How to guide on setting up a Podcast: Part 2
Building on our last post - which guided us on hardware side to podcasting here, we’ll cover how to actually record the damn thing and post it on streaming sites like Spotify & Apple!
Recording a Podcast
Option A: Recording Software
If you aren’t remotely recording there are plenty of offline suggestions.
Free: Audacity or Garageband
Paid: Logic Pro, Pro Tools or Adobe Audition
Option B: Remote Recording
Zencastr - http://zencastr.com - Free option & $20/£15 p/month
This is a fantastic remote recording software that you can use to individually record each person from anywhere in the world. The key to this software working is that is records in a lossless WAV format, which is the highest quality recording you can do. This opens your possibilities up considerably when working with an audio engineer as they can use this format to better enhance the most important part of your voice - the deeper tones - otherwise not possible with MP3 Formats.
MIXING & MASTERING
So now it’s time to send those files to your engineer.
We offer a very affordable £40 p/h to mix and master a podcast episode, with each episode taking us between one and three hours. Included in that cost is consultancy and access to a discounted music library.
If you are mastering yourself you want to aim for -16db LUFS ceiling. You can find programs that do this for you (and to some extent streaming sites will do this for you) but as an engineer, it’s important to us that we manually automate a constant level throughout that matches with this number so your listeners can hear you when you are quiet and not given heart attacks when you laugh!
Podcast Hosting & Distributing
Now we need to upload your podcast to a host so it lives online.
The host will then generate what’s called an RSS Feed from that upload which you can then attach to your profile on streaming sites like Spotify or Apple Podcasts. You can do this manually or pay for a website to do this for you and distribute to all streaming sites (inc. profile and picture).
We’ve always tried to use Acast where possible - http://acast.com - because it’s free for small projects.
Additionally, most hosts will offer analytics within their packages so cost and website are very dependant on how much leg work you want to do yourself.
And that’s it!
Once you have put the initial time and effort into a podcast and worked out your costs they can be fantasticly cost-efficient (and fun!) tools in the modern day world of advertising.
If you have any questions, please get in touch - sam@boyde.tv