Yes, it is true! At long last, the long-overdue Episode Four is here. According to certain other episode-numbered series, this should be the episode that grabs everyone’s attention and establishes me as a Force to be reckoned with . . . but it will be the next episode that proves to be my best ever, one which I’ll never be able to top.

I guess I should figure out a way to get a hold of Lawrence Kasdan, huh?

This episode is another audio diary one, this time centered around an audition I had this morning for a new Nickelodeon animated series. It was an awesome audition, thanks entirely to the totally cool people who I read for, who made me feel welcome, and enthusiastically worked with me to bring my version of this character to life. (I know some of you read my blog, so thank you for doing that. I had an awesome time today. You guys rock.)

The audio diary is 33 minutes long, so I didn’t do Q&A in this show, but it will be back in the next show. In fact, I’ll devote most of the next show to Q&A, since many of you have written in that you like that, and it’s pretty damn easy for me to answer questions about myself.

Show Notes:

• The intro music is "Gone for Good" by The Shins, from their album Chutes Too Narrow. In Garden State, Natalie Portman says that The Shins will change your life, and plays New Slang to back up this bold statement. I think New Slang is a great song, but it doesn’t have the emotional resonance for me that Gone for Good does. Why? Listen to the podcast to find out. For those of you scoring at home, the updated board should read Garden State: 0 Wil: 1
• The link to save Teen Titans is: http://www.titanstower.com/source/animated/saveseason6.html
• The song you heard from Nada Surf is Neither Heaven Nor Space, and it’s off their nearly-perfect album Let Go.
• There’s a picture from inside Nickelodeon, which I snapped with my super-stealth cameraphone, in my Buzznet blog. I meant to mention this months ago, but Buzznet has this thing where you can make posters, calendars, books, or postcards from your Buzznet images. I have a book filled with images taken up until last summer, and it’s really cool.
• Comments can be sent to podcast at wil wheaton dot net, questions can be sent to ask at wil wheaton dot net. Please use a descriptive subject line.
• Radio Free Burrito is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

The entire show is 47 minutes long (ouch. sorry about that.) and weighs in at 18.8MB. Enjoy!

Download radio_free_burrito_episode_four.mp3

Update: WWdN:iX reader Brian has created the following .torrent low-fi mirrors:

High (orig):
http://athena.unearthed.org/torrents/radio_free_burrito_episode_four.mp3.torrent

Low (mono, VBR bit rate range 8-24, 8.1 megs):
http://athena.unearthed.org/torrents/radio_free_burrito_episode_four-low.mp3.torrent

Mirror for the Low..
http://www.badmonkies.com/rfb/radio_free_burrito_episode_one-low.mp3

Thanks, Brian!

This episode of The Burrito is the longest, yet, weighing in at 37 minutes. It was so long, in fact, that I had to break it into two parts in garage band, and use audacity to join them together. However, it’s relatively small; just 15.2MB. I listened to it in headphones and through my Powerbook’s speakers, and it sounds fine to me, but let me know if you think it sucks. You can also let me know if you like it, of course.

I’m not very happy with this episode, as I fell into one of my chief complaints about podcasts in general: it rapidly devolves into just some guy talking about bullshit. I mostly did the show so I could stay on the weekly schedule, and I really just wanted to share this song that I made in garageband, because I think it’s kind of cool.

I’m always interested in feedback which can be sent to podcast at wil wheaton dot net. The feedback some listeners have chosen to send in has been extremely useful, whether it’s praise or constructive criticism, so thank you all for that. Questions for next week’s show, which will focus exclusively on family and holiday themes, can be sent to ask at wil wheaton dot net.

Anyway, If you have 37 minutes to spend listening to me blather on about bullshit, please enjoy: Download radio_free_burrito_episode_three.mp3
<– the second fixed version. The first one had huge gaps where I addicentally erased a track, while the second one had an additional track layered over the beginning that I didn’t delete when I replaced the first deleted track, for fuck’s sake. But this should be the "good" version now, and if you have one of the earlier versions, hermetically seal it and start planning for your retirement.

