There's plenty to love about this software. You can automate more than 150 parameters, use customizable shortcut keys, it has a great interface with lots of graphical metering, it allows you to easily create A/B comparisons, allows the use of undo and history to get to and from your favorite tweaks and you get all of it in 64-bit glory that mimics the sound of tube-modeled devices.

The first rule of good cable buying is simple. Don't go cheap. Good cables cost money. Spend it. You don't always have to buy the most expensive cable at the music store, but never buy the cheapest either.

During the last few months, I've had the opportunity to record two titles for the folks at Lynda.com. It was a great experience for me, and it opened my eyes to a world I had known little about. I knew Lynda, of course, from the heyday of web graphics. She was, and still is, the expert when it comes to publishing rich media on the web. But I had no idea about the depth and breath of her online training business.

Satellite radio may well fail. But it won't have anything to do with podcasting. More likely, the very high costs of delivery and customer acquisition in the satellite radio business will be the killer, not podcasting.

I recently set up a ProTools studio. The Digidesign documentation is very clear that ProTools sessions should not be saved to the same disk that hosts the ProTools application. So I used this opportunity to go out and buy some new external Firewire 800/400 hard disk drives. I tested the One Touch Maxtor One Touch III Turbo Edition 1TB drives, the standard LaCie Big Disk Extreme 500 GB drives and the G-Technology 250 GB G-Drive.

If you've been having trouble with an audio interface that you plugged into your new Mac Intel laptop, switch USB ports. That may solve your problem.

They say that there are ten reasons to buy a new piece of recording gear and the first nine are lust. Once in a while a piece of gear comes along that proves that point. I am talking about a piece of gear that will turn your head until it's nearly clean off your neck - "Exorcist" style. The Sony PCM-D1 is that piece of gear. In just one week, I've grown to realize that if any piece of remote recording equipment is worth $1900, this is it.

Overall, I found Musicbed DV to be a great tool for building podcast music. It could be used for any type of media production. And if you want to stand out in a crowded field of podcasters, this is probably a pretty good way to do it. On a scale of one to ten, I'd rate Musicbed DV a solid eight. Once the UB version ships and new music becomes available, I'll up that to a nine out of ten.

I get lots of email from new podcasters. And without question, one of the main complaints I hear relates to noise. People using small digital field recorders to record their podcasts seem to have particular problems with noise. In most cases, these are simple environmental noise problems like unbalanced AC power sources, air conditioners, fans, fluorescent lights and other environmental factors can ruin your recordings. The fix is usually simple.

There are lots of opinions about the right kind of mic for podcasting. In this post I want to cover some of the secondary factors that should go into selecting a mic.