Daily Archives: July 5, 2020

Hey, Kid, Wanna Do A Podcast?

Do you wanna make a pod-caaaast?
Do you wanna notice ums

The ways you hold your breath
And silence like death

And making reference to bums?

We’ve had a lot of time on mics lately, haven’t we? Maybe you’ve learned a little bit about crosstalk, maybe you’ve even lashed out and got yourself a nice new mic, for work purposes? And you might have been binging content because everyone is doing that right now?

Well, you should try and make a podcast!

About what? Well, that’s going to be up to you. What this post is about is giving you tools and techniques and resources.

First up, tools!

Zencastr is a recording program that runs in your browser window and runs a call that it then records. This is really useful if you’re doing a podcast with your girlfriend who lives a thousand miles away in Canada (and that’s not a joke), because you can just hand her the URL to the page, press the record button and Zencaster will record all the audio for both of you. It’ll be synced up, you can bring in up to three people on one call in the free version. It’s a solid resource! What’s more, it can put all those files automatically into your…

Dropbox! This is a good way to keep large, shared audio in a controlled space when you’re collaborating over distance. You may not need this if you’re just recording yourself (though we’ll talk to this). OneDrive can do something similar, but I don’t have direct experience with that, so I wouldn’t say.

Audacity! This is the bread and butter of audio recording. This is a very rudimentary audio editing program, and if what you want to do is cut audio up, delete some passages, clean up background noise and maybe filter out mouse clicking, this is going to do the task just fine. You will need an encoder to record mp3s, which you can learn about here, on this Lifewire page.

If you want to distribute your podcast, I’d recommend you set up a WordPress blog and use the Podlove add-on. These will step-by-step you through the process that lets you make an RSS feed that people can search up using their existing podcast recording software.

That’s it! That’s all you need, really!

I recommend for your first podcast, you either talk to a friend for about half an hour, or you recite or explain something you care about for about five minutes. The former you have room to react to one another and come to understand how hard it can be to use the time you have, and the latter shows you how much effort goes in to making those five minutes meaningful and clear. If you have plans for fiction and storytelling, try reading someone else’s story for a little bit – not releasing the episodes, just reading them – to get an idea for how quickly you can go through a story.

Finally, Freesound and Kevin Macleod’s Incomptech are excellent resources for sound effects and music.

Hope this is helpful!

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