Google Podcasts Manager + Alban Makes An Appearance On The "Smart Passive Income" Podcast

In our first-ever live-streamed episode, we revisit the new Magic Mastering feature in all its glory, Alban shares his experience as a guest on Smart Passive Income, and we dive into Google Podcasts Manager.

Claim your podcast on Google Podcasts Manager.

Check out Alban's guest appearance on the Smart Passive Income podcast. (Emergency Episode #4)

Livestream Software:

• Ecamm Live
• Restream
• Squadcast.fm

Places to find podcasting gear:

• B&H Photo
• Sweetwater
• Crutchfield
• BSW

Review Buzzcast in Podchaser to let us know what you think of the show.

Have an idea for something we should talk about? Submit a topic in our Listener Suggestions form or post it in the Buzzsprout Podcast Community on Facebook

Transcript

Travis: 0:00

So it will be interesting to see kind of how this continues to evolve. But I think the good news here is, you know, podcasting is here to say, you don't have to worry that this whole medium is going away. We are very much here for the long haul.

Kevin: 0:12

Were people worried about that?

Travis: 0:14

I don't know. If they were they aren't anymore

Alban: 0:17

If you had that is very specific unfounded fear drive Travis has totally alleviated it.

Kevin: 0:23

Of all the fears that we're struggling with right now. That should not be the top.

Alban: 0:26

That was not at the top of my fear list.

Travis: 0:32

Hey guys, welcome back to Buzzcast quarantine edition number four, and our first ever live stream episode. Kevin, Alban. Welcome to, it's good to see you. It's good to see your faces even virtually every once in a while.

Kevin: 0:45

It's great to see you guys as well.

Alban: 0:47

Welcome to the live stream dudes.

Travis: 0:49

So Kevin, walk us through how you are taking our squad cast recording and live streaming it to our Facebook group. Sure. So I've been doing over the past couple weeks experimenting more and more with how we can connect

Kevin: 2:39

And for our recording of our podcast episode, we're all recording double unders. So I'm recording here locally on my computer Travis's recording on his computer and Alban is recording on his computer. When we get done recording will Alban and I will send our audio files to Travis so he's got high quality originals to do his editing with and but we're also using Squadcast. Squadcast is a great platform because it gives us this video. So we can see each other as we're talking. And it also records high quality audio files, and then it on when we end this call, it'll automatically send those files to Travis. So we've got some redundancy there, right, like, squad cast should be capturing all that audio and squad cast has its own backup files. And then we also have our own local backup file. So we should have three copies of this audio all in high quality, just to make sure like when you're doing super important videos, podcasts, like speaking with Travis and Alban, these guys are hard to get on their calendar. So when we get on their calendar, we want to make sure we don't lose the interview. Right. So we have three versions just to be safe again, overkill for most scenarios. But squad cast is an awesome product. But like all technology, it does glitch from time to time. And so we all record local backups as well. So that's the setup. Yeah. And that's this what we're currently doing is super overkill for most podcasters. But if you are curious, that's how we do it now with the Restream.

Travis: 4:07

And you can is it just pushing your computer audio? Is that the audio that it's using? Or is it something else?

Kevin: 4:16

Yes, it's pushing the system audio right now is the way that I have it set. So I could probably set it so that it's I have a road caster pro sitting on my desk. I could probably set it so that it pushes that audio out on the on the live stream. But I was afraid that there might be some latency there that it might not line up with the video. It's kind of like when you're recording with a camera and you have an external mic. So let's say you're using like a DSLR to film some stuff and you have like a boom arm mic, right? If you run that boom or mic straight into the camera, the camera will do a job of syncing up the audio and video. But if you capture the audio separately onto like a zoom h6 or something like that, then you have to manually And if you don't, it's going to be off a little bit. And so that's why I'm running system audio. So every now and then you might hear I should probably come through loud and clear most of the time Travis and Albin might get a little bit of that robotic, you know, bandwidth. glitch Enos on the audio once in a while, because that's just pushing out whatever I hear it's not pushing out their dedicated recordings that they're doing, or the squad cast high quality recordings that are happening in the background. Again, this is super, super technical. It's taking me like I said, we've been working on it for a couple weeks and playing with it. Video is crazy difficult compared to podcasting, podcasting seems so much easier. So don't I would encourage you if you feel like you still have a lot to learn in podcasting, don't even think about video. This is crazy. And I and if you're in our Facebook community a lot or on our YouTube page, you might see or have noticed that we've gone live for a few seconds over the past couple weeks unintentionally as I was trying to technology I keep keep starting these live broadcasts. And it's just me sitting on my desk and I'm like, oh my gosh. being live streamed on the internet and turn it off quick.

