Ask Pudge

Ask Pudge is the only radio show where you can Ask Pudge. All questions are welcome, most questions are answered.

To get the podcast feed and download the latest episodes as they are posted, use the feed icon , or subscribe through iTunes Music Store by clicking on the iTunes podcast icon .

Ask Pudge what? Anything, although he reserves the right to not answer questions for personal or contractual reasons. Or just because he doesn't want to.

One question at a time. Don't flood me with questions. If I answer your question, send in another one. Give everyone else a chance!

Send your questions to Pudge via email to <ask> at <pudge.net>, either a. as text, or as an audio file 1MB or smaller, or as a link an audio file containing your question, so he can download it. Terrible-sounding audio will not be used. Pudge does not take requests for how to render your voice if you send a text question; if you want to control how you sound, provide your own audio file.

When each completed episode is posted, it will be announced on his use Perl; journal and Slashdot journal, and you can also post your questions for the next episode as comments to those journal entries.

Pudge sometimes asks questions. He'll include the best answers in later episodes. Same rules and procedures apply for answers as for questions: one answer per person, and send it via email as text, small attachment, or link.

To listen to an episode, click on the episode below to download it to your computer. To susbscribe to the podcast feed, use the feed icon at the bottom of the page, or subscribe through iTunes Music Store by clicking on the iTunes podcast icon. You can also look at the actual text of the questions where available.

Because Pudge is lazy, he'd prefer to not stitch the radio show together one question at a time. So he's put together a process to be able to generate the show in one shot.

The questions are synthesized beforehand using a Perl program. Mac::Speech generates the questions, rendering them with voices from Cepstral, and recording them directly to audio files.

Each file is imported into a sampler instrument in Logic, and mapped to a MIDI note. When comes time to ask a question, Pudge presses a key on his MIDI keyboard, which saves the question to one track, while he records in his microphone onto another track.

After finishing the episode, Pudge bounces it from Logic to iTunes, where he then converts it to MP3, and then runs another Perl program, that fills out the metadata in the file (title, artist, artwork, etc.), adds it to the HTML and RSS files, and then uploads it all to the web site. Then the program makes new journal entries on Slashdot and use Perl;.