This week’s sneak peek will be the last one before Übercaster v1.5′s official release next week on Macworld Expo San Francisco (if you’ll be in town, visit us at booth # S-1338).

Today I’ll present you one of the biggest new features in Übercaster v1.5:

Autopilot

Übercaster’s Autopilot is a completely new feature, invented to make the life of podcasters easier. It comes with a new kind of panel on Übercaster’s Prepare and Record layer:

Übercaster’s Autopilot perfectly assists you during your show. It’s a resizable panel which shows the topics you want to talk about, notes you took and even more.
While recording, you can easily jump between your topics and catch a glimpse at your notes.

During recording, the Autopilot panel shows the following information:

• Topic list
  You can scroll through all topics without changing the currently recorded topic.
• Elapsed time
  Shows the duration of the currently recorded topic.
• Remaining/overrun time
  If the currently recorded topic contains an estimated duration, Autopilot shows you the remaining/overrun time.
• Topic information
  State and features of the currently shown topic.
• Notes
  Detailed information you’ve entered on the current topic.

When starting a topic during recording, Übercaster automatically creates a chapter for the topic.

Besides the topic title, notes and the optional estimated duration, topics can also be configured to automatically play an audio clip when started. This way, you can easily define a standard jingle to play whenever you start a new topic on your show or you may prepare a topic to play a whole song – fully automated with its own titled chapter.

Preparing your show with Autopilot

Planning and preparing your next podcast episode is now an easy and fun task with Übercaster’s Autopilot:

Create and name the topics you’d like to talk about and add notes to each topic as detailed as you like.

By entering an estimated duration for each topic you’ll get a pretty good prediction of your episodes final length. Furthermore, Autopilot will visually warn you during recording when reaching the estimated duration of a topic.

Edit and refine your episode’s “flightplan” as you like and reorder the topics in autopilot by simple drag and drop:

Sure enough, all Autopilot setting are saved along with the project’s data and are of course reused when creating a new project based on a former episode with the “New with template…” command.

That’s it for this last sneak peek…

Be sure to check out the free demo version of Übercaster v1.5, available next Tuesday, January 15th, 2008.

Visit us at MacWorld Expo 08, Booth # S-1338 for a free Demo CD or download it from Übercaster’s homepage at http://www.ubercaster.com

Recording news

This week’s sneak peek introduces two major enhancements in Übercaster’s recording engine:

“Look ahead” recording

Whenever you hit Übercaster’s record button it’s like Übercaster reads your mind. It internally starts each recording 1 second ahead.

This way you can extend your recording’s start by up to one second on the Cut layer. This not only becomes handy when editing crossovers beween takes, it also means no more missed cues…

Direct AAC recording

It’s now possible to configure Übercaster to record into compressed AAC files. Although this might use more CPU during recording and when opening the project later, it also saves a lot of space on your hard disk during production.

Here are the info dialogs of two 15 minutes single microphone recordings: