Übercaster update - almost there
Published by on August 6th, 2006
Yesterday I opted the risky route of recording my podcast (MT#20) using the Übercaster beta. It was not entirely a painless process.
Beta software usually presents a few problems, but for the most part all went well until I had recorded the entire show and started getting curious about what a few of the buttons did. Of course, too enthusiastic clicking and I was rapidly in revolving beach-ball mode. Even after a couple of events on WRC Extreme (Playstation) the coloured irritating ball was still spinning: I had lost most of what I had recorded. Darn!
Looking in the project file I could see a bunch of audio files (with the extension .caf [?] in there), but was unable to determine what was what, so it was not going to be possible to rebuild from the disk stored recordings.
I managed to get AutoFade to operate -ducking to the rest of us - but despite the preferences having some ability to modify the behaviour and sensitivity, I found that it was far too enthusiastic to lift the levels back up on the ducked tracks while the voice over was continuing. Perhaps some further messing with the sensitivity settings would help there.
After re-recording the missing parts, I found that the project file on disk was over twice the size I am used to seeing for an approx 30 minute show (over 750Mb as opposed to around 300Mb), and that was not including the files for the two music tracks. A little further exploration and it seems that Übercaster keeps everything you record, even previous segments you may have recorded over, so this really is a non-destructive system. Exactly how you might revert to a previous ‘take’ I haven’t yet worked out - well, I may have but that’s what crashed the app in the first place so I’m leaving well alone for now.
I did come across an intermittent bug where the output and monitoring audio would just stop. Recording continued as normal, you just cannot hear what’s going on, which is a pain. Saving the file and restarting Übercaster returned the audio and during my last re-recording session this problem did not re-appear.
Übercaster is certainly going to be a cracking application once these bugs are ironed out and I’m still going to continue using it on the next Minor Technicality so I can learn more about how it works. I am particularly interested in its reported ease of recording Skype, Gizmo or iChat conversations - the installed kernel extension hasn’t yet had an obvious detrimental effect on my system, so fingers crossed.
If you’re a podcaster on Mac OSX, Übercaster is well worth a look.
One Response to “Übercaster update - almost there”
August 6th, 2006 at 6:01 pm
Show us what the app looks like instead of repeating the same graphic from your older post you lazy bugger…