Shortly after the release of Windows 8 last year I upgraded my front-room PC to the new OS. I rarely use that PC for anything more than watching videos, but I was keen to see whether the Media Center application would have any new or improved features in Windows 8 – and besides, I thought, what have I got to lose?

Today, a PC Pro reader asked me whether, with the benefit of experience, I consider that the upgrade was worth it. I have to say it wasn’t.

In short, I find running Windows 8 on a front-room PC a slightly worse experience than Windows 7 was. This is partly because the option to launch Media Center automatically when Windows starts up has been removed. Microsoft, with depressing dogmatism, has decided that it doesn’t want your PC to boot into anything other than the Metro Start screen, so if you want to launch Media Center you’ll now have to do it yourself.

And maddeningly, the green button on your Media Center remote control doesn’t work at the Start screen. You have to use the cursor buttons on the remote to navigate to your Media Center tile (which hopefully you’ve moved somewhere convenient), and launch it from there. Alternatively, you can manually open the desktop and then press the green button. Or, you can do what I’ve done, which is use a third-party program such as ClassicShell to automatically switch to the desktop and run Media Center. Setting it up is a faff that really oughtn’t be necessary, though.

Windows 8 refuses to support the native 720p resolution of my TV

Another irritation is the fact that Windows 8 insists on a minimum vertical resolution of 768 lines. This means it refuses to support the native 720p resolution of my TV (something Windows 7 did without a murmur of complaint). The television is thus forced to use the only other mode it supports, namely 1080i emulation. We end up in the ridiculous situation of 720p media being upscaled to 1080 lines by Windows, only to be resampled back down to 720 lines by the TV. I can’t believe this is conducive to optimum picture quality.

No improvements

Once you’re over these bumps, the experience seems identical to using Windows 7. So far as I can discover, the Windows 8 Media Center application brings neither extra features nor improved performance. It’s true that using Windows 8 does open up a new world of tablet-style media apps, such as the full-screen Netflix and 4OD offerings. That might sound appealing, especially since Netflix UK doesn’t integrate into Media Center in the way the US service does.

Annoyingly, though, these single-tasking front-ends don’t fully support the Media Centre remote. In the Netflix app, for example, the play and pause buttons work as you’d hope, but skipping, searching and accessing your recommendations still requires a keyboard and mouse. If you’re going to put up with that, you might as well stick with Windows 7 and use the web interface.

For these reasons, if upgrading your front-room to Windows 8 with Media Center were free and easy, I’d advise you not to bother. In reality you’re looking at £190 for a Windows 8 Pro upgrade, and then a further £7 for the Windows Media Center Pack, so draw your own conclusions. To be clear, Windows 8 does have advantages over Windows 7 for desktop and tablet users, but nothing that’s relevant to front-room use.

What future?

Frankly I’m disappointed to be telling you this. I’ve happily kept a Windows PC in my front room since the days of XP MCE, and the Media Center approach – an appliance-type front-end running on top of a full Windows back-end – has suited my needs better than anything else I’ve come across. I had hoped that Microsoft would continue to support such a role for Windows.

Instead, it looks as if the company is losing interest in that model, in favour of touch-friendly tablet-style apps – even though those simply don’t do the same job. True, this could be only a temporary shift of focus, to support the Windows 8 app framework while it’s still getting off the ground; but the augurs aren’t encouraging. This week’s revelation of the Xbox One makes clear that Microsoft sees Metro-enabled consoles, rather than full-blown PCs, as the front-room entertainment hubs of the future.

For now, Media Center isn’t dead, and it remains a perfectly powerful and versatile system. The concern is that support for consumer editions of Windows 7 runs out in January 2015 — a date which is galloping towards us at a surprising pace. After that, moving up to Windows 8 might be the only way for us Media Center diehards to keep using the software we love. From the way things are going I wouldn’t like to bet that it’ll make it into the next version of Windows at all.

