The question is:

Ken: I notice in one of your little videos that your mic appears to be upside down? is there an advantage to doing it that way… Also which type of boom stand are you using?… I have stands from my playing days, but they are to bulky and my desk is massive… Ted.

Let me say that I forgot to address which boom stand I use in the video. It is a ProBoom sold by BSW.

Enjoy the video, more to come soon! This week’s podcast is not going to be available on iTunes, it’s Flash based.

I had a problem with Flash, so for now, we’re going back to MP4!

Starting in about 3 weeks we are changing our format. Since we’ve been evolving somewhat over the last year and dealing with more than podcasting, we decided to change to The Media Marketing Podcast. We’re going to be dealing with ANYTHING marketing that uses all the various types of media.

We’ll be having tutorials on audio and video, things like green screen techniques, producing commercials and all sorts of great topics. I’ll be showing you how it’s done as well as what is working and what’s not working.

As part of the process, let me give you a seriously fantastic golden nugget. I’m reworking the studio to allow us to focus on video as well as audio, and part of that process means getting a ton of new toys, both hardware and software. I’m going to reveal a dynamite source to you for video production. It’s called Digital Juice – www.DigitalJuice.com. They’ve got some tools that will blow your mind. Transitions, backgrounds, music, sound effects, lower-thirds, animations, and more for the best price I’ve seen on the net.

That is NOT an affiliate link either, they’re just so good I wanted to tell you about them. If you’re doing video, you’ll love them, trust me. They’ve even some of their own tutorials that give you a peek into the world of production. I’ve used a lot of their products over the years and was recently able to get one of their Editor’s Toolkits. Incredible deal.

I ended up being down for a week while trying to get my system reinstalled and all of my programs and files put back in. Then I had to buy a nice little undelete program for $30 that saved my skin! It found and undeleted my Outlook database! So now I am back in action and can finally release this second installment in our trek to get traffic with YouTube. Enjoy!

Some videos on YouTube look good, most look terrible. Use my tips to get yours looking as good as they possibly can.

It’s going to probably take me 4 or 5 videos to get through all this, but it’ll be worth it.

You should still go read Episode 10 because there are some tips there. But to see how to do it, watch this episode.

And if you are looking for the full Adobe Audition 3.0 training I mentioned at the end of the show, you can find it at www.WalkerStudioPro.com.

I find that podcasting is more than just hardware, software, and engineering. Although those elements play a large role in the success of your podcast, personality and presence is just as important (if not more). Content is King in any venue. So to be a successful podcaster, you have to provide good content. Anybody can get good equipment and learn how to hook it up. They can buy an expensive recording application and learn how to use it. But presence behind the mic is a skill learned over time.

This week’s episode is a lot of fun and will give you some helpful tips guaranteed to make you a better podcaster.

By the way, I’m trying a new encoder this week and I’m able to provide you with a 640×480 video! Enjoy.

Stingers add a lot of pizaz to your podcast and make it sound more refined and ‘radio like’. I’m using Adobe Audition, but of course you could use any multi-track mixing program.

Today’s episode is not going to be about anything directly related to Podcasting. The reason I say it isn’t directly related is because it’s not going to be about technical stuff. Instead, we’re gonna talk about money. Cashola. Dinero.

Some of you are probably podcasting for fun, but a lot of you are probably podcasting in the hopes that it’s going to make you some money, either directly from the podcast or from the traffic that it generates.

What I wanna do is help you out with some other aspects of podcasting, or at least making money as a podcaster and I’m actually going to start giving you some tips to making money online, basically, getting you setup to be profitable with your podcast.

Before we get into this, I want to say that I realize I have not aired the final pictures of the studio job I started covering a couple of months ago. I still have the pictures, but I’m saving it for the next video podcast and since the last two episodes have not been video, it’s got to wait.

You’re listening to the Podcasting Blog, I’m your host Ken Walker, and I’ll be right back.

OK, so now I’ve probably got your curiosity peaked and you’re like ‘what in the world is he going to talk about?’, right? Simple really. Podcasting is done for various reasons. You could do it for fun, you could do it because you hope to get money through advertising, you could do it just to promote a product or service, but what it all boils down to usually, is that you hope to be generating some revenue, either directly or indirectly.

What I’m about to tell you may or may not be familiar to you. It’s called List Building. Basically it involves putting somewhere on your website, a form that people can fill out where they put maybe their name and email address, that’s usually the most popular information that is requested.

