by Nicole Naipo [Koolaye]

Tell me a bit about yourself and your podcast

My name is Frank Romano and my Gamertag on Xbox Live is TheMan661. I am a 16 year old high school student from New York and am the founder of The Xcast, an Xbox 360 Community Podcast. The show is currently hosted by myself and Phil Meza otherwise known around the Xbox community as SempraFi and has been in production since August of 2006. We actually just celebrated our 70^th Episode recently. We try to put up a new episode of the Xcast every Tuesday of each week. Also, every couple of episodes we try to have guests from different community sites on as well. As it stands, our site www.xcastonline.com, has a full writing staff made up of Jeff Whitehouse and JayR Robinson. They do a great job of putting up all the latest news going on around the community. Though I write articles when I can, they are the main force behind our front page. We also have a very active and growing forum community.

How do you put each show together?

Since Phil and I are in different states we use the VOIP application Skype to talk to each other and we use the Mac Application Audio Hijack Pro to record the conversation. When we are done with each episode, the file is saved as an MP3. I then throw it in Garageband, an audio editing program, and do a few more improvements to the audio, such as; getting our levels as equal as possible, adding some filters to improve quality, etc. Then I type up the show notes for the episode and upload the file, it is then available for download. It’s pretty simple, but seems a lot more confusing then it actually is.

What highlights have you had since the show started?

Wow, where do I start… Since the show started I have been presented with so many opportunities that I would never expected when I launched the show back in August of ‘06. I have met and continue to meet so many awesome people from around the gaming community; some people have even become very good friends of mine. The highlight of my podcasting career so far was attending PAX ’07. At PAX I got to meet a ton of different people, get some great audio content, play some great games, and it was all around a great time.

Any future plans for the show?

I am going to be attending PAX 2008 this upcoming August, which should be a lot of fun. As to other plans, we will just have to wait and see what the future brings. I plan to continue the site and podcast for years to come.

What are some of your favorite podcasts?

Some of my favorite podcasts are Sarcastic Gamer, The Gamercast Network Video Game Show, Gamertag Radio, Achievement Junkie, The Gamers Garage, and many more. I try and listen to as many shows in the gaming community as possible when I have some free time.