Almost two years ago, I wrote about how I’d abandoned the stagnating Flickr for the altogether more modern photo-sharing site 500px. Finally, Yahoo has found the time to give Flickr its desperately needed facelift, and thrown in a terabyte of free photo storage to sweeten the deal. Will that be enough to tempt me and other photographers back?

Firstly, let’s deal with the aesthetics. Until last night, Flickr’s design was marooned in 2002: acres of white space, thumbnail images that took the name literally, and clunky drop-down menus. As I wrote in 2011, Yahoo had “allowed Flickr to stagnate to the point where the only reason to keep using the site is the size and talent of its user community”. In fact, it’s staggering how many photographers persevered with Flickr despite the outdated design.

The new look finally gives photos space to breathe. The homepage opens with a stack of large photos from your contacts, which are big enough to appreciate without having to click through to the individual image page. Photos can be starred and commented upon with a single click, revitalising the community aspect of the site.

Individual Photostream pages are again much easier on the eye, with a customisable banner image at the top of the page, and a tessellated grid of your latest photos beneath. As is the current trend, the page has no end – scrolling down merely loads more images at the foot of the page. Stats aficionados may worry that their view count and EXIF data has disappeared, but this is now housed beneath the photo on individual image pages, although you have to click on Additional Info and then again on the Settings to see the full EXIF data.

On the whole, the new Flickr is once again a site worthy of hosting beautiful photography, and finally lifts the impression that the site had been abandoned like an old Ford Escort in a lay-by. However, there is an element of papering over the cracks. Any interaction with Groups, for example, reverts to the old whitewash design and pokey thumbnails. Likewise your Contact List, or the Batch Organiser (although that was the most modern-looking part of old Flickr anyway). Given it’s taken Flickr so long to redesign the site, it’s disappointing it wasn’t done in its entirety.

Photo backup?

And what of that headline-grabbing terabyte of free storage? The new drag-and-drop uploader makes it simple to dump photos or even entire folders onto Flickr, although we found that support for raw files was hit and miss, with some older Canon raw formats labelled as “bad files” that Flickr refused to handle. The old 300MB-per-month upload restriction has gone for free accounts, and you can also upload Full HD video clips of up to three minutes in length. The old Pro accounts have been scrapped, although you can make the site ad-free for $50 a year, or add an additional terabyte of storage for $500 per year, which might appeal to David Bailey or Mario Testino, but few others.

However, that free terabyte of Flickr storage can’t really be considered as an online backup of your photo collection in the same manner as Google Music backs up your MP3 library. I can’t find any way to bulk download a library or set of photos, for instance. If you wanted to recover a collection of hundreds or thousands of photos to your PC, it seems you’d have to download them all individually (please correct me in the comments, if I’m wrong).  Nevertheless, it’s a much more generous allocation than the 20 images per week you’re permitted with 500px.

Overall, Flickr has put itself back in the frame with this 2013 revamp. I still marginally prefer the design of 500px, and the flip-flopping from new to old-style Flickr grates, but the gap between the two sites has now closed considerably.

The first change you’ll notice is that the map now fills your window. The map itself looks subtly different too: there’s a new cleaner design, with a paler palette, more white space (well, light grey) and – if I’m not mistaken – Google’s Roboto font now used for labelling.

A small search bar floats at the top-left, with search results now appearing directly on the map. Instant suggestions appear as you type, with priority given to places you’ve previously searched for and interacted with. A film-strip of photos of the area you’re exploring can be brought up at the bottom of the window.

Searching for directions works in a similar way. By default, a selection of routes is shown on the map, including public transport options, and live traffic information estimates how long it’ll take you to drive from A to B.

One initial point of confusion for me was the removal of the Street View icon. Now, when you click on a  location of interest, a floating information panel appears showing a thumbnail-sized street view preview, along with any other available information. Click the thumbnail and you’re taken into full-blown Street View mode. This hasn’t noticeably changed, except that streets are now labelled and you can click anywhere in the entire lower portion of the window to move forward. That’s more convenient than the old way, but I haven’t yet found a way to move backwards.

