How to Podcast

When I was taking my month off blogging in December I started Podcasting, as you might have noticed if you saw the box on the right hand column suddenly appear. Podcasting is just a fancy name for putting together your own radio show and sticking it on the net and how it’s suddenly, well, exploded is probably being generous but let’s say “risen in profile” with this fancy new name is a combination of utopian geekery and a lowering in technology barriers. Pretty much anyone can put one together and getting one out there isn’t as hard as it might have been.

Though you wouldn’t necessarily think so if you read the Endgadget guide to Podcasting. Admittedly Endgadget is aimed at people who like to take the scenic route and there’s nothing wrong with that. But here’s how I do it with a Mac running Panther using the basic iLife applications that come with it. In other words, very simply and for free.

Being audio you can put together pretty much anything you want. All you need is an audio source and something to edit it all together. I’m dabbling in the pretty tradition music radio format so the hardest part is choosing what tracks to play. Once I’ve done that I drag them from iTunes into iMovie. iMovie allows you to edit one video track and two audio tracks. Ignoring the video means you have a very rudimentary audio editing suite that makes up for its lack of features by being piss easy to use.

Drag the songs into the second audio track so they appear as lovely brown strip. With your songs in iMovie and in the right order you can start editing the show together. Audio clips can overlap so if you want one song to fade into another overlap them a bit, reducing the audio as applicable. If a song has too much silence at the end or some kind of sound you don’t want, crop it.

The kinda tricky part is getting your voice in. You’ll need a microphone and a mic socket, which my Power Mac inexplicably doesn’t come with, so an iMic USB soundcard was in order. While the iMic is a wonderful thing, if you stick any old crappy mic into it it’ll sound crappy, but that’s not really a problem unless you’re really fussy about the quality. There are many ways you can capture your voice but since we’re keeping it simple we’re going to stick with iMovie. Click on the “Audio” button and, if your mic is working, you’ll see the green bars flicker.

Click the red dot and start talking. Then click it again. You voice will be a small purple bar on the first audio track. Crop any silence on the edges and move it to the end of the song you want to follow, shifting the next song up a bit. If you’re like me and tend to murmur self-consciously into the mic in the middle of the night you might want to whack the volume of your voice up to 150%, though this won’t help a whole lot.

The biggest problem with this system is it’s not live. You’re immediately reviewing your speech and you’ll probably be horrified by it. I know I was. The best solution is to just go with it. Don’t keep re-recording until you’ve eliminated all the things you hate because you’ll never do that. Eventually you’ll get comfortable with speaking into a mic and it’ll be okay. At least that’s what I keep telling myself.

Once you’ve got your show together, and in my experience it takes less than an hour to do so, you just need to get it ready to podcast. Go to File > Export and select To Quicktime, then Expert Settings. Click on Export and then select Sound to AIFF from the Export menu. Give it a filename (leaving the extension as .aif) and Save. Go make a cup of tea while it does the business and when you get back you’ll have a huge audio file waiting for you.

You now want to get this file down to a reasonable size for moving around the internet. Drag the AIFF file into iTunes and bring up the Preferences window.

Select Import Using: MP3 Encoder with Setting: Custom. This will bring up another window where you should chose a lower Bit Rate than usual. I go for 64 kbps which takes a 30 minute show down to under 15mb. You can go lower if you’re just using speech or higher if bandwidth isn’t an issue for you.

Now select the massive AIFF file in the iTunes library and go to Advanced > Convert Selection To MP3. Wait a couple of minutes and your show will be ready. Give it some useful tags so it’ll be identifiable when someone plays it on their system (I like to put my URL into the comments tag as well) and drag it to the Desktop. Give it a sensible filename like “fredradio_180105.mp3″ and FTP it up to your server.

You’ve just released your first radio show onto the net.

The problem with Podcasting as I see it is that in order to really take advantage of the system you need to be able to create a custom RSS 2.0 feed so people can automatically download tracks and sync them to their mp3 players (hence the “pod” in podcasting). If you even know what that means then I don’t need to explain it here but unless you’re using something like Movable Type or WordPress to manage your site it’s doubtful you’ll be able to. If there is an easy way to generate one then I’d love to hear about it, but for now it seems little less than entry-level.

So here’s an idea. If any of you lot (by which I mean people who read this that I actually know and consider friends in some way, tenuous or otherwise) want to put together shows of your own I’d be happy to host them and look after the syndication side of things. I reckon one 15mb file a week wouldn’t be too hard on my bandwidth, and if you can host them yourselves we can up the frequency. We could start a little radio station or something. It’d be cool. Let me know what you think.