Thanks! I don’t have an answer for your questions, though. I haven’t seen it happen.

I especially enjoy the respect and thoughtfullness with which you conduct your interviews — even the ones with those whose world view is different that your own. Your even-handedness has caused me to think a lot of my own personal biases.

As an atheist, I often find it difficult to set aside my own non-belief when considering the soundness of an argument. I fear that I may be falling into the same trap that Christian “historians” do when they research Christianty. For this reason, I feel that a true agnostic would have an advantage in presenting arguments against Christianity, since he or she has less “skin in the game”. What are your thoughts on this?

But the fact that so many Christians whom your guest talks to don’t really have a PhD into the science shows that

1. Evolutionists have to retreat to esoterica to try to prove it, and so most laymen can’t keep up and may be intimidated, and

2. Most christians need to educate themselves instead of take someone’s word for it. I did, and I am a YEC sympathizer, and not at all cowed by the disdain of evolutionary bullies.

Thanks for your recommendations.

I made some recommendations here: http://landonhedrick.blogspot.com/2010/04/conversations-from-pale-blue-dot.html

Tom Crisp is recorded and will be up in the next few weeks.

I’m working my way up to somebody like Pruss.

Best

Thanks for the heads up. How about now?

there seems to be a problem with the feed; it won’t load in iTunes. The validator reports a number of errors (see http://www.feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcommonsenseatheism.com%2Fcpbd.rss), but I suspect the problem is caused by the invalid UTF8 character in the 18th conversation (I could download the podcast before that conversation).

Thank you

Thanks. Fixed.

Thanks for this!

What about William Vallicella, one of the best contemporary non-Christian theists and bloggers?

What about Timothy or Lydia McGrew? Great, technical apologists. Lydia is a blogger, too.

I start out with WAV files and to my ears I don’t lose any quality when encoding to medium bitrate MP3 because that’s not where the lack of quality is. The lack of quality is in Skype. Which can’t easily be avoided. I can’t fly to Australia just to interview a few people.

Recording a cellphone or Skype conversation on the receiving end lowers quality over transmission; usually, this can’t be avoided unless both guests are in the room/studio together or they arrange a remote recording situation. Recording with better tools will improve quality (at a price- consider: laptop mic, headset mic, SM58, Neumann condenser, etc). However, even lower-quality source stream audio quality can degrade further if it isn’t handled properly in post-processing.

Some tips to preserve audio quality (if you’re interested):

You might consider providing your podcasts in Ogg Vorbis format; it’s an open format, and at lower bitrates it sounds better than mp3. A disadvantage is that it won’t play on iPods (unless they run Rockbox), but you’d be fine with your Sansa e200 (which does). :) More proprietary options are Apple’s AAC/m4a aka iTunes format or the Windows Media Audio/WMA format, both of which are still better quality in lower bitrates than mp3.

Although it would increase file size, you might also consider increasing the sample rate at which you record (of course you could increase the MP3 bitrate as well and avoid changing formats). You might just experiment and find out what works best for you and the site.

Feel free to email me any questions, I’m working as a graduate student in digital audio right now :)

Thanks. Yes, I’m constantly working on my interview skills and the sound quality. :)

Keep it up.  I hope I’m not your only subscriber.  :D  Not everyone wants to know just how much Reformed Epistemology royally begs the question in myopic ways that fall by basically the exact same criticisms of every religious formulation that came before.  Oh well.  I’m still working on the Mike Licona one.  Astounding.  I don’t know what keeps that guy believing, but at some level I gotta respect the journey. 

Ben