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Having friends over for dinner: Circulating Ideas podcast

It was a crazy busy summer for me and I didn’t notice this wonderful new podcast by Steve Thomas until last week. Circulating Ideas is a monthly interview with librarians from all walks of our profession.

From Steve:

This show is my meager attempt to get the word out on what we’re doing as a profession to remain relevant and to push the boundaries of learning and collating information, getting our ideas out there in the world, circulating them like we circulate our collections.  I hope it will also be enlightening to my fellow librarians to learn more about what other librarians are doing to push the profession forward.  I’ll be interviewing librarians and other people relevant to the profession and getting their points of view out to you, the listeners, and I hope that they spark discussions, whether you agree with the interview subject’s views or not. (from Epsiode Zero)

Not at all “meager” Steve! Those interviewed so far include: Buffy Hamilton, Kate Sheehan, Lori Reed, Paul Signorelli and the guys from Unshelved. There’s also a fun and informative show on how Steve creates the podcast, a “Library Day in the Life 7″ special episode. Coming up on Oct 11, Justin Hoenke.

Listening to podcasts & cooking go together for me. So when I get hooked on a great podcast, I tend to find excuses to spend more time in the kitchen cooking dinner. Thanks for bringing so many wonderful people into my kitchen! And thanks for all the great dinners. :)

Keep me cooking! What are your favorite podcasts?

 

Fixing podcasts that don’t play on my mp3 player

I love my handy dandy little Archos 104 mp3 player, but there are some podcasts that just won’t play on it. In particular the wonderful library programs from OPAL just freeze up.

I contacted the Archos help desk folks who were very responsive and figured out that those podcasts were produced at a low sampling rate and for some reason this little Archos player couldn’t play them. The Archos folks promised to put it on their list of fixes. Oddly, all those podcasts play just fine on my older Archos AV 500 media player.

In the meantime I found a fix. Open the mp3 file in Audacity, change the sampling rate to 22,050 khz or 44,100 khz (“Project Rate” menu at the bottom of the work screen) and Export as MP3. The file is bigger, but it plays on my player.  Yay.

And if anyone is confused by bit rates vs sampling rates, this post Bit Rate Resolution and Sampling Rate for Dummies has a nice explanation that made sense for my non-audiophile brain.