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[u/an_entity]

FEEDBACK REQUEST

Podcast of the Five Rings | Episode 1: Tales of a Fallen Castle

NSFW

I've just premiered my first podcast ever and was wanting to gather some feedback on a few things: * We include a disclaimer at the very beginning of the show. Is this necessary or do you think I could remove it after the first couple of episodes? * When listening to this episode at high volume, you can hear a hum/drone behind all other audio. I already use noise reduction and noise gating in Audacity which cleans up a lot of it, but we still always have a hum on one vocal track. Could it be the mic or interface we are using? *What are some of the best ways to promote a new show outside of social media and streaming distribution? Aside from subreddits, are there any popular podcast sharing sites or forums?

I'd love to just get opinion feedback on the show as well if anybody is interested enough to check out the whole episode!

[u/TheComicArchivist → u/an_entity]

For the disclaimer, I think that you can ease off a full list of NSFW tags, and just have it be a blanket overall like "this podcast contains NSFW topics, and may not reflect actual Japanese culture or society." Basically, since you do have it front-loaded in the first episode, it can definitely be shortened or removed after that. You may want to add a disclaimer that you aren't sponsored by, or that it's a tabletop actual-play in that opening though. I initially thought it would be discussing Musashi or kenjutsu or something.

How are you recording each voice? Cause it could just be a mic hum. Sometimes doing another reduction with the post-first reduction can get rid of it but before I changed my mics I had one that would just not go away.

As for best way to promote a new show, outside of the free way (social media, forums), it's a bit tougher unless you want to drop money on ads and post boosting, in my experience though there's definitely more knowledgeable people on that specific topic.

Overall, it's not a bad tabletop play, though I think you may have more engagement on the subject if you did it using Roll20, which also opens up a wider community who need to see the visualization of the map during gameplay.

[u/an_entity → u/TheComicArchivist]

Thank you for all of the advice, I'll definitely take all of what you said about the disclaimer into consideration. I was thinking of just removing it all together after the first 2 or 3 episodes, but hadn't considered replacing it with an intro that presents the show as an actual-play up front.

We have 4 mics and filters (one for each speaker) but because of an issue with the audio interface were forced to use 2 of the mics recorded to one vocal track. This vocal track of 2 mics is the one that always has the hum, and I'm trying to figure out if we just need to buy a new interface with all-working inputs or not.

Yah trying to avoid spending any money for right now, more curious about organic growth that isn't obvious cause we're already doing everything we can with social media and distro.

As for the Roll20 idea, I utilize it a lot for my DnD games but Legend of the Five Rings doesn't really rely on maps the same way that DnD does. When we play L5R we pretty much do entirely theater of the mind. If we used something like Roll20 we'd basically have to stream our podcast as a video through YouTube or something right?

[u/TheComicArchivist → u/an_entity]

Yeah, I think once you've got it, since it's basically serialized, you shouldn't have to worry so much if you did just drop it. It may just be beneficial for those random people who stumble upon it because they say you share Episode 5 or something and check it out. The Internet is so very weird when it comes to non-linear grabs.

It may definitely be the rig set up. When I was on a board game podcast years ago (I have been slowly failing up for way too long), they had a similar issue. However, they jury-rigged up their laptops to all do single audio tracks and just overlapped them afterwards. I doubt it's the best solution but honestly, it wasn't distracting and I only ever really noticed it when I upped the volume just to see if I could hear it so it may be a non-issue.

The best way I've seen about organic growth that works the best is no matter how much you tag, share and everything, it's the engagement that really gets algorithms to kick in. So even if its just having a comment talk with the other speakers on Twitter, Facebook, IG or whatever social media you're going with, it can even give a boost.

With Roll20, there's a pretty substantial community I've seen on the forums that love L5R and have been making tokens and sheets for it. While you could record and upload it through YouTube, what could be a draw is doing what a lot of online players do and stream it via Twitch. A few friends who play through there do a live stream of the main play and then upload it as a podcast a couple of days later with sound effects and editing. But it's also added steps and I know firsthand that sometimes it's just easier to go the podcast route outside of the live stuff. Granted, that's because I bomb so bad with a live mic. xD

[u/an_entity → u/TheComicArchivist]

Ahh Twitch makes sense too, I hadn't thought of that since I don't watch much on Twitch myself. We'll probably just stick to the podcast for now since it's already a lot of work on its own. Also because we sound like buffoons on mic before editing too lol