Guitar Chasers

Most of us probably realize that podcasting must be a relatively easy undertaking. I mean, all you gotta do is spout your opinion into a microphone, record it somehow and then paste it onto your favorite sound editing software along with some royalty-free indie music. If you’re like me, its more important to hurry up and get your creation out on the web before wasting time polishing and fine tuning the product (yes, a podcast is a product, or production if you prefer). Our podcast, Guitar Chasers Podcast, presents a podcast in its simplest form; a 40 second intro bit that identifies the podcast followed by several indie tunes that have been downloaded from the various sources whom allow rebroadcasting of their works under the Creative Commons Licensing Agreement. Regardless its level of simplicity, a podcast still requires a bit of know how that cannot be learned instantly. Fortunately, the tools (software) freely available today permit us to have a product available to the public almost instantly. At least within a few hours of our decision to become podcasters.

You may not consider this important, but it is. Don’t podcast music that you do not have permission to podcast. Creative Commons allows, in most cases, works to be podcast with few obligations on your part. You should always give the generous artists credit for their works, either verbally in your cast, or printed in the meta tags of your podcast file. The name and address of their website is a must along with a link from your podcast webpage or shownotes. Be sure to know the licensing specifics of any audio file you plan on including in your podcast.

Now go find some music that you know is safe and download it to your computer. You’ll probably be required to register in order to download free music, so be prepared. Most tunes you download will have the artist’s information included in the audio file meta tags. That info can be seen by either hovering over the filename with your mouse pointer or right clicking on the filename and selecting the Properties option. If you plan on podcasting on a regular basis, then now is the time to decide how you’ll keep these animals organized in your machine’s hard drive. A logical folder structure might be Month folder with each podcast inside its own day of the month folder. Let’s assemble this podcast now.

Assuming that your computer has the available resources to handle audio editing, you should first learn how to record an audio file of your speaking into the microphone. There are so many possible combinations it would be crazy for me to try and list them, so I’ll just run through the fundamentals. A simple mic or mic-headphone headset that plugs into your computer’s usb port is probably the easiest method for acquiring an acceptable vocal track. If you plan on recording more than one person at a time then you will need the necessary equipment to make it happen. Maybe two standard (not usb) microphones and an external mixing board. Make sure your computer has an audio input which enables you to grab audio from an external source. Once you have discovered how to get your voice into the computer, you can record it using one of the many available sound editing programs. My current and favorite program is Audacity. Audacity is free software and provides the tools you need to glue together the pieces that will comprise your podcast. Search the web, download it, install it and play with it for a while. You can now record your voice. Keep the meters out of the red zone. Create your intro. You might say something like “This is the pancake podcast brought to you by www flapjack dotcom”. Maybe you want a bit of soft music behind your intro speech. Just import a music file into Audacity for blending. You’ll find the import function under the Project button. Once the music file is imported you’ll see two graphs displayed; your voice track on top and the music track on the bottom. Adjust the volume levels so your voice can be heard well above the music, keep the meters out of the red zone. Edit the track to the proper length, use the time-shift function to adjust the talk track relative to the music track, use the fade out effect at the end and export the completed project to wav or mp3 or whatever you prefer. Give it a name, maybe intro_flapjack.mp3 or your choice. Save it in a good spot because you’ll be using it again on your second and third podcasts. Are you satisfied with your new intro? Great.

Choose the tunes you want to include in your first podcast and move the files into the specific folder for this podcast. Let’s name the folder flapjack01. Now copy your intro mp3 into that folder. The folder should now contain a few song files and a copy of your intro file. Now we need to normalize the volume of those audio files. Normalizing means that the relative volume levels of those sound files are adjusted to identical (or almost identical). This is necessary so the person listening to your podcast won’t need to keep re-adjusting his volume button from one song to the next. Audacity has a normalize function that you can use, but I prefer a different program for normalization. It’s called mp3Gain. Search for it, download it, install it. Open mp3Gain and click on Add Folder. Select the folder for your first podcast. You will see the files in that folder listed. Click on analyze. You will see some of the files listed in red and others listed in black. Red means those files are so loud they will cause clipping (overdrive) at their current volume. Now click on Track Gain. After a few moments, some of those red filenames will change to black, meaning their volumes are now reduced to an acceptable level. Also, all the tracks volumes have been adjusted relative to each other (normalized). MP3Gain has a default normalization of 89db. You can probably bump this up to 93 or so if you like, but the default is more in line with the “industry standard”. If a couple of the tracks are still red, don’t worry because its probably due to only a few loud moments in the tune which we can easily remedy later with Audacity. Normalization is now completed. Close mp3Gain.