Travis: 6:06

So the first thing we wanted to talk about was actually just revisit something that we talked about in the last episode, which was the new magic mastering feature that we put a lot of work into, to really make it as easy and amazing as possible. And to this point, since we launched it, we have over 1000 hours of audio processed using magic mastering. Hundreds of people are using it now for their podcast. And so we've been really encouraged by the adoption and the feedback that we're getting. I just want to read a couple posts that we've seen here in the Facebook group, talking about it, the first one from Carrie and Reed Brown. Who said, has anyone checked out the new magic mastering feature? If you haven't, you must try it out. I just uploaded an episode with very blatant volume discrepancies. I'm loud and the guest is low. I put it through magic bass string and voila, the loving love And loudness is fixed. I'm super excited about this new tool, and lots of other comments and posts like that. So it's been cool to see. Not only do you guys like it, but you really, really like it. And so Kevin, I wanted to throw it to you as someone who was really integral in rolling this feature out, like what are some best practices for people as you're using it to really get the full potential of the feature? And then just some common things that we're seeing that are kind of like some low hanging fruit for people to really take full advantage of it.

Kevin: 7:30

Yeah, so we haven't had too many issues where magic mastering has done something like to degrade the audio quality, that the only one that pops in and there's only one that pops to mind, and I didn't investigate it. What happened with this particular file is it was two co hosts on it. And one's levels or for whatever reason, their audio was coming through, much louder than the other, which is a very common thing. One of the things that magic mastering fixes with no problem at all. And, but they also had some, like a music track, sort of like Background music playing underneath the audio. And so you have a loudspeaker, a soft speaker, and some music playing underneath. Okay. And what happened was, I think when they were trying to figure out how loud should that music be? They were matching it to the volume of the lower the lower speaker. So if I'm talking and I'm talking, you know, loud, and Travis is talking quietly, if we put background music underneath that, we would need that background music to be pretty quiet, or else when Travis spoke, the music would sound way too loud for Travis's voice. And so what happened was magic mastering looking into it. what it was doing is it was recognizing that background music as noise. It was saying, Oh, you must not want that there because it's so low compared to the powerful vocals. It's so low. It must not be background music. It must just be some noise that's come in. So it magic master did amazingly well was stripped out all that music. And so you had two speakers that sounded really nice next to each other like they were leveled out pretty nice. But all the background music was gone. Interesting. And so the person wrote in and they're like, what happened to my background music like it's gone. And I was like, I listened the episode. I was like, I actually sounds pretty good. He's like, No, no, no, no, you don't understand there was background music there. So he sent me the original file, and I listened to it. And I was like, how did that happen? That's amazing. Like it wasn't a multitrack file or anything. Anyway, so I was able to tweak that episode, and run it through the process again, and get the music in there. But that's something to be aware of. So maybe a tip might be Hey, if you're if you're using magic mastering, and you run into that issue, what the suggestion that I gave this person was if you want to put background music in there, underneath vocals on top match the music to the louder voice It's gonna sound overpowering for the softer voice. But remember that softer voice is gonna get boosted when it runs through magic mastering. And so that was my tip. I don't know, if he's had another chance to do another episode since then again, we were able to get that resolved for him with that other file. But that's the only that's the only problem that we've had. And that was a very complicated file. The majority of we've run over, I think up to 1100 hours of audio that's been run through magic mastering so far, which we're thrilled with, just in the first two weeks. And one problem like one problem file that I've had to look into all that time. So that's the update, we're going to like most things that are brand new to Buzzsprout we usually start we push out kind of slow, push them out first to our Facebook group. We talk about them on this podcast, but there's thousands and thousands of Buzzsprout customers that don't participate in our Facebook group or don't listen to this podcast. So they may have stumbled upon it because You do see it when you go to upload a new episode. But we haven't done a whole bunch of marketing material or pushing that message out to our customer base at large yet. So that's going to start at the end of weird at the end of this week at the end of this week. I think we're gonna shoot out an email tomorrow. And we're gonna start talking about it more and more, but it feels really good feels like a really solid feature and enhancement and accomplishing the mission that we set out to accomplish which was make podcasting like making the idea of creating a professional podcast making that as easy as possible.