When they do that, they are added to a list of subscribers. Now this is different than your podcast subscribers, so don’t get the two confused. Podcast subscribers are the ones that listen with a pod catcher like iTunes. The subscribers I’m talking about have subscribed to your list, this could be a newsletter for example.

For those of you that are not Internet Marketers, the reason that you are building this list is so that you have a group of people that actually want to hear from you, that you can market to. They like you, they trust you, they want to hear from you.
What that means is that if you send them a newsletter and mention a product or service that you’re promoting, they’ll be more willing to buy it.

This works in just about any scenario. Even if you don’t have a product or a service to promote. Let’s say that you love playing guitar, so you start a podcast about playing guitar. You’re doing it just as a hobby, but then you get the idea that you’d like to make some money from it.

You can build your list up and then you can sign up as an affiliate of several products or companies. People listen to your podcast. They see that you know what you’re talking about, maybe you tell them how to play a song, or maybe you even show them with a video podcast. They learn to trust you.

If you put that optin form on your website and mention it in your podcasts, maybe you’ll give away a free ebook with guitar scales or something when they sign up, a lot of people will go ahead and optin. Then you’ll market to those people and push those affiliate products. Whenever they buy a product, you’ll get a percentage of the sale as your commission.

Internet Marketers do this all day long, so trust me it works.

If you’ve got 1,000 subscribers on your list, you could easily make $1,000 a month just off of commissions. And yes, if you have 2,000 people on your list, you’ll make about $2,000 a month.

So it’s about a dollar per subscriber per month and that’s basically because not everybody is going to buy the products you push, every month. This month, 10 people might buy, next month another 10 people might buy, that’s the way it works.

To make this work, you need to have a website, and this can even be a free blog, you need an account with an autoresponder, I use Aweber but there are others out there like Get Response.

Then you’re gonna create a list in the autoresponder, create a welcome message for the list, create a web form that asks for their name and email address, and this is all done by the autoresponder Aweber has a great interface for this. You put the web form code on your site and viola! I can say it a lot faster than you can actually do it, but it’s not too tough.

For those of you that are using WordPress, this is real easy. You get the web form code form your autoresponder. If you’ve got the latest version of WordPress it has widgets enabled already, if not, you’ll have to install widgets.

Login to your admin account and find Widgets. Add a text box and then paste the code you got from your autoresponder. Once you save it, you should see the webform in your sidebar, or wherever you put the text box.

Code Banter has a pretty neat plugin that will work with either Aweber or Get Response, that’s another autoresponder company. I’ll put the URL in the show notes. As I said, you install it as a plugin, then go to Options and you’ll see Code Banter Optin.

Choose your autoresponder, and populate the form. You can also use the extract function and just paste the aweber or get response code in the box, and extract it. It’s pretty easy really. It’s a widget so you still use the widget page to manage where it goes.

As a matter of fact, I’ve got a Code Banter Optin box on the page here at the Podcasting Blog. And if you sign up, I promise to send you promotions and try to get you to buy some stuff so I can make some money off of you.

Now the beauty of an autoresponder is not just so you can send out a newsletter. It also lets you send out messages at predetermined intervals. For example, you could say, OK once somebody signs up, send the welcome message right away. Then 2 days later send marketing email number 1. Three days after that, send marketing email number 2, and so on. So you can setup a sequence of emails to be sent out and try to get them to buy something or visit some website, and it all happens automatically.

The trick to getting people to subscribe is to offer them something for free, like a report, or a helpful manual, anything that they would be interested in.

And, the trick to making this work is traffic. You need a lot of people listening to you and to get that, you need a lot of people coming to your site. But that’s something we’ll talk about in another episode.

I’m Ken Walker with The Podcasting Blog. You can contact me at podcasting@seocompany.ca. Or visit our website at http://podcasting.seocompany.ca. Have a great weekend.

I can’t believe it, I am in front of the Podcasting Blog Mic. I mean, it has been a long time. Whew. I gotta tell ya, I have been busy, busy, busy. Between consulting and creating content for clients, I have just been swamped but this week things kinda slowed down so I’ve got some time to record an episode, so here it is. Check out what I’ve got lined up for you this episode.

News on podcast advertising, the government is using podcasting for weather delivery, and I’ve got an equipment review, well, it’s not a real review per se, because I didn’t buy it, but I do talk about it and I think that counts, right? It’s pricy too but I think it’s selling pretty good and to be honest, if you’re pretty serious about podcasting, and you’ve got the cash, why not right?

