How To Create Podcasts Using Your PC

My friend Jake Ludington will walk you through this simple presentation…

This time around, I’m walking through the steps required to record and post your own podcast using tools virtually everyone has or can easily acquire on a tiny budget.

Ultimately, if you decide to podcast on a regular basis, some equipment upgrades such as the podcast recording kit I recently detailed at JakeLudington.com will drastically improve the sound quality. To learn the process, though, you don’t need anything fancy.

Depending on whether you already have one of those cheap microphones that the OEM dealers bundle with PCs, you can record a podcast without spending a dime.

If you don’t have a bundled microphone, the third-party equivalent costs between $8 and $15 at various electronics retailers.
The other piece of hardware you need is a set of headphones.

Headphones are important because although you need to monitor your recorded voice, you don’t want the microphone to pick up sound coming from desktop speakers. Ideally, headphones that cover your ears do the best job of isolating your recording sound from other audio distractions. Earbuds make an affordable alternative.

I recommend starting out with Audacity, an open source audio recording application. I like it so much, I bought a T-shirt from the company to show my support.  Audacity offers a solid complement of editing features with an interface simple enough for a novice.
It outputs MP3-format audio for distributing your podcast once you download the Lame MP3 encoder. From here onward, I’ll assume you have Audacity and Lame installed on your PC.

Note: To use Audacity, refer to the instructions in the section titled: “How To Create And Package Audio Products For Free”.
Once you have recorded your audio using the above instructions,  you can upload it  to a Web server and link to it in your blog post.
One thing for podcasting…

An important step is editing the ID3 tags for the audio file.

You can easily accomplish this by opening the file in Windows Media Player, iTunes, or one of many other popular music players.
In Windows Media Player, right-click on the file in the Now Playing list and choose Advanced Tag Editor. Fill in the Title and Artist fields at the very least, so the proper information about your podcast will display on iPods, Zen Micros, and other portable media players.
You need blogging software with support for enclosures to distribute the file via RSS, like Radio from UserLand, which is available for a $40 annual subscription.

Movable Type is another alternative; it’s free for personal use and has support for enclosures if you install a free plugin. Several other alternatives also exist.

Enclosures are essentially a method to let news aggregation clients like FeedDemon, Newsgator, or Doppler know there’s a file attachment associated with an RSS feed entry.

Assuming you are using a blogging tool with support for enclosures, you simply type a blog post as you normally would, and use a standard HREF link to the MP3 you uploaded to your server.

The blogging software determines that the link should be an enclosure in RSS based on the file type, and it makes an appropriate addition to the RSS feed.

If your blogging tool doesn’t support enclosures (Blogger, for instance, currently doesn’t), you can generate an free RSS feed with a FeedBurner account, which will support enclosures.

FeedBurner offers a straightforward wizard to walk you through the process. Once you have the FeedBurner feed created, you promote the link to the FeedBurner feed and encourage people to subscribe.

In each of these cases, the publication process is fairly similar. Upload the MP3 to wherever you have Web space capable of storing files. Make a blog entry just like you normally would, with a title, link, and description. Link to the MP3 in the blog description and post your entry.

If you want to keep your podcast separate from regular blog postings, or if you don’t currently have a blog, the simplest way I’ve found to publish a podcast is to sign up for the $5 account at Liberated Syndication and follow its podcast publishing wizard.

The service automatically uploads your MP3 file, and creates the RSS feed and blog post associated with the podcast, all in one easy step. I use Movable Type for all my regular podcasting and blogging, but am amazed at the simplicity of using Liberated Syndication. I created a very basic site at the service to demonstrate the output.

Jake Ludington is the author of the best-selling guide Converting VHS to DVD. He publishes audio and video tips at MediaBlab.com.