I use my Mac for
Podcasting about the adventures of Arsenal
Q Your first Mac was a Power Macintosh 4400 – what made you pick Apple? Andrew Mangan: I was a radio DJ and it was the mid ’90s. All the house music was going on, and I wanted to make dance music. Back then, there was only one computer you were going to use to make music – a Mac. It cost about 2,500 old Irish pounds! When I’d started DJing, you had to splice tape, so being able to edit audio on a computer was the most amazing thing of all time! Q What have you got now? AM: I’ve just upgraded from an old Mac Pro tower to a 27-inch iMac. I’ve also got a MacBook Air, which I use when I’m travelling, and for the live match blog we do on Arseblog.
Q How did the blog start? AM: It was 2002 and I had a little web-hosting company. We were looking to do cheap, off-the-shelf websites, back when the internet was just beginning to take hold. I decided to set up a website on something that would provide me with regular content to update, so I could practise being a web designer. Arsenal provides news throughout most of the year – matches, interviews, reviews and everything that goes with a football club. And what else are you going to call a blog about Arsenal apart from ‘Arseblog’? Q Has it grown since then? AM: We now get 100,000 unique visitors a day and millions of pageviews a month. We actually continued with a hand-coded blog until about 2006 – we would manually update PHP pages in Dreamweaver, before we moved to Wordpress.
Now for $40 you can get an incredible Wordpress theme designed for you. I can play around with it, change the CSS and that kind of stuff, but I was never going to be the guy who could make it from scratch. Q Tell us about your Arsecast podcast… AM: It started in 2006, and we now get around 1.25 million listens a year. I’ve always tried to ensure the sound quality is as high as it possibly can be, because I get itchy when I hear podcasts where the sound isn’t good.
I’ve got a Shure SM7B microphone, a Behringer USB interface and mixing desk and a Golden Age Project preamp for the mic. Then there’s the iMac, studio monitors and acoustic tiles on the walls.
Q What apps do you use for the podcast? AM: I use Sound Studio. I’ve grown so used to the keyboard shortcuts and everything else that I can’t really use rival apps! I’ve tried other software, but I always go back to Sound Studio.
Guest calls come through Skype, and there’s a plugin called Call Recorder, which automatically kicks in when you start a call. Q What tip would you give to anyone wanting to get started in podcasting? AM: First and foremost, buy a good microphone, because regardless of how good your production is, if your voice sounds like it’s coming out of a tin can you don’t have much authority. You can get good-quality USB mics, so buy a mic, buy a mic stand, buy headphones and start recording.
You don’t need a great deal of software – you could do the whole thing in Sound Studio – record, add tracks, put your music on and save the whole thing as an MP3. Q Your book, ‘Together: The Story of Arsenal’s Unbeaten Season’ has just been published. What app did you use to write this? AM: I like to write in Scrivener, but then I copy and paste into Word if I need to send things to somebody else.