Thanks for sharing, that’s a neat intro to Podcastland! 
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Well, it’s certainly an intro. There’d be many others. Including ones that maybe aren’t so USA centric. Funnily enough, I think I first only started listening to podcasts to get BBC Radio 4 content when I wanted it. That’s a different type of podcasting, much more along the lines of the streamed mp3 idea. I think it’s a very broad space in which a whole bunch of things happen.
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Today I listened to a lot of podcasts, which gave me some thoughts on the SuttaCentral Podcast (SCP). I’ll first share my ideas here to get some feedback, Monday the 28th i’ll get to the tickets. 
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The best podcasts feel energetic and strike a balance between arousing curiosity and satisfying it. The listener feels like they are around friends, who have interesting stories to tell. I’d like to soak the SuttaCentral Podcast in these qualities as well. That’s why I’d recommend waiting until we have human-narrated audios. Even though Amy, Raveena, and Russell are amazing—I love listening to them—I believe a podcast needs human voices. @Viveka, is this something you’re working on?
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With regard to structuring the actual podcast episodes, I also have a few thoughts. I’d like to keep the music to a minimum so that people who keep eight or more precepts won’t have to feel uncomfortable to tune in. Optionally we could use a gong sound, like SuttaCentral Voice (SCV). Then a short introduction to the sutta/suttas/vagga at hand, followed by a live or prerecorded narration of the sutta/suttas/vagga. Perhaps we might address sutta parallels afterward; giving some more depth for those interested–while keeping commentary on the sutta to a minimum. And then finish with a simple ‘thank you for listening’ message. Maybe 18-25 min total/episode.
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With regard to sutta/vagga selection: I envision loosely following the structure of the Pali canon, without dogmatic adherence. Episodes could also be grouped in larger wholes, for example, episodes on the Middle Discourses, perhaps in three “seasons.” I like the idea of publishing one episode per day, like the BSWA podcast. But maybe just start out with one episode/week.
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It would be amazing to use Ven @yodha’s artwork for the icons of sutta episodes. I’m thinking of using one doodle for each larger whole of episodes, analogous to how @Gus used one drawing for the first volume of the Middle Discourses, and another for the second volume.
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I’m leaving the question of podcast client and audio software selection open. Just for illustration purposes, I have created one sample episode with Podbean. Unfortunately, Podbean is not free (I think the BSWA uses the premium version). However, the free version is pretty good. This test episode consists only of an mp3 downloaded from SCV. In a way, i like the rawness of it, but i don’t think it would work well with a broader audience… Don’t worry about the web address; the SuttaCentral Podcast will get its own.
Some concluding remarks…
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Everything I have proposed here is up for debate. Please share your ideas and suggestions!
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I’m not a native English speaker myself, so for the introductions and thank you message I’d need some help.
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Sorry, I haven’t read the rest yet, and I can’t give it anything more than the quickest skim just this minute, but really, you’ve nailed it in just this sentence. It gives me the warm and fuzzes to read that you hear these qualities too.
Thanks so much for the magnificent work you’ve put into this, I can’t wait to have a more leisurely read.
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Yes this is something that I can start working on next week. I’ve been working on Pali pronunciation, within the English texts, but that aspect will be a continuing learning process.
Perhaps what you want for the podcast can direct the order of voice recordings ?
Plus I have to mention, that while I’m willing to do this I don’t know how pleasant my voice is to listen to. Perhaps I should do a bit of a test, just in case 
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That’s great to hear. Just so you know, I haven’t forgotten! In fact I have made some inquiries about getting a mic, and we may have one here soon. We’ll see how that goes and see about getting one for you, too.
I’m thinking of doing some recordings myself. Reading my own translations is really useful, you get a feel for the cadence of it.
It sounds like the best thing to do with the podcasts will be to have a single session, reading and introducing the sutta.
That sounds fine.
I’m sure she’d be happy to do this.
Remember, we have our own SC theme music, from the Vimeo video. We can use this, or get it remixed.
So how does this work? When you make a podcast, does it go over a “channel”? Do only some clients work with it, or all of them? How are things discovered?
Should the timing be consistent, or should we follow the sutta? The basic issue is that SC itself is strongly structured around the sutta as an entity. If we start doing things like breaking up a long sutta into several sessions, or combining short suttas into one, we make the integration with SC or SCV bucketloads harder. Perhaps we should start by choosing suttas of about 20 minutes reading time, and worry about the length problem later.
