The tagline for my MacStories Weekly column, Ongoing Development, is:

Trying new things, seeing what works, and discarding what doesn’t.

The description captures Ongoing Development well and I like that it’s short, but if I were to add anything to it, I’d expand the middle bit to ‘seeing what works and where it leads’ because when you find something that works, it often leads in new and unexpected directions. When I started recording short audio clips for The MacStories Lounge Telegram channel, I never expected it would lead to a WWDC interview series with developers, but it did.

Note: this story was first shared by John Voorhees with Club MacStories members in the June 2016 issue of the Monthly Log. We are re-publishing it as a free preview for everyone.

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The MacStories Lounge Monologues

Audio clips are something Federico wanted to include as part of The MacStories Lounge Telegram channel from the start, having heard Italian video game channels use them. When I heard Federico’s first clip a couple days after we started the channel, I knew I wanted to give it a try too. I’d been podcasting for a while and I figured the clips would be a chance to work with audio more and an excuse to try a portable microphone.

The MacStories Lounge channel is an informal place that gives us space to share a wider range of things than we would on the website or could do effectively on Twitter. In the same spirit, the audio clips aren’t meant to be highly-produced, perfect works of podcast art. Using portable mics gives us flexibility to record audio whenever and wherever we have a little spare time. Instead of editing each clip until it’s perfect, we try to get the clips right the first time so they don’t need to be edited and can be immediately uploaded to Telegram with a Workflow action that adds artwork and other metadata.

After I got my mic, I started recording audio clips a couple times a week, usually in the morning from my kitchen table. I quickly realized that talking into a microphone by myself is different than having a conversation with someone on a podcast. With time and practice though, I got comfortable making the clips.

I record with a Shure MV88 portable microphone that plugs into the Lightning connector of my iPhone. I mount my iPhone on a GorillaPod tripod using the Studio Neat Glif that elevates the mic off the table, puts it right around mouth level, and dampens any noise from bumping the table while I’m recording. The whole setup is also easy to throw in a bag and use just about anywhere.

Taking the Show on the Road

As WWDC approached, I knew being in San Francisco was going to make it difficult to do much writing. There’s just too much going on and too many distractions and interruptions. But I wanted to do something. Because The MacStories Lounge is meant to be a behind-the-scenes look at what we’re doing on the website, I decided I would try to give readers a taste of the kind of conversations with developers that happen all the time at WWDC by recording a few.

I already had my portable mic and some experience recording with it, but I had a couple concerns. First, I had never interviewed anyone. Second, I knew I would have to record in a noisy environment and wasn’t sure if the MV88 could handle it.

As luck would have it, Tom Pritchard, the developer of Podcast Chapters, came to Chicago to visit friends shortly before WWDC. He got in touch and I convinced him to be my first interview subject, so I could put my microphone through its paces in a noisy environment and practice as an interviewer. Tom and I met for lunch at a busy pizza place in Chicago. After pizza and a couple beers we sat down and recorded an interview.

I learned two things right away. First, the background noise would be fine – it arguably added to the atmosphere and illusion that we were in an actual MacStories Lounge. Second, I talked too much during the interview. I wound up editing myself out of much of my chat with Tom, but I knew I wouldn’t have time to do that much editing in San Francisco if I wanted to record as many interviews as possible and get the recordings out quickly. I made a mental note to talk less and got a few interviewing pointers from some podcaster pals.

With that bit of preparation, I packed up my gear and headed to San Francisco. One the greatest challenges of doing the interviews after I arrived was scheduling them. It didn’t make sense to interview anyone before the keynote and Platform State of the Union and everyone was busy all week. From a practical standpoint, that meant I couldn’t do much before the day after the keynote.

So first thing the next morning, I set up my studio in the bar of the Parc 55 hotel. I started by carving the week up into one hour slots and contacting everyone who had said they were interested in participating, filling the slots as I went. I decided to keep the interviews between 15 and 30 minutes and focused my questions on WWDC and developers’ projects. Having already processed Tom Pritchard’s interview, I figured 15-30 minute interviews would give me time after each to process the audio, upload it to SoundCloud, and still have a little time to prepare for the next interview or schedule more interviews.

My approach to each interview evolved during the course of the week. Generally though, I started each interview at the top of the hour by chatting with my interviewees about WWDC and what they wanted to talk about. That helped me with the questions I would ask and got interviewees into a talking mood. From there it was just a matter of diving into the interview. As the week wore on, themes and common topics started to emerge, which I used as the basis for questions in later interviews, knowing that I was going to write an article for MacStories after WWDC that covered developer reactions to the announcements.

I used Shure’s free app to record each interview. After I finished an interview, I sent a copy of the uncompressed WAV file to AudioShare, an app that Federico found that has some basic tools for normalizing and trimming audio, but more importantly, can upload audio to SoundCloud as a private file. Adding artwork and other metadata on SoundCloud required my Mac because large parts of SoundCloud’s website don’t work on iOS. After the metadata was saved I would make each recording public, copy a link to it, and share the link on The MacStories Lounge Telegram channel and Twitter. All in, I could record an interview, have it live on SoundCloud, and shared within an hour.

There was another piece of the puzzle though. MacStories Weekly was scheduled to go out on the Friday during WWDC and we wanted to offer a single file download of the interviews with chapter markers as a Club MacStories member perk. The trouble was that timing was going to be tight. We usually like to have the newsletter ready on Friday by 9 or 10 AM Eastern time, but Federico and I were on the West Coast and I wasn’t going to finish the interviews until about 3 PM Eastern. Plus, we had other parts of the newsletter to finish.

So, Thursday evening I took the dozen or so interviews I had completed already and dropped them in as separate tracks in GarageBand. I’ve done a little podcast editing in GarageBand, but my co-host Robb Lewis does most of the production work for our podcast, so this was largely new territory for me. I tweaked the audio a little using Jason Snell’s pointers on GarageBand plugins for podcasters, exported what I had, converted it to a mono file, and added chapter markers with Podcast Chapters to be sure I had the workflow down and could move quickly on Friday.

I finished the last few interviews at Noon on Friday. After Federico and I got together and finished the last bits of the newsletter, I left to process the final interviews. The newsletter went out later than usual, but no one seemed to mind, and being able to add the perk of a single file with all the interviews was a nice bonus for Club members. When I returned home, I distilled the interviews into a WWDC developer reaction article for the website.

Controlled Experiments

Which brings me back to where I started – the tagline for Ongoing Development. It’s as much a reminder to myself as it is a tagline. It’s easy to decide you aren’t qualified to do something. I certainly could have concluded that about the WWDC interview series. But unless you start, you never get anywhere. I had my doubts, but the reality was that I had enough experience from podcasting and The MacStories Lounge audio clips to know what I didn’t know and figure the rest out with a little preparation.

The WWDC interviews were a blast, great practice, and I think they turned out well. Better yet, the interviews left me itching to continue experimenting with audio. I don’t know yet where this may lead, but I do know that when the next opportunity presents itself, I’m jumping in with both feet again.