So let’s get started with some podcasting news.

Podcast Advertising

Recently there have been some ad effectiveness studies and they’ve shown that, get this, advertising during podcasts is extremely effective. The studies show that podcast audiences are loyal to the shows they listen to and actually pay attention to the ads that support the shows. I think this data is coming from Podtrac and TNS.

What it means is that if an ad is played, a podcast listener will actually listen to the ad and retain it in memory. The reason for this is simple.

Podcasts audiences are usually a pretty tight niche. Podcasts are very focused and kinda like user forums in the sense that a podcast is usually built around a particular topic and the listeners are very dedicated to that topic. So if an advertiser is smart, they can target their ad a lot better than with TV or radio, and sponsor the show that their target audience is listening too. Makes perfect sense.

Podtrac actually gave some stats, they say that of the respondents they tested, 68% of them were able to recall ads without any assistance or influence. That’s way higher than other media. In streaming video where they pop in ads, you’re looking at like 21%, mobile ads is 20% and television is way down there at 10%. What that means folks is that if you target your audience and find a good podcast, your ad is going to be more effective.

Now just recalling an ad doesn’t necessarily mean somebody is willing to spend money, but Podtrac’s studies did show a 73% increase in likelihood to use or buy an advertised product and that does mean somebody’s willing to spend money.

And I’ve got some even better news, according to Paul Verna who is a big time eMarketer analyst, the podcasting audience is going to rise 251% to 65 million by 2012. That means spending is also going to rise from $165 Million last year, to $435 Million.

It’s interesting to see the market going this way so forcibly given the fact that podcasting was originally free but I saw this coming a long time ago. Not to say there still won’t be free podcasts, I mean, this show is free right? Of course that’s why you haven’t gotten a new episode in like 2 months.

Weather To Go

What if you don’t have time to catch the morning weather forecast before you hop on your ten-speed and head to work? Well, if you live in the United States the National Weather Service might have a solution. You can get your weather to go in a podcast.

People living in the Baltimore-Washington region can already do that. The Weather Service’s Baltimore-Washington regional office in Sterling, Va., started making daily forecasts available about a year ago as a way to experiment with the technology. Steve Listemaa, an information technology officer in the regional office says “It’s an easier way to get our information out there,”

So far, only three Weather Service offices — Sterling; El Paso, Texas; and Anchorage, Alaska —make weather podcasts available, but those examples are indicative of various agencies’ efforts to explore how they can adapt podcast technology to disseminate information about services or events.

USA.gov lists a range of government podcast topics at USA.gov Podcasts.

Incidentally, one of the first government agencies to move into podcasting was the Defense Department. In the spring of 2005 it started offering audio downloads, you can check that out at The Pentagon Channel. Since then hey’ve had over 7 million podcasts downloaded.

The Pentagon Channel’s general manger, Brian Natwick, said he got the idea during a trip to Afghanistan in 2005 with the military. He got on an airplane and noticed that 80% of the soldiers onboard pulled out there iPods. It kinda hit him at that point that they needed to add podcasting as another distribution technique.

Apparently the Federal Aviation Administration is also exploring podcasts as a way to communicate with air traffic controllers.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention relies on podcasts to reach some public health professionals and health care providers with updates about vaccination issues and news such as E. coli outbreaks.

The Coast Guard’s District 13 headquartered in Seattle is eyeing podcasting as a possible recruiting tool. They even, check this out, they even bought some helmet cameras for the boat crew members to wear during missions and catch some of the action.

Paul Roszkowski, who helped work on the project said “What it allows them to do is to show a recruit, or a possible recruit, the different aspects of the job.”

So there you have it, the government has got several examples of how they have embraced podcasting and I think it’s on a pretty large scale so I think you can safely say podcasting is here to stay. And who knows, maybe you’ll start seeing Coast Guard recruiting podcasts on iTunes.

Podcast Equipment

Up next I’ve got a review of some equipment that is being sold by www.BSWusa.com. Now I love these people, I’ve bought a lot of my equipment from them, they’ve got great service and the sales people are knowledgeable, they’re not just order takers. However, I don’t get paid by them and they don’t even advertise on my show, so I’m gonna be blunt and honest about this review.

First off, it’s expensive. $1,700. So if you’re going to podcast for fun, you’re probably not going to be interested. But, if you’re doing some research for a corporate podcast, or you’re pretty serious about podcasting, it’s not a bad solution. It’s actually a bundle.