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Looking forward to this!
I think it is a great thing to read one’s own translations aloud. For the few I have done so far I always did this, and it also helped me in fine-tuning the translation itself.
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Thanks for this. Now I’m finally established back home I can get into a nice routine again
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Great, well, we’ll let you know as things evolve.
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This is amazing!
Sure, perhaps we can start with the Majjhima. They seem the most straightforward to adapt to podcast episodes.
Sounds good to me.
Thank you for the reminder. That sounds wonderful. Is there an mp3 with the SC theme music?
If I understood it correctly, you first need a “host” for your podcast, like Podbean. They store your audio files and allow you to create a podcast and episodes. They also give you an RSS feed for your podcast. This RSS feed can be used to distribute your podcast to popular directories like iTunes. I found this overview article about distribution:
I agree. Perhaps start with the Majjhima?
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I’ve been surveying the podcast world a little bit, and I’ve learned some things!
- The ecosystem is built on RSS, so effectively you can DIY.
- It’s pretty easy to set up on something like Jekyll. We use jekyll for our monastery website, it’s handy cause it’s just markdown files on Github.
- That kind of system is good because we can ensure that it’s always ad-free. However
- You still have to host the audio files somewhere.
- Another option is to host on a podcast provider. After a bit of checking, it seems the cool kid on the block is Anchor.fm.
- Unlimited use for free, forever.
- Okay!
- The catch? So far as I can see, they rely on a similar model to Lulu.com for books: they assume most creators will want to make money, then they take a cut. So it should be fine for us.
- You can edit audio in their app, which may be okay, so long as we keep backups.
Thoughts?
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This is a great idea! When I was recording the voiceover for the promo video I wondered if there would be a chance to do more. I wouldn’t have access to that same engineering situation, but I’m happy to do some work in Striped Bath Towel Studios. 
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Thank you, I didn’t know about Jekyll or Anchor. I signed up for Anchor with username SuttaCentral and my own email address. Is there another email address we can use? After changing the email address i can PM the password to the relevant parties.
That’s nice to hear! Seems like we have quite a team! 
@Nadine, if you’d like to record a ‘welcome to the SuttaCentral podcast’ and ‘thank you for listening’ message for at the end, that would be awesome! I might know someone who could remix the SC theme music (for free), but then i’d need an mp3 of the music. Does anyone know where i can find this? It would be cool to integrate the (possibly remixed) theme music and the welcome and thank you messages.
I think it’s best to make two separate recordings for the suttaplex description of each sutta and the sutta itself and edit them together in the podcast episodes. Speaking of podcast episodes, let’s start small with one try-out episode. Is there any discourse you’d like to record first, @Viveka? Afterward, we can post the episode here to get some feedback, and take it from there.
Suggestions are welcome, as always
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I haven’t read the whole thread but you’d be most welcome to use the doodles for this.
If you need a doodle for a specific sutta or topic, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.
I’ve uploaded some doodles in low quality because I’ve had to save bandwidth lately. If you need a better resolution, let me know.
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Well this is excellent!
Cool, well let’s go ahead with that. Can you assign multiple emails to the account, or how does that work?
Shouldn’t be necessary, we can ask the composer to do it!
Sounds perfect. It seems, in fact there might be a series of things;
- opening theme
- generic intro
- Blurb
- sutta
- generic outro
- closing theme.
probably each should be a separate segment?
Thx v much!
We have someone coming over today with a mic, so we might be able to do a first pass later today. It sounds like it’ll be a communal thing, with different readers, so that with be nice!
I asked Blake whether it would in principle be possible to integrate audio with our new Bilara translation engine. He said it shouldn’t be too hard, so that may be cool. The advantage there would be that we can record on a segmented basis, interspersing pali and English optionally, and adding other languages over time, much like the voice app. But this won’t happen any time soon!
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That’s so kind of you! Thank you!
Unfortunately not.
Okay!
I think that would be best.
Absolutely. I didn’t mention it in my first post, but I envisioned different people reading the suttas. Implicitly emphasizing how the suttas are humanity’s shared heritage.
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I’m completely happy to be directed by those with more experience and familiarity on a good sequence of teachings
However, I did have a bit of a look, and a few from those I reviewed could possibly be suitable for a first podcast (though I have no preferences of any kind)
MN: 53 A trainee
MN: 54 Potaliya the wanderer
MN: 126 with Bumija
MN: 141 4 Noble truths
MN 146: Advice from Nandaka to the nuns
MN 147: Advice to Rahula
MN: 7 Similie of the cloth
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Okay, so HOLY HECKERATION YOUSE LOT!!!
