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With interest in podcasts running high in the league I thought I would post a thread to describe how it’s done so anyone can try it out. Bottom line is that there are lots of tools out there, so feel free to chime in with how you do it. I’ll update the top post to indicate other people’s methods if that makes sense.
Rule 1: Don’t worry about being great. Just have fun and everything will be just fine.
Anyway, I think there are three steps, of which only #1 and #3 are mandatory:
1) Capture Audio
2) Editing
3) Uploading
Capture Audio:
Edit:Podcasting with others: I’ve always used Skype as the base communications tool, and a third-party recorder to capture off the audio. [Here’s a link to a “12 Best” article … I use MP3 Skype Recorder because it’s free]. You can use anything that records conversations, though. There are apps out there to record phone calls or you can replace Skype with Google Hangouts or Facetime (limited to Apple/iOS users) or Zoom or whatever, as long as you have a way to turn the output into MP3 (or MP4) format.
Podcasting solo: I go straight to Audacity, and record with my simple microphone set-up. You can use any sound auditing software. I like Audacity because it’s fairly full-featured and it’s free. (Are you sensing a theme?)
Other Options:Anyway, the final product of this step is generally an MP3 of the raw recording.
- Matt used Anchor to do his live sim. It’s supposed to be super-easy.
- Brett uses Flashback Express to record from Skype.
Uploading:Let’s face it, this step isn’t required for us. Brett and Fred’s “A Few Beers In” shows exactly how much fun a raw podcast can be. I tend to do it for may podcasts because I like fiddling with the features, and I like making something with a slicker feel to it. To be open, I’m also using this as trial fodder for things I intend to do with my writing “career.”
I use Audacity to do my processing. There are lots of great 3-5 minute videos on how to do lots of things, and it’s fun to learn (for me, anyway). I tend to equalize up the ends of the spectrum on our voices, and do some compression and normalization on the sound waves. It’s all cool. I also will often edit out ums and ahs and large gaps in our conversation as we’re looking for data or whatever. Sometimes I’ll even take out parts of our conversations to make the whole thing feel snappier.
But none of that is necessary at all.
Again, though, if you want to play with the editing stuff you can use anything sound editing thing you want and probably find great “help” with Google.
And, that’s that.At this point whether you edited the file or not you have an MP3, and need to upload it to a host site. If that host site is a true podcasting site, it will take MP3 format directly. So you just upload there. Soundcloud is what I was using early, but most of these sites cost cash, so (seeing as I like free better), I upload to YouTube.
Using YouTube: Requires an MP4 or other visual format. Therefore you’ll need a piece of software that creates videos. Windows Movie Maker comes on most Windows PCs—though I think It’s being discontinued. I use Flash Integro’s VSDC Free Video Editor (free, natch). This process fundamentally consists of importing the MP3 file you’ve created, adding some kind of visual (I add the BBA Logo and a little text most of the time), and then exporting as MP4.
Once I have a workable MP4, It’s uploaded directly to a YouTube Channel.
Like anything else, there are more steps at deeper levels, but those will be different depending on the tools you use. Feel free to ask detailed questions below, or offer easier ways of doing things. This is supposed to be a learning thread, and I barely know enough to scratch the surface, really.