The Dawn of a New Era!

Okay, get ready. Are you ready? This is a big moment for me. Remember how I mentioned last week that I was thinking about starting my own podcast? Well, I bought a microphone for my computer the very next day, and I only got as far as Sunday before I could no longer resist the itch to give it a dry run. Well, here's the result, sooner than I expected ... I now quasi-proudly present:

Thnairg's Podcast: Episode 1!!!

You can download it right here, right now! You'll notice that it's at a lower bitrate than usual -- 64Kbps ... not crystal-clear, but still clear enough that the songs sound just fine. And they're not full songs, but I do give you enough of them to get a feel for the song (and maybe you'll be intrigued enough to buy the track, or maybe even the whole album). Anyway, both the lower bitrate and the partial songs I chose to do primarily in the interest of making the finished file as small to download as possible, for those few of us who aren't fortunate enough to have a broadband internet connection just yet. The good news is that this file is nearly 18 minutes long, but is a nice tidy 8 megabytes.

But anyway, I really hope you enjoy this. It's not perfect -- a little distortion in the speaking parts which I hope will remedy itself next time with a slightly more careful positioning of the microphone. I also sound a little "stiff" in this podcast, but I think I'll "loosen up" over the subsequent installments. I think I'll just be doing this every other week for now -- better to start out slow and pick up the pace if I see fit, rather than to go crazy at first and use up too much material too fast. But I sure had a lot of fun putting this one together, so I have a feeling Thnairg's Podcast may be here to stay. So ... go ahead and listen, and feel free to tell me what you think!

By the way, just in case you missed any of the links to download the file, here's another one.