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How-to Make a Podcast

(with M-Audio Podcast Factory using Audacity, Lame, Podifier)

Part 4 - Creating your Podcast

Audacity is provided for you to create your podcasts as well as Live 4 "Lite". For help on Live 4, please see our Live tutorial .

Using Audacity
Open Audacity.

You may want to make or add a music intro to your podcast. If so, you should probably do this before recording your podcast. You can change the music later. To add a sound file, click "File->Open File" and select the file you want.

You can now see the file, in Audacity.

You probably will not need the entire musical selection for your intro. Select the excess portion of the file you won't need by clicking and dragging, if it is a stereo file, make sure to click and drag across both audio channels.

Hit the delete key, and its gone - simple.
Now select the section of audio that you want to be the "fade-in", where the sound fades down to nothing.

From the menu, select "Effect->Fade Out".

See how the output gradually fades down to nothing? Easy! Make sure to save the file to a new name at this point. OK, now let's open a new track to add the podcast "vocal".

Click the "Record" button to automatically open a newtrack and start recording. You are going to have to play with the levels to get the volume of the microphone input correct.

You can monitor the levels while recording:

Don't forget to turn on the microphone.

Keep the levels as high as you can with no distortion. Be careful, peaks may distort, so be a little conservative.
To delete a track, hit the little "X" in the tracks upper left hand corner.

You may need to do this alot!
One important thing that you may not have considered in your podcasting plans is "writing" the podcast itself. Writing an article for online pubilcation is one thing. Writing for a podcast is not quite the same thing. A good podcast should seem very "impromptu" or "offhand" in that it has to sound as though the person talking is doing so in a natural manner rather than just reading a paper. This is actually a lot harder than it sounds! Describing how to make a good, natural sounding podcast is a bit beyond this tutorial.

Anyway, when you are finally happy with your podcast "vocal", you can add sound effects, a closing musical interlude or what have you.

Next, Part 5) Converting your Podcast to an MP3 file