You know how, a couple of posts up, I said we could maybe integrate audio recording with Bilara and get segmented audio? Then we can do cool stuff like playback of segments in real voices like on the SCV app?
Well, take a seat. It turns out we don’t need to do that at all. There is, in point of fact, an app for that:
https://www.readbeyond.it/aeneas/
Aeneas , in theory, is able to match up an audio file with the corresponding text. You end up with three things:
- text in line by line
- audio
- a map file that syncs the two.
So it was a bit fiddly but i managed to install aeneas. I created a text file with the line-by-line version of a short sutta. Then I read it. Run the command, and you get the “map” file, which lists exactly where in the audio file the segment starts and stops.
And OMG, it actually works. 
aeneas-test.zip (1.0 MB)
Open map.json in a text editor. See how it has “begin” and “end” fields? Start the audio, and check the begin and end times for each segment: it’s spot on!
So what does this mean?
It means we can take the audio files of any reading of our segmented texts, run them through aeneas, and get the segment times. This can be used to generate distinct audio files for SCV, or any other purpose we think of. It means the real human voices can be as flexible and adaptable as the computer-generated files.
And the best thing, we don’t need the readers to do anything special. Just focus on reading well. I made the audio file in anchor with just the mic on my phone, and it works fine. We can post-process the audio files to sync with the segmented text, like super-duper easy.
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Gosh, it’s so neat to watch this all coming together!
A few points as I turn over the things in the pot:
Again, I was really beaming when I read the qualities you’d picked out as being most important. I think your recommendation makes a lot of sense, but I think there are perhaps some variations and related details that could be paused on:
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Sustainability: you wouldn’t believe how much I’ve always enjoyed watching people coming together to offer what they have to inject something good into the world. Nevertheless, things take work, people have fluctuating commitments and circumstances and so on, and I’d be very hesitant to rule out a good quality, rock solid resource that would more or less guarantee we would be able to keep things rolling even in times of overly stretched human resources. Keeping in mind the ‘start simple’ principle (or re-jigging it a little to ‘keep a simple foundation’)
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There’s more than one way to go about things: I love the idea of ‘guest readers’, and a million +1s to that. But interested in exactly the same qualities you’ve picked up on, one thought I had was to release maybe a sutta a day/week (I’ll come back to schedule) and then as a second simplicity-tier (ie. as and when possible) perhaps a fortnightly / monthly episode with two or three regulars + guest, discussing recently released suttas (perhaps some take a nerdy line, others a more ‘personal relevance’ line, others thematic, others whatever). Not a million miles away from the Second season of Dhammathreads, but maybe with a bit of a different feel. That said, this was just my first thought, and the main point I want to pause on is just it’s good to reflect on a range of the ways of achieve the qualities we’re interested in sharing.
I can definitely see the benefits of a daily release (although it amplifies the sustainability point), but I can also see some other sides too, and I think to make a call, it might be good to have an idea of who we want to include in our reach.
It can sometimes be overwhelming when you subscribe to a podcast and see there are 600 previous episodes. Of course, these are things you can jump into at any time, and so it should be, I’m just saying at least my experience has generally being pleased that I can conceivably go back and start from the beginning (this can also feed into the ‘listener around friends’ point as you get to see how ‘your friends’ have evolved right from the start). Going a little slower maybe particularly relevant at an early point, while we’d be aiming to find an audience, giving more people more time to hop on from the start.
Also, again, maybe it’s just my experience, but I think there’s something in a measured release. With a couple of podcasts I’m particularly fond of, I look forward to the release day. I Enjoy not having the podcast because it supports my enjoyment of its eventual release. And again, it’s something I feel I can keep up with.
That said, once more, I stress how much I see the value of daily releases, know how great things like the Buddhist Breakfast corner (or whatever it’s called) is, and really recognize it can be a great support to have Dhamma delivered daily like this.
Quite so! Quite so! Thank you so much for kicking this all off and inspiring everyone like this.
One team oriented question I have, is with all of this wonderful variety of inputs and voices and such, I have the idea that it might be good to designate a specific producer/co-producers roles. Nothing so major or anything, but just to help unify everything into a cohesive, delivered product.
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