New Ebook!
Thanks for visiting The Podcast Studio!
If you’re new to podcasting, I encourage you to check out my new ebook entitled, Virtual Podcast Seminar. It contains all the information from my Podcast Seminar series of posts PLUS expanded examples, more details and links for products and services that the beginning to intermediate podcaster needs.
It’s only $5 and is available as a PDF download NOW!
Podcast Rig: Fat 2 Fit Radio
A question came in that asked what I use to record my podcast. I had that posted over at the old Podcaster’s Friend site. It’s changed since then, so here it is.
It’s not the fanciest rig in the world, but it gets the job done. Currently my voice is captured by a MXL 990 microphone. It’s been discontinued, but there are similar condenser microphones for about the same price available. This was the microphone that I bought a long time ago and I continue to like it more than the more expensive microphones that I have. The audio is fed via XLR cable to a M-Audio Fast Track Pro USB audio interface. This one replaces the Tascam US122 that doesn’t have the best drivers for Windows Vista that I use on the Podcast Studio computer. The microphone stand is a basic desktop variety. I use probably the cheapest headphones around, the Behringer HPM1000. They work well enough.
Software wise, as I mentioned, I use a Windows Vista box. I record Skype audio with Callburner. It captures excellent audio without the hassle of the wires and complexity of a mix-minus setup. Check it out. I highly recommend it. I also record a backup out of the Line-out on the Fast Track to a portable music player with a Line-in jack. That’s just in case Callburner fails, or more commonly, Skype fails. Post production and editing is done using an old copy of Sony Vegas initially. It’s tightened up further by my partner using Audacity. The whole podcast is sent through The Levelator to smooth out the highs and lows before encoding using iTunes and uploading to the server using Filezilla.
That’s about it. Don’t forget, you can ask questions of any type by using the Ask A Question link above.
Podcasting Patent Awarded
VoloMedia Awarded the “Patent for Podcasting”
Free Podcast Host: PodBean
This is the second, and long overdue, review of free podcast hosting solutions. The last time I reviewed MyPodcast.com. This time I’m taking a look at PodBean.com.
It’s been so long since I signed up at PodBean that I couldn’t remember my username or password. However, PodBean sent me an e-mail oh so long ago that had that information in there. Nice.
PodBean seems to be running an implementation of Wordpress MU, the MU stands for Multiple Users. When you sign up your username is your subdomain. The one that I chose was MyThoughts. That’s part of why I didn’t remember what my username was. You would probably choose the name of your podcast as your username, or some derivative thereof.
Design
PodBean has multiple themes to choose from, all of them fairly basic. There are many widgets that you can use for the sidebar including the uber flexible Text widget that will allow you to include things like Twitter streams, or a Facebook badge should you choose to add those.
Media Handling
Upload of all files, for the free service, is handled through the File Manager where you can upload files as large as 30MB. This is the location where you would upload your podcast audio or video file. This is also where you’d upload any images that you’d like to include in your posts. The podcast files were easy to include in the posts after they were uploaded through the File Manager.
Quotas
The free PodBean service is limited to 100MB of upload capacity and 5GB of transfer per month. This is adequate for a new podcast considering you’ll have zero listeners to begin with, except you. There is an upgrade available that brings the quotas up to 1GB of upload capacity and 100GB of transfer per month for $1.99 a month. Not a bad upgrade for the money and gives you a lot more headroom in the capacity so you don’t have to archive old shows to make room for new ones.
Posting Podcasts
So, how easy was it to post podcasts? Extremely easy, especially for anyone that is familiar with Wordpress, MU or otherwise. You can add categories, tags, images, podcast media, text and then publish your podcast. Very simple. Comparing PodBean to the last free service that I reviewed, MyPodcast, I’d consider PodBean a large step up in terms of customize-ability and ease of use when making posts. While I didn’t have a problem making posts with either, being familiar with Wordpress made the PodBean experience to my liking.
Podcast Questions
I added a new page to the web site recently. The page is called Ask A Question. 
At the end of many of the posts I put my e-mail address and you, the reader, can send me questions about podcasting. Some of you do, but compared to the number of readers, the vast majority either don’t have questions, or don’t bother emailing. To make the asking of questions a little easier the Ask A Question page gives you a quick and easy form to send your podcast related question.
The best questions will be made into blog posts so all the readers can benefit from the questions and answers.
Give it a try!
The Recording Booth: Building a Professional Recording Studio
I’ve had a few inquiries about building a podcast studio. First, a milk crate lined with egg crate will be a great first recording booth. It isolates the sound to just what is in front of the microphone, mainly you. If you don’t want to talk into a little box on your desk, run a microphone stand into your closet, clothes and all, close the door and record there. If neither of these suggestions are for you, and you are looking to build a real recording booth/podcast studio, check out the video series over at Expert Village. There’s some good advice in general about recording audio.
