7 Tips for Podcasters

Keep it short

Most people don’t have the time to listen to long podcasts. Chances are, they’re listening while travelling to work, or late at night. If your podcast is longer than ten minutes, provide an index to topics, so listeners can start at a particular spot.

Record somewhere quiet

Unless you need a specific atmosphere (eg waves, seagulls, theatre foyer), avoid recording in noisy areas: they are hard to listen to, and a pain to edit. Record the podcast in WAV format for best quality.

Use The Levelator to balance voices

This free software balances audio levels between different voices. The Levelator automatically balances various audio levels, such as multiple microphone levels in an interview or panel discussion, or segments combined from multiple sessions that were recorded at different levels.

details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelator 
downloads: http://www.conversationsnetwork.org/levelator

Note: you will require a PCM recording, such as WAV or AIFF, for The Levelator to work.

Audacity showing the Effect of Running The Levelator on a recording with varying voice levels (TOP) to create a more balanced output file (Bottom)

Do a basic edit on the recording before publishing

Always worth doingto ensure you’ve got a good recording. Means you can edit out unexpected noises, remove coughs, false starts and so on. Most importantly, it means you can listen to what’s been said and make sure you want to publish (all) of it.

Audacity is free, cross platform and easy to use editing software for audio files.

details: http://www.audacityteam.org

Tumblr will let you store audio posts for free

Audio files can be quite large, even if you’ve saved the recording in mp3 format. There are several podcast oriented website hosts which will not only provide additional storage each month — so you can continue store all of your podcasts — but also provide convenient templates, tools, and online audio players.

One of the few places you can publish audio files for free is Tumblr. They limit files to be under 10MB, and cap the amount you can upload each day, but they do have an audio micro-format, and let you upload audio to their site, or link to audio files stored elsewhere.   

The Environment Show at http://enviroshow3d.tumblr.com

Get a good podcast player

If you’re going to listen to a range of podcasts, pick a good podcast player: It’s much easier to organise your subscriptions and episodes with a good player, which will also let you

• • subscribe to new episodes
  • change playback speed
  • play parts of episodes and let you resume where you left off
  • provide feedback to the podcasters

Zencastr will record both sides of a discussion

If you can’t both be present in the same room, you can record podcasts across the web using Zencastr.

Zencastr is built to run in a modern web browser. This makes it super easy to invite guests or record from anywhere with internet access. It records each guest locally on their machine, then combines the recordings and stores it in your dropbox.

More details: https://zencastr.com