Podcasting: a simple guide
Learn how to get your podcast idea off the ground!
Podcasts are all the rage these days. I’m personally invested in the story behind Welcome To Night Vale and the comedic pacing of CoolGames Inc. It’s really interesting to see how an audio-only format allows for new storytelling and media.
In this post we won’t delve into the specifics of hardware you’d like to use, but we will talk about how you can set up your software for less than a wad of pocket lint.
Setting everything up
Download Audacity. It’s cross-platform, open source, and works real well. We’ll be using this to record audio. Open Audacity and make sure your microphone is setup correctly.
If you’re not monitoring your microphone audio, make sure to click to start monitoring your audio.
Start talking normally as you will when you’re doing the podcast and monitor your audio.
If you see your audio peak over -6 db, adjust your microphone volume here:
You should aim to have a normal talking volume of -9 to -6 db. A little lower is fine, but don’t go below -12 db. Not everyone needs to have the same level of audio, just don’t make it too quiet or too loud; you won’t be able to equalize it later.
Your guests should have this same setup. Guide them through the process and make sure they’re all set up before you start recording. They are going to be recording their own copy of the audio and then upload it somewhere for you to download and master on your own.
Help them download the software and make sure they’re equalized correctly. They don’t need to fiddle with filters or what not, just make sure their audio isn’t peaking the meters.
Recording your voice
All podcast recordings should start with some sort of time syncing process. Ideally, you would do a roll call or a syncing method by clapping or some other form of synchronization. I would recommend recording your system audio and trying to sync up with that. This helps a lot if you’ve got multiple guests.
The podcast should have some sort of format that’s easy to digest and work through. Introduce yourself and your guest quickly — this should take less than 5 minutes. People will start to click off if you’re boring them.
Depending on what your format is, you’ll want to pace yourselves on topics and ideas. Your mileage will definitely vary with what kind of content you want to produce. My friends and I planned way more than what we actually recorded, and we almost hit 1 hour total of recording time. Try to aim for about 30–50 minutes of content, depending on how long you want to talk for.
For our recording setup, we used Discord, since it’s my favorite chat platform at the moment and all of my friends were already on it. The high bit rates and clean design meant we were able to set something up in a few minutes for us to chat through. You can use Skype, Hangouts, or any other voice chat service, however — what matters is that you can talk to each other.
Cleaning everything up
Alright! Now that you’ve recorded your audio, export your audio as a WAV and tell your guests to export their audio as a lossy 320kbps MP3. Normally you’d want to use an uncompressed WAV file to retain quality, but the file sizes are ridiculously large and near impossible to upload (300 MB vs 30 MB).
After getting the audio files from your guests, it’s time to start mastering. This part is a little tricky and takes some practice, so don’t worry if it sounds complicated in the beginning.
I used Adobe Audition, and Adobe offers a free trial so you can test the software out for a few days. It’s definitely worth the price to pay if you have the cash, but you can also do most of this in Audacity for free.
The first thing you need to do is make sure that all of your tracks have limiters on them. The final, mastered audio should never peak above -3 db. This is ridiculously important because that means that your listeners will never have to worry about someone’s voice blowing out their headphones or speakers. This can be achieved through a hard limiter.
The next thing to do is make sure that everyone’s audio normally stays around -9 to -6 db during normal speech. This is tricky and takes some fiddling with different audio levels, but once you get one track done, you’ll get the hang of it. You will have to do this individually for each and every track you record, though. This is so that everyone’s audio can sound as if they’re on the same level as you.
To make your audio sound better, you should probably invest in a good microphone. If you don’t have that sort of cash right now, make sure to keep your surroundings relatively echo-free and try to eliminate as much background noise as possible. Help your guests to do the same while they’re recording so you won’t have to fix it in post later. If all else fails, you can do some audio filtering later, but this might make your voice sound tinny.
Chop up whatever audio you need to and maybe add a nice intro track (that you’re legally able to use) to your program. After mastering your track, you can export it as an 320kbps MP3. Now you’ve got a file to upload to places!
Sharing your content with the world
Sharing your content is as easy as throwing it up on SoundCloud or Podcasts.com. Podcasts.com is free and easy to use, and SoundCloud is also easy to use, but has a pretty high price to pay per month. (Also, SoundCloud might be dying?)
The processes on uploading there are pretty self explanatory. Podcasts.com provides you with a pretty robust RSS feed to provide to iTunes so you can publish it. Publishing your podcast on iTunes is as easy as going to Podcasts Connect and submitting the previously mentioned RSS feed for approval.
After getting the greenlight, your podcast should immediately be available on iTunes. Do note that you will need to publish your content through Podcasts.com so that your content will be available on iTunes.
After that, your next steps should be to start working on your next episode!
You can check out the podcast this blog was made with here! (Although, fair warning, it is pretty explicit.)
(Note: The views and opinions in said podcast do not belong to devAcademy in any way, shape or form. They are my own/belong to the respective guests in the show.)
I hope this helped you in getting started on podcasting. This isn’t a terrible in-depth guide, but I hope it helps you get off the ground and producing content.
