Starting Podcasting

A podcast about making a first podcast.

Transcript:

Today we’re going to talk about making a podcast. Actually, I’m going to tell you about my experience making my first podcast, in hopes that it will ease your first foray into podcasting.

Here is what I used:

An iPod
A microphone that attaches to an iPod
A USB connector to connect the iPod to a laptop computer
A Dell laptop running Windows XP Pro
A wireless connection to a router
A broadband connection to the Internet
Audacity, open source sound editing software, that you can get from audacity.sourceforge.net
Adobe/Macromedia Dreamweaver, to edit the web page, and later, an RSS feed that will allow people to access the podcast
Microsoft Word, to write the show
iTunes software, to copy the recording from the iPod to my computer and to download podcasts to the iPod
WS/FTP (File Transfer Protocol software), to upload the podcast, the web page and the RSS feed, onto a web site.

I don’t think you have to have an iPod, but I wanted one anyway because they’re so cute, and it did work well, producing good quality sound. I got a microphone, too, that attaches to the bottom of the iPod. If you plan to do a lot of interviewing, and you should, you might want to consider buying a dual microphone that you can place on a table between you and your interviewee, so you don’t have to pass the microphone back and forth.

The first task was to figure out how to work the minimalist controls of the iPod, which turned out to be as simple as they say it is – you scroll through the choices by softly running your finger around the circle on the front, select the one you want by pressing the middle of the circle. Go back (and up, and out) by pressing the Menu button as often as it takes. That’s it, for the basics.

I downloaded some podcasts to my laptop, then used iTunes to synchronize my iPod with the music and podcasts on my laptop. For some reason, my podcasts showed up under the “Music” category on my iPod, presumably because they were in MP3 format.

Then I wrote the show. I figured I’d do the first one on a topic I’m completely comfortable with – I can be brave later when I’m more confident about the techniques of making the shows.

I figure you need an intro where you identify yourself and the show, a sponsor section if you’ve got sponsors, an announcement section if you’ve got announcements, then the show, and finally an exit, where you re-identify yourself and the show and tell people where they can go for more information.

I didn’t want to sound as if I’m reading the show, but I also didn’t want to stumble around, so writing it down and then improvising slightly seemed a reasonable compromise. Even when I ended up going off the script during the recording of the podcast, it was great to have the script to refer back to.

At one point during the recording, I couldn’t find my cursor to scroll down to the next part of the script, and I ended up with a long bit of silence. I had just installed a second monitor, and the sneaky little critter was over there, and I couldn’t figure out right away how to bring it back. Fortunately, taking out silences (and ums, and repeated words) turned out to be pretty easy.

After I had my recording, I opened up Audacity, then opened my recording, which was in .wav format. I hit the “Play” triangle, and my recording played, as pretty as you please. Then I started to edit it. I decided to edit out my long silence first. I listened to the show, found the long silence, and selected it by putting my cursor at the beginning of the long straight line, and dragging it over to the end. Up till now, everything had been completely intuitive. However, the “delete” option was greyed out, and the delete key did nothing. I simply could not take the silence out.

I went back to the documentation, (when all else fails, you can always read the documentation, right?), It said “To delete a portion of the recording, select the unwanted portion and hit ‘delete.’” Right, I already tried that. Tell me something I don’t know! I kept reading, and references to an “Audacity Project” kept appearing, suggesting that perhaps for Audacity to work, you first have to set up a Project. They could have told me that! So I tried the menu item “Project>Import Audio” instead of “File>Open” or “File>New” as I had been doing. Suddenly everything worked as I had imagined it would.

The sound file looks like a seismograph – a long squiggly line. Where the squiggles are wide, the sounds are loud, and where the squiggles are missing, and there’s just a line, there’s silence. Words look like bulging shapes, often going from one to the other without silent straight lines in between.

At first I just deleted the bad spots – the too-long silences, the “ums” and the places I started a sentence one way only to decide it should go another. Then I got bold. I attempted the equivalent of swapping heads in Photoshop – there was one spot where I got a couple of numbers backwards. Could I actually switch the words? After all, spoken words aren’t discrete – words tend to run together, and finding the beginnings and endings isn’t so easy. With Audacity, like other sound editing programs, you can usually identify the general region of a sound, then zoom in. There’s a little plus and minus magnifying glass you click to look more closely at a particular region. You can select the region where you think the word is, and listen to just that region, over and over, until you think you know exactly where the word begins and ends, maybe zooming in again to get even closer to the beginning and end of the word. In the end, I found my two words, and switched them -- but the results aren’t really all that great. Maybe you’ll hear where I did it. But maybe not, though. That’s what I’m hoping. J

The next thing I wanted to do was to add music – not only would that give my show a signature beginning and ending, but it would be good practice in layering sounds over one another. I got the music from an open source music website called the Podsafe Music Source. I selected the opening and closing instrumental and used the bits to open and close the podcast, fading the music out sometime after I begin talking, and fading it back in near the very end of the show.

I learned about the music site from a wonderful podcast by Chris Kretz, who is a reference librarian at Dowling College. His podcast is called “Learning to Speak: Creating a Library Podcast With a Unique Voice”, and tells how the Dowling College Library put together its series of shows. It covers some really important parts of the process: how you get people to want to talk on the show, how you market your radio show, and how much time it takes to put it together... things like that. It makes a really strong statement about why all this matters to libraries. You can find the podcast on www.higheredblog.com. I’ll put the complete link to it on the Extra Mile podcast page. I’m serious, you should definitely listen to this one. It’s terrific, and makes you want to run out and start podcasting!

The last step in creating my podcast was (to use Audacity terminology) to export the project as an MP3 file. MP3 is a compression protocol widely used on the web because it makes relatively small files for a relatively good quality of sound. And small files mean, of course, shorter download times.

Finally, I uploaded the MP3 file to the extramile.com web server, and linked to it from a web page using HTML, then tested it by listening to it to it from the web page. This part seemed ridiculously easy. There’s more to do, like creating an RSS feed so that people can subscribe to the shows, but that can wait.

I hope this has been helpful in encouraging you to start experimenting with creating a library podcast. Be sure to come back often for more marketing tips from Extra Mile Design.

This podcast was recorded on December 14, 2006.