Travis: 11:30

And for me, just personally using it, I think the big thing is it's such a time saver. Like one person wrote in the Facebook group talking about how it's totally changed their workflow. This is Shawn and he talked about how he was previously using phonic and his workflow was finished editing the episode in Hindenburg, export the WAV file, upload that WAV file telephonic, download the all phonic process file, and then upload that file to Buzzsprout. And he was saying that process took between 20 and 30 minutes, which is about what I was experiencing when I was doing that workflow. But now, I literally just use the publish button from Hindenburg with magic mastering turned on, and it's like, I hit three clicks in it, that whole 2030 minutes goes away. So it really is incredible as a time saver as well.

Kevin: 12:22

Yeah. So this is something that I struggled with because I publish directly when I do an episode I struggle I push straight from Hindenburg using the Publish feature as well. Travis, have you locked in on the settings that you use from Hindenburg because you can publish it as a as an mp3 is a WAV with all these different file formats. And you can have Hindenburg do some loudness, normalisation before it publishes or you can just leave it alone. And so up, here's a little test. I'll tell you what I did. And then Travis being the audio engineer of the group, he'll tell me if I got it right or wrong. So what I did is I set it to export A WAV file, I set it to mono, just to save on bandwidth because I figured it didn't matter if I did mono or stereo so I just chose monitor to make the upload faster. And then I left where it said loudness normalisation. I just said, Don't worry, like do nothing. Because I know magic mastering does that. So why do it twice? So I just basically just a wave in mono didn't change. The sample rate didn't change anything else. And I think I had, I've done a couple episodes like that, but the biggest one was like an hour long episode, it took about five or 10 minutes upload from my home internet connection, and then about 10 minutes to process them to hit Buzzsprout and it sounded perfect. So how'd I do on my settings?

Travis: 13:45

You did great. You did great on your settings. So I think the thing to keep in mind is you you don't want to over process, your audio file. Like it's easy to think if a little mastering is good that Lots of mastering is better. That's hardly ever the case unless you're, like auto tuning an r&b album. So yeah, so I think what you did is absolutely perfect. If you're not using magic mastering, then you're using a software like Hindenburg look that lets you set the loudness target. you absolutely want to do that before you put it in Buzzsprout. But if you're using magic mastering, that's going to do the loudness target for you. So you want to keep your Hindenburg export as clean as possible to minimize the opportunity for you know, something to get over processed. All right, because the past passed, you passed Kevin. So Alban, you were recently made more famous than the other two of us, by chance have a lucrative podcast guest spot on Smart Passive Income were you're not?

Alban: 14:56

Yeah, I don't know how that make me more famous than you, Kevin. has also been on SPI. So, we are now just if anything equally famous. I think the first time I met Pat was like one of the first podcast movements. It was I think it was probably like five years ago. And we did with Kevin, I actually built a recording studio. And we auctioned off like or not auction like raffled off time to interview, like all the top speakers at that podcast movement, and one was Pat. And I specifically remember the girl who won the interview with Pat was, like, petrified. And she was like, Oh my gosh, I can't believe how nervous I am. And I had no idea who he was. I was like, This guy said he was like an architect or something like two weeks ago. Like I didn't know what was going on. So I remember kind of being like, Oh, you don't want to be nervous. It's fine. You're just interviewing someone. And then five years later, he was like, hey, do you ever be on my show? And I'm like, Oh, no, I'm the one getting nervous. I think Kevin pointed out he was like, you know that, uh, the amount of people that listen to SPI that's more than like, the Jaguars stadium like completely full of fans like you're being interviewed on the 50 yard line. And I was like, oh, gosh, that's a Yeah. So you start imagining that then you definitely get a little bit of butterflies.

Travis: 16:21

Well, and I know that we kind of worked a little bit together before that interview. And I know for a lot of podcasters You know, one of the marketing strategies we teach is to become a guest on other people's podcasts as a way of getting your show out there. And often you start hitting above your, your, your weight class, so to speak. And what are some things? Well just say like SPI is as great as Buzzcast is SPI it's been around longer, more people listen to it. Yeah.

Kevin: 16:52

Yeah, it's an awesome show.

Travis: 16:54

So how did you prepare? Like, what was your process like to prepare to be a guest on a podcast like SPI?