The Recording Booth : Building a Professional Recording Studio — powered by ExpertVillage.com
Search Meter: A WordPress plugin
While listening to the Boagworld podcast a couple weeks back, Paul Boag had a recommendation that he took out of his new book. It was about using metrics for identifying holes in your content. He recommended looking at the searches that are done on your site. Those searches that yield zero search results are lost readers/viewers/listeners. What at great idea! Wordpress has built-in search ability, but it doesn’t give you statistics. I have Google Analytics on the site as well, but that doesn’t help with the internal search on the site.
Enter Search Meter.
Search Meter is a Wordpress plugin that does keeps record of searches and how many results are returned. It does exactly what Paul advocated. For example, on my podcast, Fat 2 Fit Radio, there were 15 plus searches for “zero calorie food” or some derivative thereof. Searches returned for that string on my site, ZERO! Time to put together an article or episode of the podcast on zero calorie food.
Give Search Meter a try and plug the holes in your content.
Search Meter: a WordPress plugin » Semicolon
DIY Microphone Stand
Dozens of people each week using the search term “DIY microphone stand” land here on The Podcast Studio. I did make a post back in March of 2007 showing a wire coat hanger twisted with some duck tape into a microphone stand. I’d consider that a more “makeshift microphone stand” than a true do-it-yourself project.
So in that DIY spirit, and in conjunction with NaPodPoMo, I give you my DIY microphone stand. The whole thing cost me $6.50 in parts from the local Lowe’s home center. Listen to the podcast below to find out all the parts to assemble your own stand.
The DIY Microphone stand is really only good for the handheld, SM58 style microphone. I couldn’t attach the Heil pictured above to this stand. I guess if you really wanted to you could attach a 3/4″ PVC cap to the top of the stand and then drill and insert a bolt with the exact thread count and size as the microphone attachment clip. This DIY mic stand, with a coat of black paint, would be almost passable especially if you mounted it to a round piece of wood instead of the two chunks that I have pictured.
Did you make a piece of your podcast studio yourself? Send me a picture and I’ll post it here on the blog.
Top 5 Free Podcaster Tools
I talked with a woman recently that is planning to start a podcast in the coming year. We setup a blog and went through how posts are made. She already had a web site so adding the podcast would cost next to or exactly nothing.
How is that you ask? With the Top 5 Free Podcaster Tools below.
#5 – Wordpress w/Podpress
Wordpress is the software that powers many a blog. It is free software that’s distributed by Wordpress.org. Any $3 web host with PHP and MySQL can host a Wordpress blog. With the addition of the Podpress plugin, which adds podcasting and, more importantly, iTunes support, you have a very powerful and capable podcast server. One caveat though, the latest version of Wordpress introduced a feature that keeps multiple revisions of posts. This broke the Podpress plugin. So far the creator of Podpress has not issued a patch for this problem. However there are two work arounds. One is to add another plug-in called No Revisions and the other is to add a couple lines of PHP code to the Podpress code. Even though this incompatibility exists, I have not found a better combination of software to create a podcast site.
#4 – Feedburner
Feedburner is a free service from Google that will keep track of subscribers to your podcast, downloads and provide some other great services. If you don’t have another way to get iTunes compatible tags in your feed, Feedburner will also take care of that for youl. One of my new favorite services is the subscribe to podcast/blog by e-mail. Readers/listeners can enter an e-mail address at your web site and they’ll get an e-mail every time you post an episode of your show. Very slick. It also integrates with Worpress with the use of the Feedsmith plugin.
#3 – Audacity
Audacity is the defacto standard for podcast recording. You can purchase more powerful programs, but for the price, FREE, you can’t beat it. Audacity has filters/effects for normalization, compression, noise removal, amplification and oh so much more. Being free has it’s ups and downs. While I have found the program very reliable, there are multiple stories of shows being lost because of program stability. Overall thought, Audacity is a solid piece of software.
#2 – Google Analytics
When you’re trying to find out where your listeners are coming from, nothing beats Google Analytics. This is also a free service from Google. By inserting a small chunk of supplied code into your web pages, you’ll gather a plethora of information about the people that visit your site. And another bonus, Google Analytics will integrate with Wordpress by using any number of great plug-ins. My current favorite plug-in to integrate the two is called Ultimate Google Analytics. The plug-in puts that Google created code on each and every page. That creates a complete picture of how each person visiting your site is using it.
#1 – Google Docs
Probably not an application that you’d expect to see on a podcast tool list, but Google Docs do one thing better than any other service out there. That thing is share documents. Each my co-host and I collaborate on show notes on Google Docs. Links, comments, e-mails, literally the complete show layout is input in a Google Doc. It is a marvellous tool.
That’s it. Get recording!
1UP Podcast Studio Disaster
Check out what happened to the 1UP podcast studio during a taping of the show. It looks like some sort of pipe burst or the sprinklers went off. Either way, water and podcast studio equipment, in either the video or audio variety, do not mix.