Various methods of creating podcasts

Having been the producer of Filibuster - The Black and Red United Podcast, for over 70 episodes, I have gone through a number of methods of recording, most of which have annoyed me in one way or another. People keep asking me, though, how we do this podcast, so I figured I would lay out my tools and all the methods that I have used, and see if any of them work for you. I’ve broken this up into production, hosting, and recording.

Production

First, however, here is the production part which I have always used.

• I edit the podcast in Audacity, which is a great audio editor that works on Linux, Mac, and Windows.
• The effects that I typically use are Fade In/Fade Out (for the intro and outro music), Truncate Silence (to remove long pauses and dead air), Noise Removal (to get rid of background hums and hisses), Leveler (to pump out the volume of the outro after I fade it in and out), and Compressor (to even everything out).
• When everything is done, I export to MP3. Make sure to check your export settings here, because there is never a need for an audio podcast to be 80 MB. I use Variable Bit Rate encoding at quality level 7, which usually gives me a 17-25 MB file, and it sounds perfectly fine.
• Once the MP3 is exported, you are ready to upload it to your platform of choice.

Hosting

Proper hosting makes sure that you can get your episode off of your computer and into other people’s ears. Over the course of Filibuster, we have used a number of different methods of hosting, but let me just say this now: You don’t have to pay for it, if you’re willing to do a little work.

• Buzzsprout was the first hosting platform we used, and it was your typical paid podcast hosting site, like libsyn and many others. Their cheapest real plan is $12 a month, so that’s not great.
• Through SB Nation, we got a free Pro account with Soundcloud, which is where we currently host the podcast. You can apply for their beta podcasting platform, so that could be a good option for you as well.
• YouTube is always an easy option, even if you’re not a video podcast, but would be difficult to get into iTunes and other podcast providers; not really recommended unless you are video.
• The best free option, as long as you have a blog (and who doesn’t?), is to host your audio on the Internet Archive. You can embed it into your post, which I have done to the very first episode Filibuster. Placing a link () to the raw MP3 in the page as well will embed the file in your RSS feed, allowing it to be used by podcatchers. The feed for your podcast category is then your podcast feed.

[archiveorg id=Episode1PreviewingThe2012SeasonTonyLimarzi width=500 height=140] Download the MP3 here

• The catch with the Internet Archive is that they really want you to license it under a Creative Commons license. That’s fine for us, we already license it that way on Soundcloud, so IA would work for us too.
• Some sites recommend running your podcast feed through Feedburner so that you can submit it to iTunes, but I have not confirmed those things.

Recording

This is the part that has caused me the most frustration, going back and forth between methods constantly. A note on recording: whenever possible, record to a lossless audio format such as WAV or FLAC; your final quality will be much better if you do so.

• Before I took over the producer duties, we recorded via Skype with the producer using Garage Band to grab all of the audio and then do the editing. Update: Via the comments, LineIn and Soundflower were the programs used to record the podcast on a Mac.
• When I took over, we continued to use Skype to talk to each other; however, since I use Linux, Garage Band was not an option. We started by using Skype Call Recorder, which updates only very rarely (last update in 2013) but still works. We would sometimes have problems with people dropping out, and the recording would get ended if that happened to me.
• We then switched to Google+ Hangouts On Air for a long time. Despite the fact that it was “live” on YouTube, we only invited those who we wanted to be on the show. After the show ended, I would download the video file, use VLC to rip the audio out of the file, and then proceed to edit in Audacity. However, we had problems with audio clipping, people dropping out of the call, and people getting into the call in the first place. However, if people drop out the recording continues, and you can try and join the call back. This is a decent way to run a podcast, however.
• Since I like seeing the faces of the people to which I am talking, we have now switched a regular Google video hangout, which I record using Audio Recorder, which records off of my microphone and my sound card; that means that we could switch between communication platforms and not change how we record. If you’re using Linux, I highly recommend this piece of software, which makes recording a podcast very easy.
• I just use a Blue Snowball USB microphone, which is a massive improvement over the built-in microphone in my computer. If you’re going to do your own podcast, getting a decent microphone is well worth the investment.

That’s all I can think of; any questions? Cross posted from http://beforeextratime.com/2015/03/various-methods-of-creating-podcasts/