Now this is pro gear OK, so the price tag is to be expected. It comes with a broadcast mic, Electro-Voice RE-20. You get a Mackie Onyx1220 mixer which is kinda overkill for most podcasters but hey, sometimes we have to buy something that does way more than we need, just because of some of the features that it has right? Plus, it looks way more professional to have a 12 channel mixer on your desk.

In this package, the mixer comes with an OnyxFireWire card that lets you stream 12 independent channels of audio to your computer. Now that is a great feature.

It’s actually a pretty slick mixer and you can pick it up for $580 by itself. I’ll put a link to it in the show notes. Mackie Onyx1220

I’m in the market for a new mixer and after looking at this one, I’m seriously considering it.

You’re also gonna get dbx’s pro 1066 compressor which I think a compressor is essential for good podcasting. They’re throwing in an Atlas DS7 desk mic stand and a 5ft. cable. You also get a copy of the 272-page Podcast Solutions how to book.

However, $1,700 Ouch! Seriously though, it’s a nice package. My birthday was in March and apparently you missed it, so if you need my address, drop me an email.

By the way, I know a lot of you have been sending emails and I probably don’t respond quickly. I’ve got to tell you, I’ve got a serious spam problem, I logged into my email for the podcasting blog the other day, and there were like 19,000 emails and I seriously cannot go through all those. So, try posting a comment if something is urgent and I’ll try to get to it as soon as I can.

I’m Ken Walker, this is the Podcasting Blog.

Hopefully, I’m looking at another couple of days before my voice is usable. At that point, I’m going to do my best to get back on track with once a week episodes. The good news is, what I’m doing is working for me and I’m making money online! I’ve got some great ideas for shows in the future. Tips for really helping you get traffic and make money.

I know we got kinda side-stepped on the studio project, so the next show will finish that up. I’ll just quickly show you what the final result was and then go over some details. My original intent was to take you through a nice course over several weeks with some real structure. Unfortunately, I must confess, I’m not very good at structure. I’m an artist at heart and I act very sporatically, on impulse. So I think I’m going to stop trying to fool the world (and myself) and quit making promises I’ll never keep!

Spring is nearly here and I can’t wait to get outside. Not that I’ve stayed inside all winter, but I haven’t done many outside activities, as I have somewhat of a detest for coldness, preferring to stay inside where it is warm. What can I say, I grew up in Naples, Florida?

I shant leave you without any sort of tip that at least relates to podcasting, however little it be. So here it is. When editing audio clips, zoom into the wave form pretty close so that you can see where the actual wave is going positive and negative over the centerline. You want to make your cut right at the zero line. That will make your edit seemless and not give you any pops or noticable transitions. This works for a raw voice edit. If there is background noise, that is another story.

Awhile ago, I was doing a tutorial series on setting up a site for podcasting with Mighty Seek’s Podpress plugin. I mentioned going through the config stuff at a later date (I actually said I’d do it the next week, but I always make promises like that and end up getting distracted…so what’s new?). Well, I forgot about it and a listener reminded me about it. Since he is one of 5 people that actually listen to this podcast, I figured I should get it done for him. So that’s what I did, I interrupted our coverage of the studio installation up in Canada, just for one week. We’ll get back to it next time (notice I didn’t say “next week“)

This week’s video is in full blown 640×480 video! Special thanks to Craig Santini, The Hollywood Star Coach for his excellent work on the introduction this week. Check out his site at www.hollywoodstarcoach.com.

I took plenty of pictures and did some recording. This week’s episode shows the early stages and the whole episode was recorded on the Zoom H2. It’s not studio quality, but hey, there were saws and hammers going off all over the place so what would be the point in a studio recording?

I also gave Bob some training in general audio, as well as a quick start on Audition. I was there for 4 days, and would liked to have done more Audition training, but there were some construction hangups and the studio didn’t get finished until pretty late Saturday.

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Thank you, thank you, please take your seats, really. I’m glad to be here today and hopefully you’ll learn something new and exciting by the time this episode is over.

By the way, HostMonster really is a great hosting company so if you are needing to host a domain, click on one of their links on our page, it’s a great way to support the show.

Last week, I was looking for a new piece of hardware that we could review, something that would help podcasters out, and I saw the Zoom H2. Next week, I’m going up to Canada to setup a recording studio for Bob who’s the owner of SEOCompany. He’s gonna start doing SEO podcasts and some other audio projects, and we’re gonna document the whole process, building the studio, equipment setup, how to podcast, everything, so I thought, ‘Hey, what a great time to pickup a portable recorder.”

