Setting up the Podcast

Image: Mark Thistle, A rough draft for the shows icon.

I listen to podcasts myself and over time I have listened to many. My current fav that I am catching up on is The Nerdist.

Given my love of multiple topics I decided to start a podcast that is eclectic like my hobbies and tastes. One of my best friends from Newfoundland that has similar tastes and I thought would be good for a podcast with me is Scott Parsons. He agreed to try this out with me.

We plan to record on Tuesday night's and so far have 2 shows done. I have been working on figuring out and getting the podcast ready. Personally I wanted to polish it more and make it perfect but then I listened to one Nerdist in particular where they discussed how creative people often want something to be perfect before exposing it. But then we can be caught up in self-doubt as we try to make it just so.

So, while I figure out how to podcast you can follow along with that journey as well. Here are some things I picked up as I have been setting up the podcast.

Setting up Recording

I am learning how to record and edit the podcast. To do this I used the following helpful apps:

• Audacity - For recording and editing the podcast
• Soundflower - to pipe inputs to a single output for piping audio inputs/outputs
• LadioCast - For pipping 2 inputs (mic and Google Hangout) into one output for Audacity so I can record my audio and the Google Hangout audio at the same time.

This YouTube video and website helped me a ton to get this working easily.
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Editing the Podcast

Editing the podcast was the next thing to learn. This is where Audacity shines again. It is simple to use and easy to apply effects to the recording to cleanup any line static, trim silence, etc.

Here is a good channel of tutorial about using Audacity: Audacity Tutorials

And for the love of all that is good, do not use the time shift tool unless you know what you are doing. I really messed up the first podcast using that.  Hence there are a coupe of odd blips and a bunch of missing content in the first episode.

Publishing

I am using Blogger to blog so I decided to use it are the site for the podcast as well for now. We may decide to spin it off later but for now I tried to keep this easy.

Here is the best articles I found on setting up the publishing of the podcast: How to Publish Your Podcast on iTunes

And this one explained Dropbox use much better: How To Podcast