Another button that’s vanished is Satellite view. It’s replaced by a button at the bottom-left labelled simply “Earth”, which switches you into Google Earth view. By default this works in the same way as the old Satellite mode, but you can now click the perspective button at the bottom-right to switch into 3D view – not currently useful in the UK, but working for many US cities. You can also zoom much further away from the Earth’s surface, all the way out to a simulated space view, showing the globe as a whole against a backdrop of stars. (Oddly, the Moon is nowhere to be seen).

The new Google Maps looks more pleasant than the old one, and it shows more useful information at a glance. The marriage of Maps and Earth is neat and sensible. Overall, though, the update doesn’t seem to bring anything really revolutionary to the table. That being the case, the interface overhaul does feel a little like change for change’s sake. No doubt I’ll soon become accustomed to the new ways of doing things, but Google should be wary of heading down the Facebook path of periodically tinkering just to keep things fresh. Making an established product unfamiliar gives users a perfect opportunity to try out the competition.

Google is slowly rolling out the new Maps, but you can request an early invite here.

With the phones pictured side by side, the difference between the two handsets is clear to see. The new handset’s display is the same size and resolution at 4.5in and 768 x 1,280, but the chassis has been completely redesigned.

For the most part it’s still constructed from the same sensible and hard-wearing solid polycarbonate as before (in a variety of more muted colours), but with the Lumia 925 it’s framed with a curved, matte-finish aluminium rim, which also acts  as the phone’s antenna.

Physically, it’s a huge improvement over the Lumia 920, and it’s the phone we’d rather have in our pocket, although we’d have appreciated the addition of a microSD slot. Just like the 920, the 925 isn’t expandable, storage-wise, and you can’t replace the battery either.

Most noticeable about the 925 is how much lighter it is when you pick it up; at 139g, it weighs 46g less than the hefty 920. It looks fantastic, too; we only hope that the aluminium surround proves as durable as we’ve found the fully polycarbonate Lumia handsets to be.

The other key difference  is that the 925’s display is an AMOLED unit instead of the IPS screen of old. It looks as bright and saturated as you’d expect of an AMOLED screen, but we’ll only be able to tell if it’s an advance when we get an official review unit; AMOLED displays tend to have lower brightness than IPS screens, making it more difficult to read in bright sunlight, so this may well represent a small downgrade.

For snaps, Nokia claims to have improved the camera technology, in particular the lens, which now consists of six elements instead of five, and the software processing. The resolution remains the same at 8.7 megapixels and it retains the optical image stabilisation technology from the Lumia 920, the f/2 aperture and the Carl Zeiss branding.

The phone also comes preloaded with a raft of new camera features. The Nokia Smart Camera app adds several new features, including Best Shot – where the camera shoots multiple frames that  you can choose between afterwards– and Action Shot, which is similar to the Samsung Galaxy S4’s Drama Shot. It shoots a burst of shots then overlays them on top of each other. Motion blur keeps foreground objects in sharp focus, while blurring the background dramatically.

Change Faces is similar to the S4’s Best Face function, taking multiple shots of a group of people, allowing you to pick the most smiley mugs from a range of facial expressions. And there’s also a tool that will use the burst mode to remove annoying moving objects for you, for times when someone walks across the frame while you’re trying to snap a picture in a crowded space. Again, this is similar to a Samsung Galaxy S4 feature – called Eraser.

Aside from that, it’s typical Lumia fare. The Lumia 925 comes loaded with all the usual Nokia software bells and whistles, from Nokia Music for streamed music mixes to Here Maps, which offers free worldwide navigation with downloadable maps.

And, lastly, the CPU powering the 925 hasn’t changed: a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 and 1GB of RAM taking pride of place. This should prove perfectly sufficient for Windows Phone 8, which felt extremely slick and smooth on the new phone.