So I went ahead and ordered it, it showed up this Monday and let me tell you what, for $199, and being as small as it is, I’m pretty impressed. It came in a nice retail box, it has an adapter for plugging it into the wall, though it runs off of 2 AA batteries. It has an adapter for a standard mic stand, its got a base stand, an 1/8” to RCA stereo cable, a windscreen, a USB cable, earbuds, and a 512MB SD card, along with a carrying bag.

The most important thing to me for a portable rig is recording quality, so let’s start there. I’ve gotta say, for such a tiny device, I’m pretty impressed. The mics have a sensitivity adjustment, low, med, hi, and you can control noise pretty good. If you set it on low, ambient sounds aren’t strong, but of course you’ve got to move the H2 closer to the sound source. I’m gonna be playing some sound bytes for you in just a little bit, but one neat thing about the H2 is that it has 4 mics. Not only can you record in stereo on the front of the H2, but you can record in stereo on the back of the unit.

Now obviously, that is 4 tracks, so you’re gonna eat up a lot more memory doing that, but it’s kinda neat that you can. That means that if you wanted to record an interview, you place it between yourself and the other person, and you’re set.

You can actually record in 4 channel surround sound though, so if you were doing an interview with several people, you could get a little bit better control over the different parts, if you sit everyone in a cross patter, with the H2 in the middle.

The Front mics have a 90 degree pattern, while the back mics have a 120 degree pattern. You can select how you want to record though, in case you’re worried about storage space, you can record in simple stereo, while still using all 4 mics. It’s pretty versatile actually. It’s also got 2 mic active lights, one on each side, to let you know if the mic is on.

It’s got a LINE IN jack so you can plug in a CD player or an MP3 player, and if you plug in your earbuds, you get to monitor the recording while your recording, that is pretty neat, I was impressed with it when I did that.

If you’ve got a real nice condenser mic that’s battery powered, there’s an external mic jack so you can plug that in and just use the H2 as a recording device.

One thing I didn’t mention yet is the size. From pictures online, you can’t tell how big this thing is, and when I opened the box I was kinda surprised because it’s pretty small. It’s a little bigger than most cell phone today, but for what it does, it’s pretty tiny.

It’s not just a recorder, like those MP3 conference recorders that you can get at an office supply place, it’s actually geared towards musicians and it actually has software. It’s got a built-in metronome with lots of options for sounds , it’s got a built-in guitar tuner, and I don’t mean just frequency generator, it actually listens to your guitar and tells you if you’re in tune. You can even adjust the tuning so that you’re not right at 440 Hz, for example. I mean, for such a little device, they threw a lot of extra features in there and I am still pretty impressed with it. The things even got a built-in compressor.

The recording is very simple and straight forward, you select what mic configuration you want and hit the Record button. The monitoring starts, but it doesn’t start recording yet, that way you get to set your positioning and levels. Then you hit record again and it starts. Let’s go ahead and have a listen to a simple voice recording:

Hunting in Texas
Like I said, pretty impressive from my standpoint. I didn’t do any processing with that file, except for a little amplification to balance it out better with our broadcast.

As far as getting the audio out of the H2, it’s simple. You can either pull the SD card out, or you can hook it to the computer via USB cable. You do have to manually connect it, unless you plug it in with the H@ powered off, in which case it’ll turn on and be powered by the USB port.

You can even set the thing up as an Audio Interface and record straight to your computer. So if you’ve got a laptop and you’re out in the field, and you just wanna use the mic because it’s way better than your laptop’s built-in mic, go for it.

All in all, I think it’s a great deal and I’ll look forward to the trip to Canada where we’ll be documenting the construction of a recording room, I’ll use the H2 for interviews while the project gets underway.

That brings me to some other great news, Adobe has released Audition 3.0. In fact, I’m using it to record this podcast and so far, I’m loving it. There are a couple of quirks but I’m not gonna talk about anything until I’ve used the program for a good while and then I’ll give you the full run down.

I’m gonna end the show with a live recording done completely on the H2. This is my son Jacob and I playing a little bluegrass.

You’ve been listening to The Podcasting Blog with Ken Walker, have a great weekend and by all means, podcast about something, would ya?

