Category: Behind the Scenes

Accessibility of information is something that is very important to us here at the Modern Technology Podcast Network. We realize that although our work is primarily audio-based, there will always be those for whom that is not the most useful data medium.

To best serve everyone we can, we are doing our best to post human-made, human-readable text transcripts of our work. This is a lot of work with hours of audio, so in addition to tackling what we can ourselves we have recently begun engaging the excellent services of a professional transcriber (shoutout to the wonderful Betty Sulwe!) and it’s our goal to eventually present all our work in readable as well as listenable formats.

Transcript links for individual episodes will be added to the relevant episode and podcast pages as they become available. You can also check out our new Transcripts page for a consolidated list of all currently-available transcripts.

Transcripts of future episodes will be given priority as they are released, and we are slowly going to be filling in the gaps in our back catalogue as well. Those of you who are interested can contact us with your feedback. You can also let us know which of our past episodes you’d most like to see transcribed so we can queue things up accordingly.

As with all our original content, our transcripts will always be freely-licensed, copyable, and reusable under Creative Commons.

Share and enjoy!

You may have noticed that we here at the Modern Technology Podcast Network are big fans of Free Content. All our podcasts are freely licensed under Creative Commons terms which not only ensure that our content is available free of charge and will always remain so, it is also allowed to be freely republished, rebroadcast, and – should anyone get a wild hair to do so – remixed into something new.

Bringing our output formats a little more in line with that particular goal, in addition to our normal podcast feeds we are now archiving high-quality FLAC files of each episode to our page on the Internet Archive. For those unfamiliar, FLAC is a digital-audio standard producing files which are compressed in file-size but, unlike the podcast-standard MP3 files which go out in our podcast feeds, they are lossless. These FLACs are the files we initially produce our shows as, from which we make the lossy MP3s that go out into our podcast streams.

We behind the scenes have long been supporters of the Internet Archive and their work, and they are the perfect place for us to archive the small chunk of the Internet Modern.Technology creates. People interested in rebroadcasting, republishing, or remixing our work in line with our Creative Commons licenses can now find it in a format which can be further edited and re-exported without any loss in fidelity.

Listeners not interested in FLAC have nothing to worry about; we’ll keep posting and podcasting our normal MP3s as we always have. You still get the full show in the MP3s, there’s nothing extra added to the FLACs. This is merely an additional sharing venue for our episodes which makes the audio geek segment behind the scenes of this network very happy, and hopefully will do the same for the audio geek segment out there among you.

From now on, you can generally expect our archival FLACs to be posted within a day or so of our podcast MP3s.

• The Modern Technology Podcast Network on the Internet Archive