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There are often discussions about podficcer starter mics and what mics people use (often I see them on discord, but here's an example on Tumblr) to which there will usually be a few varied responses depending on who sees the post, but it's never terribly conclusive. For instance, I feel like there's an impression that the Blue Snowball and Blue Snowball iCE are popular podficcer mics, but is that actually the case?

So, out of curiosity, I put together a mini-survery and simple results interface to answer this question.

Link to the single-question form (Airtable form)

Embedded form:

Link to the live(-ish) results! (Airtable interface)

Embedded results:

I know this question is maybe a little headed more towards

podfic_tips/

podfic_tips but hopefully with the inclusion of live(-ish) results (I learned my lesson!) it's meta enough to fit here.

( Some notes: )

bluedreaming

This was shared by Elany/Elany on 20 June 2024 and posted here with permission. I thought it was interesting!

So! The infamous Read by the Author tag, right.

I got curious about whether the state of that tag is really as bad as it seems, so I got some numbers from the past, well, technically past 20 years but past 2006-07 there's no works with that tag and even before then some were very likely backdated. Still, I'm including those also because 2015 marks an interesting shift.

tl;dr it's bad you guys lmao

( longer version (with numbers!) )

bluedreaming

There are several questions of the "ask ten podficcers, get ten answers" variety that get asked at least once a week, and one of them is what kinds of metadata are included in the audio of a podfic. Quite neatly, this topic was also the subject of a 2010 post in this community: Tell me something good -- Audible headers. (I also checked Fanlore, but there’s only a single line in the Podfic Metadata article, from what I could tell at least.) So, out of curiosity, I created an informal and very amateur survey about how podfic creators and listeners feel about metadata in podfic audio.

This survey isn't about the metadata in the file properties of a podfic file, or about the metadata included on podfic cover art, or even about the metadata and tags used on a podfic post, though those are also interesting questions!

Eventually, I'll gather up the submissions to create a (very un)official summary and report and share it here, not to provide any kind of guidance, instruction, or suggestion about best practices, but rather just out of curiosity.

Note about the survey: the linked form is not intended to collect any private or personally-identifying information. Please keep any write-in details non-specific. Results will be assembled and shared publicly for curiosity's sake only. In addition, the form is not intended to be comprehensive or conclusive; I'm sure I'm still missing something very obvious! (And have already had to go back to add things.) Any omitted questions are not intentionally excluded.

Update (2-Dec-2023): After very brief consultation, I’ll keep the survey open until the end of the year to perhaps also get some thoughts from

voiceteam players and other listeners/podficcers.
Update (14-Mar-2024): The form is now closed. Thanks to everyone who participated! I received 96 responses! (A few of these were repeats, due to initial form testing.) I'll update this post again when the results are gathered!
Update (15-Oct-2024): I requested some FTH help with displaying the results, but if that doesn’t end up happening, I’ll definitely have to budge up and do it myself 😅
Update (30-Nov-2024): It looks like I'll have to do it myself 😅

bluedreaming

I was randomly on the Fanlore page for podfic and came across the following line (no attached citation) at the end of the Distributing Podfic section:

For listeners accessing podfic on their mobile devices, streaming is much easier than downloading.

Fanlore contributors, "Podfic," Fanlore, https://fanlore.org/wiki/Podfic (accessed July 20, 2022). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic License.

The rest of the paragraph above the line links back to a 2011 post from this community, Streaming Podfic, which is more about the reasons one might consider offering streaming.

Obviously, there are people who both access podfic via their mobile devices and find streaming much easier. However, I know I'm not the only person who prefers to download as my mobile access. This conversation (different perspectives on access preferences) tends to come up cyclically, but I don't recall reading any meta about it (if you know of any, I'd be very interested), and of course, things change a lot as phone operating systems get more flexible.

So, it would be very interesting if anyone would like to share in the comments about their preferences for accessing podfic on mobile devices, as well as tips if they have any (favourite apps, basic steps), or things that make downloading or streaming difficult on mobile. To clarify, if you do access on mobile and prefer streaming, it would also be interesting to know what makes that easier or harder. (Breaking streams into certain lengths? Certain hosts?)

( My personal preferences )

Per the profile (and I also checked after posting), anonymous commenting is enabled for this community, so you don't need a Dreamwidth account to comment, but the guidelines note that "they must be signed in some fashion".

Podfic Meta

What We Talk About When We Talk About Podfic

primary microphone mini-survey & live(-ish) results

so! the infamous Read by the Author tag - by Elany

Podfic Metadata (Headers) in Audio

accessing podfic via mobile devices

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