Show Notes:

• Yes, this should be called Episode Two. I am an idiot.
• Continuing the "I’m an idiot" meme, I inadvertently deleted an entire track, which took some of the bumpers with it. This results in about 20 seconds of silence around the 5 minute mark. I will repair this, and replace the current file later tonight. Sorry about that. Okay, thanks to some audacity-fu and a bit of garageband voodoo, I fixed it. Nothing to hear here. Move along.
• The intro music comes from Squirrel Nut Zippers’ 1996 gold album, Hot. The song is titled "Hell."
• My tune is called "Lakeside Shadow." I made it in Garageband.
• Comments can be sent to podcast at wil wheaton dot net, questions can be sent to ask at wil wheaton dot net. Please use a descriptive subject line.
• Radio Free Burrito is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
• Thanks for listening, and have a great weekend!

Mirrors, provided by WWdN reader Brian M:

Low: 6.46 megs, vbr 24kb max, mono
http://badmonkies.com/rfb/radio_free_burrito_episode_three-low.mp3

High torrent:
http://athena.unearthed.org/torrents/radio_free_burrito_episode_three.mp3.torrent

(Thank you, Brian!)

I can’t believe I already did another podcast, but I had ideas, and they needed to come out of my brains, so here we are.

I’m going to tell you the complete truth: This isn’t the greatest thing ever, but I really had fun putting this show together, and I think I’m officially hooked on doing these shows. As long as it doesn’t completely take over my life, I’ll do everything I can to get a new episode up every week. Around episode four or five, when I’ve climbed a little higher up the learning curve, I’ll even see if I can get this into iTunes so subscribing is easier.

Okay. How about some show notes? That’s kind of cool, isn’t it?

Notes for Episode One:

• Feedback and reflections on Episode Zero
• Bumpers!
• An audio diary, featuring an audition, some random thoughts around town, a bit of really horrible singing, and an interview about Stand By Me.
• Very brief Q&A.

This week’s show is much, much smaller than episode zero, weighing in at a much friendlier 13.3 MB, but still just over 30 minutes. I’m still not ready for primetime, but I feel much more comfortable than I did last week, and had a great time putting this together.

Questions can be sent to ask at wil wheaton dot net and comments can be sent to podcast at wil wheaton dot net.

Also, until I figure out a more appropriate license, RFB will be released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Okay? Get to listening!

Download radio_free_burrito_episode_one.mp3

Afterthoughts:

Several listeners have asked for a list of the music in this show:

• Don’t Stop Believin’ by Journey
• Jesus of Suburbia by Green Day
• Title and Registration The New Year by Death Cab for Cutie (that’s what I get for doing this list from memory.)
• Radio Cure by Wilco
• Kamera by Wilco
• Tear Stained Eye, by Son Volt

. . . and have a mirror, courtesy of WWdN:iX reader Alan.

. . . and another mirror courtesy of Craig.

. . . Brian did a ton of Burrito-Fu, and sent in a low-fi version, and .torrents for hi and lo fi:

High (orig):
http://athena.unearthed.org/torrents/radio_free_burrito_episode_one.mp3.torrent

Low (mono, VBR bit rate range 8-24, 5.7 megs):
http://athena.unearthed.org/torrents/radio_free_burrito_episode_one-low.mp3.torrent

Mirror for the Low..
http://www.badmonkies.com/rfb/radio_free_burrito_episode_one-low.mp3

Wow! Thanks, guys!

Well, here it is! It’s alive!

As I wrote earlier today, "It will either be really cool, or the stupidest fucking thing in history, and I’ll proceed accordingly."
My initial feeling is that it falls somewhere in the middle: it’s
longer than I wanted, and it’s a little unfocused, but I’m willing to
allow myself the freedom to make as many mistakes as it takes to either
come up with something cool, or accept that I just don’t have what it
takes to make a podcast.