Alban: 17:02

Yeah, so the way I think, and I develop an idea is mostly by writing. And so for me, I need to be writing things out during the research phase, to really kind of hone a message, or else I'm sure as people have heard on this podcast, I will just ramble and talk to you for an hour. And so I think I just put, I mean, I've got my notes up here, and it's somewhere close to like 2000 words. So I wrote quite a bit. And it was me kind of trying to break up almost like smart, small paragraphs, many of which never made it into the show, just as a way of like formulating my thoughts. So it's all done in kind of an outline format, you know, so I've got a whole section, what are we seeing in podcasting, and the time of current Coronavirus? And there's 700 words there. Why is now the time to start a podcast. We've got a whole section What about marketing a podcast whole section and then Things that I didn't know for sure we would talk about. But it was more I kind of thought these are kind of the buckets we'll probably hit. And then just an outline format kind of built this outline. And then was writing stuff for each of the kind of potential questions. Does that make sense?

Travis: 18:19

Yeah. And I know for me, whenever I've done guest podcasts, I always, at least try and get a sense of the general topic, right? I never like I never like to go in blind. Because as a guest, I want to make sure that I can be the best guest that I possibly can. And so I think that that's spot on with just like a really good approach is be as prepared as you can. But then don't feel like you have to stick to your talking points or your script that you've created. You really still want to be conversational as well.

Alban: 18:47

Right? So, for me, the idea creation is the same as writing it is when I write that is when I'm figuring things out. And then the actual interview, I create could read these answers, but I don't. Because if you just read them, then you just come off as robotic. But by writing so much and thinking about it, you actually have kind of have these almost like canned responses. You have things that are already queued up. And you're like, oh, here's a piece of data that's interesting to answering the question you just asked. And you've got that piece of data right there. You don't have to read the whole thing. So wrote quite a bit. I think most of it got used in the episode, so it felt good being prepared. The one last piece of advice I would give is, any podcasts you're being asked to be a guest on. Try to listen to at least one or two of those episodes for that podcast. Because it's pretty common that podcasts have like segments that they always do, or they have a particular tone. And if it's a podcast about it's very well produced business podcast or is just kind of a you know, friends, hanging around having Beer podcasts like it, there's totally different vibes you can get. And especially if there's lots of podcasts that end with like the same three questions, so they have one segment always, you want to be kind of prepared for those, so that you don't feel as much like an outsider to the podcasts audience. If I think of, I listen to conversations with Tyler, which is Tyler Cowen and people he does a segment every the same segment every time. And it's obvious when people are confused by the segment. And they're not someone who listens to the show, or people who get excited by the segment because they listen to it. So listen to a few episodes. I think it's like very kind and respectful thing you can do, especially if you can reference old episodes. hosts always love it when you're like oh back, you know, you talked about this in this episode. They're like, Yeah, we did. Let's plug that old episode.

Travis: 20:52

So let's dig into the actual content that you were on SPI to share like they asked you on specific Because we see kind of the impacts more across the industry than just an independent podcaster would with their own show. So what was some of the data that you dug into and some of the things that you shared as far as the impacts on podcasts in the last couple of months?

Alban: 21:15

Sure. So like everybody has seen and we've talked about on here. Number one is podcast downloads are down in March. But at April, we saw that number creep back up, and we're just about, it depends on which category are in and your specific listeners. But overall, we're pretty close to back as far as normal download numbers. And one thing I said on SPI was, you could really summarize like all the changes we've seen in two words, which are just changing habits, that we are creatures of habit, and all of our listening habits were totally disrupted when everybody started working from home, or just when You're the things you worry about changed and a lot of life just all of a sudden, this abrupt shift. And I think that it's allowed some podcasts to do pretty well and others have maybe taken a bit more of a hit. So some of the, you know, the reason why we see just we saw a drop in listens was the changing habit of commute time, people are not driving and their habit in the past was when I drive into work, I listened to these three shows. And over time, they shifted habits through March and April, to listening at other times of the day. The second trend that we kind of focused on was when are people listening? We found that people are listening to podcasts more at lunchtime than at any other time of the day. So it used to be you saw these peaks when people drove to work and when they came back from work, and now the peak is at lunchtime. The other thing we see is a lot Or people listening on desktop than mobile. And it's only a shift of a few percentage points. But I think just, I think it's actually the probably the change is bigger than we can see in the data. Because I know personally, I'm listening on my phone while at my desk. And so that would still show up as a mobile play than a desktop play. But what it made me think is, if you're a podcast that needs to get some reviews and iTunes, Apple podcasts, excuse me, the best way to do that is when people are at their computer. So go ahead and ask for it now, because it's much more likely somebody at a computer, you're not going to get a review when someone's driving into work. Hopefully, they're not reviewing you at Apple podcasts. But now they're their computer and it takes them 12 seconds to leave a review. you're much more likely I think, to get a hit on that if you ask now than if you'd asked you know, a month ago

