The Ruk.ca Podcast: Whatever Happened to the Cool Dog Deli?

Today marks the first in an experimental series of podcasts here on the blog. I’m trying out the medium: taking the gear out for a ride and exploring different ways of talking about things that I’m interested in. Putting this piece together brought back a lot of memories about Nouspeak, a weekly spoken word programme on Trent Radio that I was one of the production team for; I enjoyed that experience, and I had a good time editing this piece together.

Today’s podcast: Cindy Burton, owner of the recently-closed Cool Dog Deli in Charlottetown, talks about the ideas behind the deli, the challenges she ran into running it, and how it came to close.

I have long been a fan of the CITY-TV programme The Originals, especially its “interviewless” format. I’d experimented with the format in radio projects before, and decided to return to it for this piece.

Here’s the tech used to assemble today’s podcast:

• My “in studio” voiceovers were recorded into Sound Studio using the Omnidirectional Tie Clip Microphone from Radio Shack connected to my iMac using a Griffin iMic (see this technical note).
• I recorded the telephone interview with Cindy Burton using the Monitor command in our Asterisk telephone system. The result is two WAV-format files, one for each side of the telephone conversation.
• I broke Cindy’s part of the interview up into individual clips using Audacity; I exported each of the eleven clips as a 16-bit, 44 Khz AIFF file.
• I used Apple’s GarageBand to edit everything together: I imported my intros and Cindy’s clips, added a soundtrack, and exported into iTunes.
• I then exported as a 24kbps mono MP3 file from iTunes (which compressed the file from 108MB down to a more reasonable 2MB!).

Thanks to Cindy for agreeing to talk about her experiences; you can email her at cindy@cooldogs.ca or visit her website at bigdogsolutions.ca.