Observations on getting this thing from my brains to your ears: I
thought the recording would be very hard, but it was actually super
easy. I’ve tried in Audacity several times before, and it never wants
to work, so today I just followed the instructions from Apple for creating podcasts in Garageband,
and it was simple and easy. But holy shit the converting and the
uploading was so hard, I felt like I had no thumbs and an IQ of 24. I’m
sorry to report that this episode is only available in the stupid,
proprietary, Apple AAC format, but that’s the only format I could get
to upload (the .aiff file was over 300MB, and TypePad just wouldn’t let
me upload it. That was really annoying.)

So now I need to know what you, the audience, think. What would you
like more of? Less of? Is it too long? Is it too narrowly focused, or
not broad enough? Most importantly: when it was over, did you feel like
I earned your 30 minutes, or did you feel like you wasted your time?

Heh. The last time I felt this nervous about releasing something into the wild, it was the first version of Dancing Barefoot. This is both cool and scary.

Afterthought: I just realized that I stupidly recorded this thing in super-ultra-hyper-mega-stereo, when nifty-old-mono would have been just fine. The result is a ridiculously large file (71.8 MB) which I can only leave up for a few hours before I blow through all my bandwidth. I’ll see if I can convert the file I have to mono, and if not, look for Episode .05 to hit the airwaves in the next 48 hours. Yeah, I am really a moran. iTunes won’t let me convert it to mp3, and Audacity won’t even open it. So this file will stay up until about 8:00 PM Pacific time, when I’ll have to take it down. If someone wants to mirror the file, go nuts. Gods, I am sofa king stupid. I blame my nervousness for this ultrarookie error. When you mock, please mock me gently.

AfterthoughtAfterthought: I owe Shane Nickerson a huge debt of gratitude, because he pointed out to me my stupid mistake. I’ll reveal my shame a bit later on. In the meantime, here is a .mp3 file, which is much smaller: "only" 27.3MB:

Download radio_free_burrito_episode_zero.mp3

Oh boy! Several Mirrors!

Mirror one, from WWdN:iX reader buford: radio_free_burrito_episode_zero.mp3

Mirror two, from my friend Kathleen: radio_free_burrito_episode_zero.mp3

Mirror three, from WWdN:iX reader  UglyRedHonda: Unauthorized low-bandwidth-friendly re-encoding

And the coolest of them all . . . a .torrent. Man, do I feel like I’ve arrived now! Thanks, Brian! 🙂

I am a big fan of the Family Guy Freakin’ Podcast. I love hearing the people who create the show talk about how they do it, and it’s especially awesome to hear how much they obviously like each other, and the work they do.

Near the end of the podcast, they always answer some listener e-mail (I sent one last week; I don’t know if they answered it or not and they totally answered it on the podcast for Fat Guy Strangler, and they didn’t even make fun of me. Freakin’ Sweet!) and it’s always funny and informative.

So I thought, "Hey, I can be funny and informative, and I want to do a podcast . . ."

So let’s give this a try: Send me a question or comment, and I’ll respond in a podcast. It’ll be sort of like Ask Wil Wheaton Anything but you listen to it and it’s not at Slashdot. It will either be really cool, or the stupidest fucking thing in history, and I’ll proceed accordingly.

Questions or comments can be sent to ask at wil wheaton dot net. When I have enough questions to fill about seven minutes of podcasting, I’ll produce and publish it.

UPDATE: Wow. A bunch of questions have flooded in today, and I already threw away a podcast that was over 40 minutes long where I tried to answer them all. I mean, I think I’m a swell guy and all, but forty minutes of me rambling on is about 32 minutes too much.

So I pulled out a few that I think I can give interesting answers to, and I’m about to start recording them. I should have Radio Free Burrito Episode Zero up in a few hours. Huge thanks to everyone who has sent in questions. 🙂