Travis: 24:00

Yeah, it's very interesting to see not only how it impacts podcasting, but everything. One thing that we're going to talk about later in the show is what to do now that all the podcast equipment has disappeared off the face of the earth. So it will be interesting to see kind of how this continues to evolve. But I think the good news here is, you know, podcasting is here to say, people are still listening to podcasts. And so you don't have to worry that this whole medium is going away. We are very much here for the long haul.

Kevin: 24:27

Were people worried about that?

Travis: 24:29

I don't know. If they were, they aren't anymore.

Kevin: 24:33

There you go.

Alban: 24:34

If any of you had that, very specific feet unfounded fear trap says totally alleviated.

Kevin: 24:42

All the fears that we're struggling with right now. That should not be the top Yeah, that was not at the top of my list.

Travis: 24:48

Is there anything else before we wrap up the segment album that you want to make sure that we hit on?

Alban: 24:53

Sure. Um, the one thing I would leave you with is you don't want to make decisions about the podcast, based off of You know, two or three change percentage points and changing listener behavior. Right now is the time to shift from thinking short term to thinking long term. There's lots of uncertainty. People are out of work, businesses are struggling. And I would I think out of that, I think, you know, really what we want to be doing now is thinking long term. And while you may not be able to grow your business or your brand in other ways, one thing you can do is consistent, great content, and build an audience. And then that audience will be very thankful that you put in a lot of work during this time, and then they will be there in the future. So now's not the time to be doing a hard sell and trying to make an extra $12. It's the time to help people out and then benefit them in the long term.

Travis: 25:56

Yeah, and I know for me personally, I'm getting kind of Tired of the, we know that we are living in uncertain times. And we are here for you rah rah commercials that are everywhere now. What I really want is for people just to make my life better. And so if you can be that for someone else, they that will stick out, they will remember that. And then like Alban said, in the long run, that'll pay huge dividends for whatever it is that you're creating. And if you want to hear the full interview of Alban just crushing it on the Smart Passive Income podcast, I will leave a link to that episode in the show notes. So you can click over, check it out, and then leave a review saying that Buzzcast sent you. So Google, who makes lots of different software products, including Google podcasts, just released their first podcast analytics feature software platform? I don't know what would you call it, Kevin?

Alban: 26:51

manager?