So when will the new Nokia Lumia 925 appear? In June, when it will cost around €469; the 32GB model will be available on contract exclusively from Vodafone.

This week, Adobe formally announced that it would cease development of Creative Suite and focus all its efforts on delivering its collection of apps via Creative Cloud.

The outpouring of rage has been considerable. Twitter has been ablaze, with the majority calling for human sacrifices in the Adobe boardroom. Others who are already using Creative Cloud have been wondering what the fuss is about, claiming it’s a great service.

I’m not using Creative Cloud yet, but I’ll eventually be forced to if I want to update Photoshop and the other apps I use as a professional photographer. So what’s the problem?

The idea of having to maintain a subscription just to keep those apps working means I’m beginning to look elsewhere

It’s one of simply not feeling like a valued customer any more. I’ve bought every other version of Photoshop since version 7 in 2002. I had CS2, then CS4 and then relented and bought CS5 as soon as it came out. Mostly for its features, which looked – and were – amazing, but which, ultimately, I’ve seldom used, if at all. With hindsight, the vast majority of what I do now could have been done with version 7.

What really rankles isn’t the money I’ve spent or the lack of advancement, however, but the fact that I’ve been forced into other, less-efficient workflows by software upgrades or apparent killing of functionality without good reason.

My biggest gripe this year was the blocking of CameraRaw 7.3 from use on CS5. CS5 is less that 18 months old and, for me, the upgrade to CameraRaw was an essential feature. On buying a Canon 6D, I found that the output raw file wasn’t compatible with the old CameraRaw software. The block on CameraRaw 7.3 meant that I was now forced to either join the Creative Cloud, buy CS6 or start using the free DNG Converter.

I did the latter, which has added yet another stage to my workflow. This may sound like a petty gripe, but I can take and process up to 2,000 images per week and that extra step takes time, not to mention the fact that most photographers have a healthy dose of OCD, which means that we destroy nothing and keep everything (I have film in my attic from 20 years ago, and even though some of it is fogged, I still can’t bring myself to throw it away). So, I now have to keep the original raw files and converter DNGs, and it’s all just become too much.

Now, I find Adobe’s trying to railroad me into paying a monthly subscription. Even worse, the Creative Cloud is more expensive in this part of the world than others. Our American cousins pay $29.99 (£18.50) for the Creative Cloud subscription; in the UK, we pay £27.99 for exactly the same thing.

I’ve never been deluded that I “owned” Photoshop; it has always been licensed to me. But the idea of having to maintain a subscription just to keep those apps working means I’m beginning to look elsewhere.

There’s so much great software out there with incredibly powerful raw processors. When you wake up and see the great work being done by Acorn 4, GIMP, Pixelmator and many others, you won’t hesitate to step away. I’m already well down the exit path.

Ewen Rankin is a professional photographer and runs the British Tech Network

So how did I come to strap a GoPro camera to a remote control helicopter? (Play video in full screen and select 1080p option for best quality.)

At the recent National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show in Las Vegas, I was walking down an aisle between two large stands, and felt my hair being gently rustled by a powerful draft from above. Looking up, I saw a quad helicopter sitting a few feet above my head. It was perfectly stable, and under the control of someone off in the distance. It gently, and oh so accurately moved down the hallway, turned right and came to a landing.

Now remote control helicopters are not new. And ones that talk to your iPhone or iPad aren’t new either. Indeed, I bought the AR.Drone when it first shipped. It gave me two live camera feeds back to my iPad, and the facility to record the video. The only problem was that it was rubbish.

John and I are going to visit on a sunny day, and fly the Phantom around the golf course

The device was a pain in the neck to operate, relying on subtle movements of on-screen touch controls. The video was even worse quality. And it was almost completely unstable if you tried to use it outdoors with even a moderate breeze.  I tried a few times, and then gave up. It has been sitting in the cupboard ever since.

