Here are my thoughts on getting started in podcasting.

Picking a topic

First of all, decide what you want to record. It could be funny, serious, political, gabbing with friends, interviewing interesting people…the list could go on. I think this is the hardest part! You can script it, outline it, or just be off the cuff. It need not all sound professional produced or planned!

Recording

Next, you need a way to get your voice into digital form. There are two main ways of doing this - recording directly into your PC with a microphone, or using a specialized voice recorder and then transferring the files to your PC.

I think a must-have for doing podcasts is a portable voice recorder. The microphone quality is not as good as a stand-alone microphone, but the portability is important. Best Buy has a whole section on voice recorders. Be sure to buy one that has a USB cable or docking station - many of the lower end ones cannot be connected to a computer. I have an Olympus DS-2, which I like because it records in stereo and it has a microphone jack to plug in a better mic. The Olympus VN-480PC is a decent one that is available for $61 from Best Buy.

I’ve been interviewed for some professional-type podcasts, and they’ve had a very nice microphone coupled with a very nice voice recorder. I didn’t get the model numbers, but I think the cost is 10x what you can get started with, so if you really get serious, you can aspire to get higher end equipment.

When I got my portable voice recorder, I just carried it around with me whereever I went, and I would talk about things into. Most were pretty short clips, just a few seconds long. I did this to make a podcast at the Consumer Electronics Show this past January. When I got back to my computer, I downloaded all the clips and edited them together.

Editing

Once you get the audio clips onto your PC, you’ll need some audio editing software to edit all the tracks, add music, or do effects like fades. There is a free package, Audacity, which everybody talks about. I use Adobe Audition 1.5, which is definitely more complicated than it needs to be for simple podcast editing - it’s also pricey at $350. But, you can basically do anything under the sun with it. It’s now at version 2.0, and there is a 15 or 30 day tryout version that is downloadable from Adobe’s web site.

For a mid-range offering, I’d look at Sony SoundForge Audio Studio (see the CNET review), which retails for $70 at Best Buy. It also has a downloadable trial version, which if I remember correctly, was feature-crippled.

You can do a simple podcast without any fancy effects, show intros, show breaks or music just to get started. Once you develop the audio templates for these things, you can re-use them for future shows.

Hosting

Now that you’ve got an audio show put together, what’s next? If you have your own hosting space, you can put it there. We see the average podcast to be about 10-20 MB, so a bunch of them will eat up your hosting space quickly. There are many other hosting services out there that will host files starting at about $4-$5 per month. My favorite general hosting site is Go Daddy. There are also podcast-specific hosting sites, like Liberated Syndication.

The other thing that you need to do is create your RSS feed. The RSS feed describes both your series and each episode. You can create it by hand if you are daring, but there are also simple free tools to help you get started. I found a pretty good list of tools at Podcasting News. The free RSS generators I tried, Free Podcast Maker and Podifier, were quite buggy. However, using Free Podcast Maker, I was able to easily generate an RSS file. Neither application had an “import” function that appeared to work, so the best way to do this for free is to use Free Podcast Maker to generate your first RSS xml file, then for each new podcast episode that you generate, copy the “item” section for your new episode, editing the description as appropriate. The “item” section starts with <item> and ends with the next </item>.

Post the RSS/XML file on your web site too. That’s your podcast’s “RSS feed.” Remember where you posted it; you’ll need this web address to register with other services. Also, it’s worthwhile validating this feed file using the RSS Validator. This will tell you if you have an error in the file which needs to be corrected so that the RSS readers can correctly read your feed file.

Searching

How will people find your podcast? Hopefully, you’ve picked the appropriate keywords and description text for your RSS feed. The next must-do step is to register your podcast series with EveryZing. Once you do that, EveryZing will do speech recognition on all your podcasts and check back regularly for new ones. There are other places to register your podcast too.

Now you’ve got your own little audio corner of the web!