OK, Techies (or who Emma refers to as the IT crowd, to differentiate from my other friends), hold your breath. All you need to know is that my podcast’s feed is over here and that you can subscribe via iTunes. You’re free to go. The rest stay tuned, to use a cliché, because you’ll need this to survive in this civilization of ours. Survival of the fittest and all that. If you don’t know what it is here is podcast wikipedia entry (I reckon no point me consciously doing the work somebody already did, half of my on-line activity is just that any way). A podcast, very shortly, is an audio file that consists of a recording of what reminisces of a radio show. Formats are different, the main point is that is done, edited uploaded and it’s there for generations to download. So no, it’s not aired in real time, and no it’s not like radio streamed over the internet. But the variety of podcasts currently on the internet gives a great amounts of information and commentary, sometimes very substantial, about whatever you’re professionally or not-professionally interested in. And the best bit is: most often it ain’t costing you a thing, sir.

Few people (well, about 3) asked me recently about my football podcast, that I host and produce with Dan, including few (about 2) requests to explain how to make one. The reason I descend to you, little, non-tech people, is that it’s really easy and really handy. And I’ve been preaching internet marketing among my designer, artist, music, photographer friends, so it’s time to stand behind my words, put my hands where my mouth is… or something.

I’ll use ‘On the bench’ as a case study, but that does not mean it all is or has to be about football. Or thechnology. As a matter of fact my favourite podcasts include Smodcast (some chat from Kevin Smith and Scott Moiser, respectively director and producer of The Clerks), MediaTalk from Guaridan Unlimited, BBC World Service Documentary archive, 35 mm (film previews from Sky), SMS Text News (all things mobile) and Linux Outlaws (ok, this is techy, but they do drink beer!)

OTB production cycle starts with the research. This might seem obvious, but you need to do a good research and know what you’re talking about. (Unless it’s all stories of people you slept with in which case I advise you keep it to yourself). Even if your podcast will consist of interviews or sound clips or you playing on your hairbrush, you need research. So have a look through all the sources, probably mostly on-line, and take down some notes (google notebook is good for that, you can copy and paste pretty much everything into it, access it from which ever computer you work on and share with other people).

Secondly me and Dan call each other on Skype and record our conversation. Now, this could be a bit tricky. You can do it on a built in microphone, if you have one in your laptop, but it’s good to invest 20 quid in a set of usb headphones with a microphone. They make you feel a bit like you work in call-in centre but you can compensate for that with swearing. After all it’s not main stream media.

The way we record is that both of us record our own voice on our own machines. Dan messes around with his fancy mixers and mic, but I just use Audacity. It’s not ideal, but it does good enough job and comes for free. Once that’s done i sent my file over to Dan (can do it via Skype), who stitches them together. Again, it’s doable on audacity. If there’s 2 or more of you it’s good to make some noise on the beginning all at once - if it’s on all recordings it makes synchronization easier.

Dan sends me the file back and here the fun begins. I’m a very fussy editor, I clear the recording quite thoroughly and I cut out quite a lot of ‘dead wood’, for lack of better words. Usually it takes me about 40 minutes of editing for every finished 10 minutes of recording. But don’t get scared. I know people who barely edit at all. Depends on how you talk and how you want it to sound. While you’re editing, like with everything, remember to save your work often. There’s very few things worse than loosing several hours worth of editing labour.

Once I’m done with that I go on a hunt for intro. Now, what we usually use is a clip with piece of funny football commentary. This is not difficult to obtain. I sometimes listen to radio commentary on BBC 5 Live and record straight from then, you don’t wait long till the commentators say something stupid. I also find pieces of it on-line. Here are few examples:

The last one I shamelessly ripped of the Nike advert which includes Spiniard Ferrnando Torres, Liverpool’s Striker. I’m sure it breaches some sort of copy right even though on our website we gave the credit where it’s due. Music copy rights are a whole different issue, about which I might write in the near future. Try avoid using it unless you have the permission from the copy right holder. The music I usually use in the intro after he commentary was made by a friend of a friend ages ago and they say I can use it in podcasts how I want - so I stick to it. Or if you don’t have the permission make sure you’re not cashing in on your production (highly unlikely with podcasts any way). If they spot you they’ll most likely ask for the files to be taken down. Or at least you’ll know you got done for fighting for freedom..

I mix all the clips together in Audacity and export the ready thing into a mp3 on 64 bit rate. This is enough for good quality listening and makes the file bearable size. Try making sure the recording doesn’t go rapidly from quiet to very loud - mostly people listen to these things on mobile players and earphones, it would be unkind to blow their heads out since they shown so much interest in your work. You might want to put the ready file through a program called levelator - there are better ways of doing it but again this is free, quick etc etc. You might also want to put the ready file in iTunes, edit it’s properties and add stuff like cover art, name, artist, genre. Badly tagged files are the curse of the Internet and nicely done cover art makes your content stand out, especially for the owners of flashy iPhones and the like, who did not pay the fortune for colour screen to look at nothing.

All this work done, you’re ready to publish. OTB is published on Dan’s server through a content distribution platform called Drupal. If you don’t have your own website (your own server space) there are several places you can put the file in. Give me a shout in the comments and we’ll try and figure out the best way for you.

It’s good idea to publish the file together with show notes, so that the content of the file is clarified up front - especially if it doesn’t have a dedicated website. I do my show notes by going back to the notes I made for the recording and edit them into more or less readable piece. OTB show notes differ for every show: there’s an introduction, list of topics we’ve covered and some other details, like schedule of coming games, info on where our intro given week came from and links to things we talked about (example here).

The major point of podcasts is that if you continue with it you want it to be automatically delivered to your listeners and not have them come over to the website all the time to check if there’s a new episode out (most likely they won’t bother). Above 2nd episode you have to, absolutely have to have an RSS feed (wikipedia again). This is easily done with feedburner.com - mostly by simply giving them the address at which you post your pod. You get a ready link to your RSS feed, who ever subscribes to it will automatically be updated every time you post.

And off you go, bragging to your friends, boring them to death untill they have to listen to save their lives, posting on social networking site of choice (i.e. facebook) and casually mentioning it in every conversation. And writing about it on your blog.

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