OK, I was doing a little research on Adobe’s site and I ran across Hart Shafer’s blog and did some reading on Audition 3, I also checked out there promo stuff for it and let me tell you, I am totally ready to go with it. They’ve done a lot of great midi enhancements that I’m looking forward to checking out. You can now edit multiple tracks at the same time, inside of Multitrack view. They added auto-crossfade which has been missing since the days of Cool Edit Pro. They brought over the same type of behaviour that’s in Soundbooth, where you can click-n-drag your fades and get visual feedback, real-time, that’s a great addition. I didn’t see anything in there about auto-ducking which is something that Garageband does that I like. That way you can set a track up to duck, and anytime there is audio playing on another track, the ducked track will get much quieter, so like if you had your voice over on one track and a sound bed on a ducked track, the sound bed is at normal volume, when your voice over starts, the sound bed automatically gets quieter. If they didn’t add that, they really need to.

Now, they did add a Spot Healing brush. I use Photoshop and it has a tool that lets you blend in pixels based on the data of surrounding pixels and apparently, this is the audio version of that. They’ve also added some new effects, particularly some stuff geared towards guitar.

You can also record volume changes and pan in real-time, just by listening and adjusting. Other packages have been able to do that for a long time, so I’m glad to see Adobe finally get that in there. Basically, here’s how it work, you preview the file and make volume changes while the file is playing. You make the changes with an on-screen mixer. Those changes are entered in sort of a timeline and you can then look at Multitrack view and see the adjustments. You can even tweak ‘em after that. They call it Recordable Parameter Automation. Again, that’s been available for awhile in other apps like Cubase for example. Anyhow, it looks like the Audition team has been really listening to feedback and making some major fine tuning. It really looks like Audition is going to be a one stop shop for audio.

This won’t apply much to podcasting, but if you’re into surround sound stuff, they’ve now got a built-in surround encoder that is very visual and seems to be kinda neat.

It comes with 20 royalty free music beds too, which probably would appeal to podcasters. Considering what Garageband gives away, they might wanna pump that up a bit, but they do give you a good number of loops and for those of you that might not know what a loop is, it’s a segment of music by a particular instrument and you can use them to build a custom song. For example, you might find a drum groove that you can set to loop for a specified period of time, if you want it to run longer, you just streatch it out. But then you can find a Bass part and set that to loop. Then you can add an acoustic guitar, throw in a little lead, and you’ve got a full blown song that you can use for commercials or an intro, or whatever you want.

I am thrilled with all the new features, and I’m thrilled that I haven’t started my Audition training course yet because I’m gonna go ahead and wait a couple of weeks to do it with Audition 3. Hopefully, it’s gonna ship mid-November and you can be sure I’ll pick it up as soon as it’s available. Let’s go ahead and take a break, and I’ll be back with a little podcasting news.

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I was listening to Jason Van Orden’s podcast today and he talked about a lot of flap going around that podcasting is kinda dying and people are losing interest because the buzz has kinda faded away. He had a lot of good points though and he think what he was saying is a little bit more of an accurate representation of what’s going on, check is podcast out for the full scope, but basically he was saying that number one, more people are aware of what a podcast is now, so it’s not so much a ‘new thing’. Because it’s not so flashy now, some people are saying that it’s dying, but in reality what’s going on is that it’s being embraced as a standard tool. I think a lot of big media has jumped on the band wagon, lots of big companies use it for advertising and for promotion, and of course tons of Indy podcasters are out there, so it’s not the new thing, but that doesn’t mean it’s the ‘going out’ thing either. Jason mentioned that the Podcast and New Media Expo has officially changed its name, pretty much dropping the word ‘Podcast’ but like he says, what does that really matter? He devotes a good part of the show to talking about this and again, he makes some pretty good points, so check it out. I also like something he said about telling someone how to listen to your podcast. Why try to explain what a podcast is? Why try to tell them about RSS? Don’t, just say, ‘Do you use iTunes?, great, just do a search for, you know whatever your show is called.’ You don’t even have to call it a podcast anymore, call it Internet radio, call it a show, call it whatever makes it easy for people to understand. It’s not new anymore, but it’s not even close to dying out and people are always gonna need help with how to do it, and how to do it right.