Kevin: 26:53

Yeah, Google podcasts manager. It's very similar. If you've used Spotify as if you've logged in and claimed your podcast on Spotify, very similar to that. They don't give all the data that Spotify does. Spotify gives some demographic data. And they differentiate between plays and streams things that the I think is listens in streams, listens and streams. I can never remember the terminology they use. So they differentiate their Google podcast doesn't seem to be as sophisticated yet the Google podcast manager, but it's awesome that it's something I mean, Google has, up to this point, been doing their own thing their own way. And this is like, kind of falling in line with what others have been doing, just kind of like unexpected of Google in a good way. The claiming process is super simple. I loved it. I did a really short video showing how you can claim your show there. It also sounds like it has the side benefit of Google has never given us a way to submit shows directly to Google podcasts before. We've had To put up a website that met some very technical specifications to set yourself up to be discovered by Google podcasts seems like they've kind of piggyback submission on top of this Google podcast manager feature. So if your podcast hasn't been picked up in Google podcasts yet, you can still drop the feed in. they'll recognize it possibly as a show. We haven't tested this, but it's been reported by James Cridland to pod news that he had a podcast that wasn't in Google podcasts. It was brand new, he dropped the feed and they recognize it as a new show and let him index it right there. So it's very cool. I don't I'm not overly impressed with the data yet. But I don't need to be because it's something that I didn't have before. Right. Like it's it's how can you be picky? Like you got something you didn't have before, but you're saying it's not good enough? Well, it's better than nothing. It's better than what we had two days ago. And so I don't want to like naysay it. I mean, it's pretty cool. I have if anybody is watching on the livestream, I'll show you. I've got the Buzzcast podcast loaded up in Google podcasts manager show. I'll show you that screen. It has Like number of plays across the top number of minutes played, again, not super exciting, the data seems to only go back to April 6. So it seems like that's when they started collecting this pool of data that they were going to make accessible to people who access Google podcast manager. So it starts at April 6, then it goes forward. So we see some plays, which is showing 65 plays for Buzzcast from April 6. One of the things I want to do is compare that to what Buzzsprout is reporting. So if I go over to Buzzcast, we don't. We don't let you like lock in a date range when you're looking specifically for apps and devices. So the filters that we get for apps and devices are by episode, you can look at your last episode last five last 10 or all episodes. So I figured the closest thing to 30 days that we have is about the last five episodes. five episodes for Buzzcast actually spans two and a half months, not just a month, but I don't have you know, 30 days on here. But if I scroll down and look at Google podcasting where that shows up, we were showing 152 plays on Google podcasts over the past roughly two and a half months. They're showing 65 plays for the past 30 days. So I mean, those numbers are, you know, they're in the same ballpark. It's interesting. I like seeing the little bumps when we release episodes. You can see here, here's what you get from services like this that you don't get from your podcast host. And this is where the value is, when you log into Apple podcasts Connect when you log into Spotify podcaster dashboard. Now when you log into Google podcast manager, even if you don't get a lot of plays on Stitcher, but stitcher has a dashboard that you can log into as well. The most valuable thing is that you can see they know that we don't is how much of your episodes are being played. Because they're the app they know more than we do. We just know if somebody downloaded the file or not. They know how much of that file was actually played on the person's device. So that is that's why we love this stuff. When Apple came out with their podcast analytics when Spotify did theirs, now Google podcast is done. There's, these are the three biggest players in the podcasting space. And now for all three of them, you can log in and not just see how many downloads you're getting. But you can actually see how much of your episode is being listened to hugely valuable. And it's great that they're providing data that podcast hosts can't. So we're doing the best job that we can and providing all the helpful data that we can like total number of downloads, and where in the world people are listening from and the types of apps that they're using and stuff like that. But how much of your episode is being listened to is not a data point that we have access to? Until the apps provide API's that we can actually pull that data that they provide it to us, which I don't think Apple's ever going to do. I don't know that Google is ever going to do that. So it's really nice that they don't want to share that data with with partners, which I understand why they wouldn't because there's like it's a huge trust relationship. There's some liability there, right. And so they want to anonymize it. They want to control it. I totally get But make it available to the public. And now we have the third major podcast host or listening platform, making that data available to podcasters. Huge when, again, there's I have my critiques, but I'm not gonna say any of them. Because I'm so excited to be doing this. I think this is a fantastic tool for podcasters.

Travis: 32:17

Right. And this is just their, this is almost like a beta product, like they just rolled it out. Of course, there's gonna be bugs, but like you said, it's better than what we had before. And even if you don't have a ton of Google podcast plays, which would not be uncommon, it still gives you an insight into how people are consuming your podcast on different platforms. So like, you can see, is there a consensus in the consumption charts across these different apps? Or are my Spotify listeners not listening as long as my apple podcast listeners and what does that tell me and it just gives you more information that you can kind of pull inferences from and make educated assessments about what's working, what's not working in your show to make it better for your future episodes. That's Really the power of these things. And so it's just one more data point to help you be more accurate with those assessments. So if you want to watch the full video, Kevin walks through how to get set up with Google podcast manager. I'll leave a link to the YouTube video in the show notes for this episode, and you'll get all set up with that. And if you're not yet in Google podcasts, then it seems like that would be the fastest way to get listed as well. So great bonus there. So if you have tried to purchase podcast equipment, in the last several weeks, you may have run into a brick wall of no one having anything to sell you. This is not uncommon with Amazon where a lot of the microphones that we recommend a lot of even the boom arm that we recommend the road PSA one is out of stock on Amazon out of stock in bnh, at least at the time of recording this video. But there are some places that you can check if you're wanting to upgrade your equipment or you wanting to purchase something and Amazon doesn't have it. That's not only will potentially be able to get you in waiting lists, you're notified when they get back in stock. But we'll also give you more information than Amazon does. So Kevin, why don't you kind of share the places that we go to to try and find things when they're not available? They're not easily available.

