Auphonic – Graves On SOHO Technology

Reminder: Auphonic is still a terrific audio tool!

Auphonic on Lenovo X-1-Carbon copy It now seems half-a-lifetime ago that I used to commit an hour or two every Friday to join Randy Resnick’s VoIP Users Conference (VUC) calls. That long-running project developed a global community of like-minded geeks, addressing a broad range of technology topics.

If you’re not familiar, VUC was a live call-in podcast that ran from 2005 to 2018. There were around 800 episodes, with numerous guests from the far corners to the communications ecosystem.

It started on a service called Talkshoe, accessible via telephone and SIP. After interviewing ZipDX founder David Frankel (VUC381) about his (then) new project it transitioned to the ZipDX wideband conference platform. Sponsor Voxbone (now part of Bandwidth) was able to provide dial-in access numbers in dozens of countries. When Google introduced Hangouts, VUC naturally transitioned to that new video platform, but always maintained integration with the telephony realm.

One of the things the project required was post-processing of the recording each week, to ensure consistent sound level for all the various participants. In a podcast, dramatic changes in level from speaker-to-speaker is very jarring to the listener.

February 24, 2013
Michael Graves
Audio

Open source guru Randal Schwartz of FLOSS Weekly recently interviewed Georg Holzmann of Auphonic.com about their new online service for post-processing audio files for podcasts. Auphonic.com sounds very interesting indeed.

In the past the routine production of the VUC podcasts involved the use of The Levalator from The Conversations Network. That program, while a potent tool, is run locally and limited to processing uncompressed WAV files. This places a certain burden on the user to know how to create the appropriate source files, and later on to encode the processed files for publication online.