Now, I tell people, anybody can podcast, and they can. By that though, I mean that anybody can learn about the equipment, they can decide to get cheap equipment and sound cheap, they can go all out and sound great, they can learn the tech side of it and be physically capable of podcasting, BUT, and this is a big but, producing a quality show has a lot more involved than just the knowledge of how to podcast. You’ve got to be entertaining, you’ve got to have personality, you’ve got to be creative. I think there’s always going to be a niche for people that can do that. For that reason, I think you’ll always have amatuers that are doing it for fun, and you’ll have pros that are doing it for money. You’ll have people try it for awhile and not get far with it because they just don’t have a great show, and you’ll have companies trying to make it work inhouse. I think that because podcasting is so simple, at its physical level, meaning you can spend a little bit of money and get a litte bit of training, and boom, you’re in business, but because of that, people try it and it doesn’t work for them because they don’t have the other key ingredients. Even on nationally syndicated TV, you can’t just have a studio, a camera man, and a producer. What’s on the show, the host, all that, has a big factor in whether it all works out. So, not to discourage anybody out there, but if you’re looking to start a podcast for fun, hey, great, check out our tutorials and post questions, I’m happy to help. But if you’re big business, think about having the podcast produced for you. Anyhow, that is my take on it, I wanna mention just one more thing I read today.

Here’s an interesting use of podcasting by what is typically a low-tech organization, not this one particularly, but for the most part small towns and villages are pretty low tech. But the Village of Riverside, Illinois is putting there board meetings online via podcast, and I just thought that was kinda interesting. They spent $1,250, I am assuming on equipment, and now they’re basically podcasting their meetings. Pretty neat, I’ve got a link to the whole article on my blog if you’d like to check it out. That’s it for this week, thanks for joining us. I’m Ken Walker, you’ve been listening to the Podcasting Blog. Have a great weekend.

Alright, Paul posted a comment about recording phone conversations, and again Paul, I apologize for this taking so long but I wanted to really deal with it and I didn’t want to break up the domain setup so I had to wait until that was over. But Paul’s question was “I used to do interviews over the telephone but now I am having a lot of trouble getting good quality. I am using a Toneport UX2, JK Audio Quick Tap and Cool Edit Pro 2.1. I only use the guest side of the interview and I have noticed that the line quality has been very poor. I am wondering if in the day of VOIP if it is practical to depend on the telephone for broadcast quality production.”

One thing I want to mention here first is that more and more phone companies are trying to use voice over IP so that they can compete with companies like Vonage and that can give you some pretty bad phone quality, that doesn’t have to do with the audio equipment, but just keep it in mind if you start hearing garbled audio.

As far as the audio equipment though, Paul is using a little box that you can pick up for $40 to $60 that you plug in between your telephone and handset. It gives you an 1/8” mono output that is a mix of both sides of the conversation. Now that is not the way I recommend you record because you can separate the voices and most of the time, you’ll have people talking over top of one another and you won’t be able to do anything about it.

JK Audio does have some better options, but of course you’re talking more money. The thing is though, and what I’m gonna be thinking about is the audio quality, especially of the host. For some reason, and I hear a lot of podcasts like this where they use a QuickTap or something and do the whole interview, but for some reason, it doesn’t sound right if the host is on the phone too, and that’s essentially what you get with this type of setup.

Before I get into other options, I mentioned briefly in my reply to Paul that you can use Skype to do recording and a lot of times, it sounds absolutely great. Now sometimes, it sounds bad, sometimes you get dropped all together, but most of the time, you get a good quality recording. The best part is, you get to use the same mic that you do your podcasts with, so you, as the host, sound fine. If your guest sounds like they’re on the phone, that’s kinda normal, but it gets even better. If they have a PC and a decent mic, they can sound just like they’re in the studio with you and that, of course, is the preferred scenario. There are plugin applications you can get for Skype, but you really don’t have to use them, I’ve setup Audition where one track is my mic, and another track is what comes over the speakers, which is the guest, and it records great, and I’ve got fantastic separation, especially if you use headphones during the conversation.

Now, that aside, JK Audio has a couple of great upgrades from a QuickTap that’ll let you have that ‘radio station talk-show quality’ audio. One is the Inline Patch Telephone Hybrid. It gives you the separation of voices, and you can even mix sound bytes in for the caller to hear. That’s gonna set you back about $230, but it’s a good step up just for the fact that it gives you separation. It doesn’t let you use your mic though, you still have to use the phone, so what I would do is use the phone, but still talk into your mic and record everything. That way, you can scrape your telephone version of your voice, and use the mic version, together with the telephone version of the caller, it’ll sound totally studio.

The other option, which is even more of an upgrade, and yes, much more expensive, is the Digital Telephone Hybrid, this is called the InnKeeper. It gives you an XLR input for your mic, and an XLR output for your caller’s audio. You also get a couple of other input and output options so there’s a lot more flexibility as far as how you get your audio into the call, and how you get it out.