Kevin: 34:13

Yeah, and I would go even beyond just your general recommendation of if it's not available on Amazon. For better or worse, there are a lot of small, smaller shops that we want to support. We buy a lot of stuff from Amazon. I'm not saying don't buy from Amazon. It's super convenient. But there are some great sites that serve the podcasting space and just the audio space in general or creator space in general. And they don't have all the resources and stuff that Amazon does. So whenever we have an opportunity to support them, some of them are like b&h photo and video. Again, they're not tiny. It's not like we're supporting a mom and pop shop. They're huge. But it's just an alternative to Amazon. They have great customer service, they still ship very quickly, it's still free shipping have almost All the same gear. And one of the benefits they have is that usually if something's out of stock on Amazon sometimes they'll say like more on the way or something or expecting more bnh is really good about doing that. So if something is backordered they have a little place where you can drop in your email address and say notify me when it's back in stock. You can also reach out to their customer service line and they will look into when they're expecting the next shipment and give you like an exact date. So I love bnh I love um, Sweetwater is really good. You can do online chats with Sweetwater and crutchfield. Crutchfield is amazing at this, you can do online chats with Crutchfield and Sweetwater and you can ask them specific questions about the problem that you're trying to solve? Or do you like this mic with this audio interface? Or does it matter? Or is there a better Do you have an alternative that maybe is a little bit less expensive, that would give me the same quality and they will totally show you everything else that they have. Like they're all it's kinda like going to. It's replicating that music store experience, like you're walking into a music store and that's their competitive advantage. Over Amazon so Amazon is like easy to find anything and everything right like you can check out with a bag of potting soil and a new microphone. You're not going to do that at crutchfield. But at Crutchfield the advantage there is that you can talk with people who really know that gear inside now. And so check out some of the sites, check out b&h, check out Crutchfield check out Sweetwater. There's another company called BSW. The web address is BSW usa.com. They are big supporters of the podcast community. They're at all the podcasting conferences, they we set up booths and bring a bunch of gear to show people so they love podcasters they have a phone number list on their site, so you can call and talk to them about gear and I'm not saying that they're gonna have the gear if Amazon doesn't have it. I'm not saying these places will, but they might. And if they if they don't, I think you could chat with them and ask them for alternatives and they might be able to point you to something similar that they do have in stock.

Travis: 36:57

Well and the other thing that is great about those cites is that the prices are more stable than on Amazon because often what happens with Amazon is let's say that they typically ship road PSA1 boom arms from their warehouse for the MSRP of 99 bucks. If they run out and it's only resellers, you'll see the price go up, it won't be $99 anymore. Now it's $119 $125 $135 to buy that same boom arm on Amazon, but because you're buying it from some reseller, they can charge whatever they want. I think we're seeing this with the webcam industry right now, if you buy a webcam on Amazon, they're just exorbitantly expensive. And so going to these other websites, you're not going to run into that issue, it's going to be the normal price. And so you can be confident that's the best price for the gear that you're trying to get.

Kevin: 37:48

So all that to say right now might not be the best time to upgrade your podcasting gear. But if you want to, and you can find what you want or something similar. Those are some great sites to check out and again great sites for for advice. I did notice some of the stuff is starting to come back in stock like the, the new ATR2100x from Audio Technica was backward for a long time that's back in stock on Amazon and bnh. The Q2Us are still backordered. So if you want to get that $60 mic, which is now our number one mic recommendation for entry level podcasting, that's still backordered B&H has said it's going to be a couple weeks. Samsung, the company that makes that mic is actually active on Twitter, also, so you can tweet them and they will let you know how they're doing it fulfillment focused right to iTunes, the audio interface that we recommend for two or more recording or two people recording in the same location, the same computer that's back in stock, the third Gen. That was one of those price gouging situations that happened. So the latest version of that audio interface got backordered and out of stock, but some people dug into their inventory and found second gens old second gens and started charging more for those old ones. Then the new ones we're going for. So that's what Travis is talking about is those games happen a lot in the Amazon Marketplace, but you're not going to see sites like Sweetwater and b&h and Crutchfield they will not play those games.

Travis: 39:12

Well, that does it for our first ever live streamed episode of Buzzcast. It was cool seeing the interaction in the Facebook group reading the comments. If you want to see the full recording, and you're just listening to the audio only edited portion on our podcast feed, jump into our Facebook group. Go check it out, go check out the other resources we have in there. It's just a fantastic community of podcasters. And then also, if you haven't yet, make sure to jump over to pod chaser and leave us a glowing five star review for this podcast because we already know that you love it. So you might as well just tell the world that you love it as well. That does it for this week, and we'll catch you in the next one.