Now we’ll open a new project in Audacity. This project will be comprised of your normalized intro and the few normalized tunes in your flapjack01 folder. Start by opening the (normalized) intro mp3 in Audacity. You now have the choice of either importing the first music file into the project, or opening that music file in a separate Audacity window and use copy and paste to insert it right at the tail end of the intro. Copy and paste is the easiest method. Importing, on the other hand, offers you a more convenient flexibility while demanding a bit more of your computer’s resources. Let’s do copy and paste in a step by step routine.

1. (Already done) Open your intro file (mp3 normalized) in Audacity.

2. (Already done) Open the first music file of the cast in a new Audacity window.

3. Highlight the music file (the graph of the music file turns dark when highlighted). Copy the music file by either right-click on the graph and choose copy or click Edit from the toolbar and select Copy.

4. Click on the Audacity window containing the intro to bring it up, click on the tail end of the graph. There should now be a blinking cursor at the end of the intro sound graph. Right click at this point and select paste. Now you see the intro graph with the first music file glued to its tail.

5. Repeat the process, pasting each new tune to the tail end of the previous. When finished the results will be one long string of tunes in one window of Audacity. Great. You should notice that the window still bears the name of your intro only. On the top toolbar, select File and Save Project As.. whatever name you want to actually assign to your first podcast. If you want to keep your podcast files ordered in a nice fashion you might name those files consistently with a date-first format. Maybe something like 070401flapjkcast01 (meaning: 2007, April, 01, flapjack podcast #1).

6. This is a good time to actually listen to the assembled podcast and discover how well the program flows from one song to another. You’ll probably notice that, even though the tunes were normalized before pasting them into one long file, the graph shows a significant difference between apparent volume levels along the timeline. This is a typical characteristic of normalizing the files with the mp3Gain freeware. If you hadn’t normalized with mp3Gain, you could instead have chosen to normalize now with Audacity. The graph would look considerably smoother with Audacity normalization. You may prefer one over the other. Don’t do both.

7. I mentioned earlier, when we were normalizing with mp3Gain, not to worry about those few files that were still listed in red (indicating clipping) after completing the normalize. If you watch the graph scroll by while listening to the podcast, you can see those moments that are clipping in real time. There will most likely be only a few high peaks that clip and they can be easily reduced below 0db without affecting the overall quality of your cast. Use the Hard Limiter function listed in the Audacity Effects menu. Highlight the entire length of the cast, select Hard Limiter and adjust the dry level down slightly. After a few moments you will see that the limiter has reduced the peaks enough to prevent clipping.

8. Final editing might consist of deleting long periods of silence between songs or adding a few seconds of silence between songs. You may want to paste a short bumper somewhere in the middle of the program to remind your listeners who they are listening to. You may want to paste a short advertisement between two songs. It is all part of polishing and fine tuning your podcast.

9. When you are satisfied with the podcast, export to mp3. Before exporting, open the Audacity preferences (settings) and choose the bit rate for your podcast mp3 file. Stereo, 128 Kbps is typical but many podcasters prefer the luxurious 192 Kbps for music podcasts. Podcasts which are mostly talk can be exported at a much lower bit rate and mono which results in significantly smaller file sizes. Choose whatever you think is best, but be aware that peculiar bit rates (96 Kbps for instance) often times don’t play correctly in some (flash) players.

10. Let’s finish up the podcast file by editing the meta tags (ID2 or ID3 tags). I like to use the advanced tag editor provided in Windows Media Player because it allows me to specify the genre as “Podcast”. Some tag editors don’t include the word “podcast” in their list of music genres. This may or may not be an important issue to you. Any tag editor should provide plenty of form fields to give credit to yourself as the podcast artist, to the music artists as the original artists and include their website and your website addresses, include your logo image and license declaration.

11. When you are satisfied with the completed audio file the next step will be uploading it via FTP from your computer to the place from where it will be served to the public, i.e. your host. Several websites offer free podcast hosting, and they are good places to learn the methods of distributing your cast. If you are serious about the continuing production of podcasts, whether twice weekly, weekly, bi-weekly or monthly or even daily (takes a lot of stamina for daily), then you should consider finding a good, paid web host and purchasing your own domain name. You can get plenty of goodies for around a hundred bucks per year and if your podcast becomes really popular you can always upgrade to a plan that will accommodate any increase in listener numbers.

12. Build your website. Once your site is built, create the rss feed for your podcast and promote your podcast. You can find a wealth of information and tutorials about podcasting all over the web. PodcastAlley dotcom, PodShow dotcom, PodcastPickle dotcom are some of the most popular hangouts.