So, I was intrigued by this serenely stable newcomer. Of course, flying indoors is a lot easier than outdoors. But after I’d trundled over to the DJI Innovations stand, I found people who really understood the issues. They make proper flight-control systems for proper grown-up devices. Comparison with the AR.Drone could not be more stark.

The model in question, the Phantom, isn’t cheap at around £500, but this gives you everything you need: GPS satellite control, barometers for measuring height, compasses for direction and so forth. It is a real techno-feast.

Better still, it has a mount underneath where I could mount the new GoPro 3 Black Edition camera. The combination was too tempting to resist.

Getting it unpacked and working wasn’t hard, but the documentation is a mess. Once I had everything sorted, it was time for its first flight. I took it outside to the garden, and promptly managed to fly it into the side of the house. Clearly someone with experience was needed. I dropped next door to the pub and found John, our local aviator expert who worked for RAF and can fly seriously big things.

He grabbed the controls and took the Phantom for a spin. Up and down, round and about. There was no stopping him. Despite the significant cross-winds and turbulence, including heat rising from the roof of the house, it was stable, easy to pilot and a joy to watch. I admit he knows what he’s doing, and I need a little more practice, but the results are worth it, as you can see from the video at the top of this blog.

The camera is not at its highest resolution, so picture quality, although already quite stunning, will be better when I switch the GoPro to the highest settings.

Total cost to play with the Phantom and GoPro 3 Black is verging on a grand, so this is a serious boy’s toy. But the results speak for themselves, and it’s more than ready for billable work.

Another pub friend, George, is taking over the management of a golf club. John and I are going to visit on a sunny day, and fly the Phantom around the golf course. It will make brilliant video, and be a great value-add for the club. Chocks away!

The Acer Iconia A1 is the latest of a flurry of compact budget tablets to have hit the market recently. It was launched alongside the exotic Aspire R7 and Aspire P3 at the company’s annual Global Press Conference in New York.

It’s a 7.9in tablet, runs a plain looking version of Android Jelly Bean 4.2, and is clearly aimed at being a low-cost rival to the iPad mini. Both the screen size and resolution (1,024 x 768) are identical to Apple’s smaller tablet, and Acer boasts it can be held one-handed too.

However, that’s where the physical similarities end. The Iconia A1 is a much chunkier, thicker device, and 100g heavier at 410g. It’s finished in bright white plastic rather than aluminium, and the screen surround is broader, too. It’s by no means ugly, but neither is it a tablet for design snobs.

Indeed, it’s all about the price with the Iconia A1. The 8GB Wi-Fi version will go for £150 when it hits the shops at the end of May, and 3G models will start at an equally reasonable £210.

And there are plenty of positives, aside from the low cost. Powered by a 1.2GHz quad-core ARM-based Mediatek processor, the Iconia A1 scored 1,571ms in the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, which is perfectly acceptable – it’s as fast in this test as the  iPad mini.

In use, the A1 felt spry and slick, and it’s very practical. It has an HDMI output and a microSD slot for adding up to 32GB of storage, and the tablet also has a pair of cameras. On the rear, a 5-megapixel snapper lets you use the A1 as a giant camera, while the 0.3-megapixel front camera will get you videoconferencing.

And although the screen lacks sharpness (the Nexus 7’s smaller, 7in screen has a higher pixel density) it did appear reasonably bright and colourful in the time we had with it. We weren’t able to measure it, but under bright white lighting it remained readable and viewing angles were excellent. Not bad for a tablet this cheap.

The A1 might not be the slickest looking tablet around, then, but what it lacks in panache it more than makes up for in utility. We can’t wait to get our hands on one for a more thorough test.

The Acer Aspire P3, launched at a glitzy New York press event in New York, wants desperately to be a rival to the Microsoft Surface. At first glance it looks like it could be: it has a keyboard cover, just like the Surface, and that cover can be folded over so you can use it  as a tablet or prop it up at an angle for use in laptop mode.

On the evidence of our first experiences with it, however, it’s a long way from matching the Microsoft tablet’s level of industrial design.

