Jump into podcasting
How to create your show on a budget, without too much technical difficulty
AYou’ll want to do a little editing to clean up the sound, but don’t worry: nobody expects you to offer BBC quality!
s with most creative projects, the temptation is always to rush out and buy lots of expensive equipment and the fear is that you’ll actually have to. You don’t, though. There are professional podcasts out there that are using top of the line microphones, but that’s not the expectation your audience will have. Do you have a basic desktop microphone that records audio that isn’t painful or annoying to listen to? Then honestly, you’re likely fine. Whatever microphone you use, you’ll want do a little editing to clean up the sound anyway, but don’t panic: nobody expects you to be the BBC.
If you’re prepared to spend a little money though, you can get some decent equipment relatively cheaply – for hardware. The usual recommendation is the Blue Yeti, which is around £100. This uses a USB connector rather than requiring mixers and other extra gear, offers great sound quality, and, most importantly, multiple recording modes – bidirectional for sharing the microphone (not ideal, but doable for bringing a friend into a podcast without needing an audio interface/mixer for multiple microphones), omnidirectional for general recording, and cardioid, for just recording in front. The same company also offers a slightly odder-looking but also popular microphone called the Snowball (guess what shape it is!) for around £60. This also allows for omnidirectional and cardiod recording, with its own minitripod. Another popular choice is the Samson CO1U, with a Podcasting Kit containing it, the stand and a shock mount (which prevents noise from desk impacts or the microphone being nudged) that’s usually sold for around £100. Whatever microphone you opt for though, plan for a couple of add-ons. In particular, you should always record with a pop shield. This is a piece of fabric in a ring that can be attached to your stand or otherwise put in front of the microphone, which catches the p-p-plosive sounds made while recording and p-p-prevents them exploding into your listener’s ears. It’s also worth setting up a stand so that you can get the microphone in the right place and close to your mouth, though a big pile of books often makes for a cheap and effective substitute there. Other gear can largely be skipped though, unless you absolutely need them. You don’t need an expensive mixer for a regular podcast, you don’t need shock mounts unless there are a lot of vibrations you can’t do anything about, and you don’t need to fill your recording room with acoustic foam to kill a little bit of reverb that nobody will even notice. (That said, if you can record in a room with soft furnishings and some space rather than in a closet or a room full of hard surfaces, that will help.)
With the microphone set up, you still of course need the software to record your podcast. Many
options are available, but you can definitely do worse than the completely free Audacity (audacity.sourceforge.net) for both recording and producing the audio. Elsewhere in this issue we’ll look at the complete steps that are involved (page 42), but in short, if you can click a button marked ‘Record’, you’ll be able to use it.
The trickiest part – not including recording a good podcast, of course – is finding a host for your files. If you have a website with a decent amount of bandwidth (or a small audience) it’s possible to self-host. Otherwise, you need somewhere to both store the files and handle the RSS feed. Podcast hosts come in many shapes, sizes and prices, but typically sell services in tiers based on three things: storage, bandwidth and services. Storage is typically a monthly increase, for instance each billing cycle, another 50MB or so rather than a few gigabytes up front. Bandwidth covers how often your podcasts can be downloaded, again in terms of megabytes/gigabytes. The bigger your audience, the faster you’ll use it up, especially if new listeners routinely decide to download the whole archive. Finally, additional services vary in terms of usefulness, but statistics is an important one for both seeing if anyone’s listening and considering sponsorship/advertising to support the podcast later on. Popular podcast hosts include LibSyn (libsyn.com) that starts at $5 and Jellycast (jellycast.com) that offers a plan with a £10 setup fee, but then has no ongoing monthly costs. Whatever service you use though, be sure to submit your podcast to the iTunes Store. There are lots of podcast directories out there, but that’s the one that matters. Full information on doing that can be found at apple.com/uk/itunes/ podcasts/specs.html, but in short, you need your first episode up and ready to go, the RSS feed to point iTunes towards, and an attractive ‘cover art’ file that will represent it in the store. Once added to the directory, regularly ask (though not nag) your listeners for reviews. Every little helps when trying to get attention.