected to that audio file if it just stayed purely audio in Spotify. So this is not my anger towards Spotify, I understand that hosting video is the expensive part, and so they want to keep it on their platform. If you're doing video, I get that. And also for the seamless experience, if they're hosting the video and the audio, then it becomes sort of seamless to switch back and forth between the two, because they don't have to figure out where's this file. Now, how do I go find that on the audio file that's delivered from somewhere else, like from a technical standpoint, it's easier. I just don't like it. I don't like that. It disconnects the audio from the original once you've uploaded the video, and if you have a different edit for your audio, because for one of the shows that I do, I have a different edit for the audio, because I can edit the audio a lot tighter than I can the video, and it doesn't look or sound bad, it it sounds great. Once that's done, it's like 10% shorter than the video. So now they stay out of sync. If you've done that to provide a great experience for your listeners, and then Spotify just says, well, we'll just play the video. It doesn't work on that platform. Everybody on that platform is now getting a substandard experience based on what you had planned for.

Matt Cundill  40:00  
Them, what are you doing late at night? You're a Nighthawk, aren't you? A little bit yeah.

Bryan Entzminger  40:06  
In terms of podcasting, I'm really only doing a couple of days a week of work now, nights and weekends, depending on the production schedule that I've got going on. So I like to hang out with my wife and sometimes see my kids.

Matt Cundill  40:20  
I mention it because the available openings on your website to interview you are like, sometimes, like, 12 o'clock Eastern. They're like, Oh, that's late, yeah.

Bryan Entzminger  40:30  
I also work a full time job, and so when I tried to come up with times that I could commit to where people could I could know I would be available, it was kind of early mornings and late nights and then Saturdays. And so I just made myself available at that time. Not surprisingly, not a ton of people take me up on that. But it does work a lot better for people that are on the other

Matt Cundill  40:48  
side of the world. What are you going to do when you grow up?

Bryan Entzminger  40:52  
Well, when I was younger, my hope was that when I grew up I would be six, three and 180 pounds, and so far, I've surpassed one of those and not the other. But I don't know that I'll ever grow up. I still feel like a 16 year old. I'm just trapped in the body of an old guy whose peers from high school are now gray and have grandkids, right? I don't know that I'll ever grow up, because I love to learn new things. I love to do new things. Yes, physically, I'm slowing down, but I'm okay with that. I don't really have any huge aspirations to change the world. I just want to, you know, change it for a few

Matt Cundill  41:25  
people, one edit at a time. Yeah, Brian, thanks so much for doing this and being on the sound off podcast. You're welcome

Tara Sands  41:36  
another sound off media company podcast.