The keyboard cover, for one, is simply a snap-on case. It’s quite an elegant on, we’ll give it that, but it can’t match the simplicity or slimness of the Surface’s keyboard covers, which lock firmly, yet magnetically to the bottom edge of the tablet and make use of the Surface’s built in kickstand to provide support.

The design of the tablet itself is pleasant enough to look at, with its matte-silver edges and white plastic strip on the rear. It’s well-built, too, and met our efforts to twist it back and forth with stern resistance. But it’s angular, and looks distinctly frumpy next to the Surface’s angled edges and “Vapour MG” casing.

It’s also quite a hefty beast with the case snapped onto the rear, and when propped up in laptop mode, there’s no way of adjusting the angle of the tablet.

Having said all that, there are a lot of things to like about the Aspire P3. Our initial feeling is that the Scrabble-tile keyboard is a success. There isn’t much travel to the keys, but they’re well spread out, and give a decent amount of positive feedback. That leads us to think it’ll be a productive working companion.

The IPS display, although not Full HD, is perfectly crisp at 1,600 x 900. In our time with it, the touchscreen felt responsive, and the screen looked vibrant and rich in colour. It’s difficult to tell just how good the display is, under press event, so we’ll reserve judgement until we’re able to test it more thoroughly in our Labs. However, there didn’t appear to be any fundamental problems, and viewing angles were excellent.

Look around the edges, and you’ll also find plenty of connectivity options, with a USB 3 socket and a micro-HDMI, to go alongside a 3.5mm audio input/output and the power socket. Note, though, that there’s no sign of  either a full-sized SD card slot nor one for microSD cards.

Despite the slightly angular design, though, we do like the feel of the whole ensemble, especially as it runs full Windows 8, and the base model comes in at £525, a price that includes a copy of Microsoft Office. But the key to the success of the P3 is likely to be battery life. It doesn’t sport an energy efficient Intel Clover Trail processor, like the Acer W510, but a more power hungry, full-fat Core i3 or i5, depending on the model. If it meets Acer’s quoted run-time of six to eight hours, however, it looks promising.

We’ve seen some wacky hybrids in recent months, but the recently launched Acer Aspire R7 has gone further out on a limb than most. Its hinge, dubbed the “Ezel”, resembles the central support strut of an all-in-one PC more than a laptop hinge, and it delivers a surprising amount of flexibility.

With the Aspire R7 fully closed, the strut is flush with the lid, with the hinge itself attached to the centre rear of the display. It looks odd, but this arrangement allows the screen to tilt back and forth, lift up above the keyboard so it’s floating like a desktop PC monitor, spin vertically to face away from you or fold flat, facing up.

It can, of course, be used as a standard laptop, and positioning the display “normally” like this reveals the Acer Aspire R7’s other party trick: its large, glass touchpad is positioned above the keyboard instead of below it.

In some ways this makes sense. It pushes the keyboard towards the front edge of the chassis, leaving room for the display to rest its chin just above, a position that makes reaching over to swipe, pinch and tap the screen that bit more comfortable.

It also gives you the luxury of  a large, usable touchpad for those occasions when more precision is needed – when you’re using video editing or high-end photo processing software, for instance.

On the other hand, we have concerns about the long-term practicality of this arrangement. While we were using it on the stand at Acer’s big launch event in New York, we found it difficult to mouse about without resting a palm on the keyboard, inadvertently pressing keys.

The position of the keyboard at the very front of the chassis also means there’s nowhere to rest your wrists while typing. On a hybrid, such as the Sony VAIO Duo 11, this isn’t a massive problem because the keyboard is so thin. On the Aspire R7, however, the front lip of the keyboard rises a centimetre or so above the desk, which makes typing feel distinctly odd.

Also, although this may not be immediately obvious from the photographs, the R7 is a very big machine. The Full HD IPS screen measures 15.6in from corner to corner, and the mechanics of that hinge means it’s a weighty piece of kit, too. Suffice it to say, it isn’t a laptop you’ll be wanting to lug around much and, perhaps in keeping with its all-in-one PC look, it’ll likely stay tethered to a desk.

That screen though, does look good: it’s as crisp and colourful as they come, and a few dabs and swipes confirm the touchscreen works well. Only the most effortless of flicks is required to move the Start screen around, and scroll, pan and zoom on web pages.

The R7’s not inconsiderable size also means there’s room for a full range of ports and sockets scattered around its edges, with twin USB 3 sockets and a full-size HDMI output on the left, and another USB 3 port plus an SD card slot on the right side. From a performance perspective, it ought to be on the money too, with a Core i5 processor, up to 12GB of RAM, and the choice of either a 1TB hard disk or up to 256GB of SSD catering for storage.

The Acer Aspire R7 is certainly a striking machine. Whether it’s a practical one, and worth the rather high £900 asking price, remains to be seen. We’ll bring you a full review once we’ve had the opportunity to fully test one and, more importantly, tried to live with it for a while.

A few people have asked me, over the years, about the processes and equipment we use to record and produce our podcast. If you’re curious, here’s how it happens.

Every Wednesday, we go into the recording studio at around noon. Prior to this, we’ll have agreed on the news stories we plan to discuss, and who’s going to introduce which topic; but within this basic framework the conversation is allowed to flow quite freely.

The discussion is recorded “as live” using four Shure SM58 microphones connected to an M-Audio Fast Track Ultra interface. I record and edit in PreSonus Studio One: arguably it’s overkill for this job, but it’s the DAW I use at home, so using it here as well makes life easy for me.

Each microphone track has a noise gate plugin applied, to minimise background noise and crosstalk. To avoid clipping off the very starts of words, I give the gate a half-second lookahead. (This isn’t actually something the Studio One Gate plugin supports natively, so I achieve it by making a second copy of each track, applying a -500ms time offset and using this as a sidechain input for the gate.)

I use a limiter on the whole mix just to ensure the signal doesn’t clip if (for example) two people laugh loudly at once. Hey, it happens. We don’t use any other compression or normalising plugins, though: later on we’ll simply run the whole mix through the excellent Levelator tool, which does a very satisfactory job of automatically evening out everyone’s volume levels.

We don’t do a great deal of editing either: if somebody sneezes or stumbles over a phrase, I might edit that out, because it’s just distracting. But for the most part what goes up is the full conversation, complete with misspoken words and bizarre tangents. The one place we do normally make an edit is at the start of the Hot Hardware section, as it can often take a few moments for the hardware in question to be brought out – plus, of course, people sometimes people need a minute to swap seats, if the person presenting the hardware hasn’t been involved in the news discussion.

Exporting and publishing the episode

We export the mix as a WAV file. Studio One does support exporting directly in MP3 format, but it only supports CBR encoding, and only at a limited selection of bitrates, which doesn’t really suit our needs. Exporting as a WAV also allows us to run the file through Levelator, as mentioned above.

Once Levelator has worked its volume-normalising magic, we use the free LAME encoder to encode the podcast as an MP3: after much experimentation we’ve determined that VBR encoding at quality level 6 gives an appropriate balance of audio quality and file size. We tag the resultant MP3 file using the free MP3Tag utility: the episode description goes in the “Unsynced Lyrics” field, for some Apple-related reason I’ve never really understood.

Finally, we upload the finished product to our FTP server. Now we simply have to alert iTunes to the existence of the new episode, which is done by updating the RSS feed for our podcast. We do this by adding a post to a dedicated WordPress blog; the free Blubrry PowerPress plugin ensures the RSS data includes all the tags iTunes expects.

Technology being what it is, I generally like to open up iTunes and make sure I can really see and download the episode before exhaling. Assuming everything works, I then shout across to Barry or Nicole to let them know that the podcast is up, and that it’s time for them to update the podcast page on the PC Pro website.