The InnKeeper ain’t cheap though, you’re probably gonna spend about $460 for it, but if audio quality is tops on your list, that’s the way to go, believe it or not, if you’ve ever been in a radio station, they’ve got even more expensive equipment costing thousands of dollars, just for working with the telephone.

OK, so that is it for phones, let’s take a break and we’ll be right back.

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Welcome back everyone, I’ve just got some news that I want to talk about that I found on ITWeb that basically has Glen Verran saying that podcasting is pretty much for amateurs and isn’t profitable from a financial perspective. Glen hosted Podcamp and I’m a little disappointed that this would be his take on where podcasting is going but let me just start by hitting some of the highlights of the article.

Glenn and his wife host the ZAShow which is not listed in iTunes and I find that pretty interesting but I had a listen to the show and besides an extremely long introduction, the show sounds pretty good from a quality stand point.

I guess his biggest point about making money with a podcast is that once you bring finances onto the table, like with advertisers or sponsors, then you’re bound to producing content on a regular basis, and with his show being self-produced, they can put out content whenever they feel like it. He does pretty good though, it looks like from what I saw they post about once a week, but I think the point here is being missed and that is that there’s a big difference between someone who is podcasting for fun, and somebody who is podcasting for profit, whether that is an individual or a company.

And I think that you have to realize that some people, and some companies, are using podcasting very seriously as a way to reach others and it’s working, the thing is, for it to be used effectively, you have to do it on a higher level than just having somebody plug a mic into a computer and talk about last month’s company picnic, I mean you’ve got to put more into it than that.

One thing that was said in the article, by Dave Duarte, was that it’s getting a lot tougher to grab the attention of an audience, and that I would say is very true today. There is so much out there on the Net, so many podcasts, people just have this blank look on their faces and believe me, it is tough to get to the top of the pack. You can’t just have a great podcast, you’ve got to use tactics for getting traffic, you’ve got to get yourself in front of the audience, and THEN hit them with a great show. They’re not gonna keep coming back week after week and month after month, if your content isn’t fresh and if that content doesn’t give them something.

There’s a lot of podcasts out there though that do this very thing and they do it very well. The key is to find your niche market, find something that really provokes people and draws them, then provide that content to them at a very high quality.

I hear the music, and that means this week’s show is over. I’m your host, Ken Walker, if you’ve got anything you’d like to hear on the show, a topic for us to discuss, or just a question, post a comment or send me an email at podcasting@seocompany.ca. Until next time, happy podcasting.

Hey everybody thanks for listening, I tell you what, it has been another busy week for me I’ve had some very late nights and I think this Labor Day weekend is actually going to be spent outside. I’m actually gonna take Monday off and do a bit of relaxing with the family. Plus it’s gonna give me a great opportunity to do some grilling and I’ve got a special announcement on that in the second half of the show today.

I was reading an article today, and I’ll post the URL in the show notes that basically says podcasting is stagnate. Compared to blogs and video, it’s just not catching up. I don’t agree with that really because podcasting is huge, but the article states that podcasting is mostly useful during commutes, but that people can’t scan through their podcasts, it also says it’s hard to monetize on a podcast, that ‘big media’ control the podcast market.

These are actually pretty good points, but I wanna address ‘em. First off, just sign into iTunes and look at the podcasts and you’ll see that podcasting is far from stagnate, I mean it’s huge, but a lot of the content is video, which is still a podcast, it’s just a video podcast.

I understand it’s not as big as blogging because really, #1 it’s tons easier to blog than it is to podcast, and it takes a lot more work to do a podcast right. I mean, you need to get some good equipment, get a quiet place to record, edit, mix, post-production, all that, definitely more time involved than just sitting down and typing a few paragraphs on a blog, so really I doubt that podcasting is ever going to be as wide-spread as blogging, but I’ll tell you what’s real big today, and that’s combining blogging with podcasting, like what I do here.

When you blog and podcast together, I think you get the best of both worlds. Also, I don’t know about the usefulness statement he made about commuting, because, granted my situation is a little isolated, but I think there’s tons of people that sync up their iPods in the morning before they go to work and play them in their car on the commute. Or maybe they listen with their headphones on if they take a bus.

I mean, I just don’t really see that as being an issue. People subscribe to what they want to hear, and then they listen when there’s something to listen to.

Now the statement about monetization, that’s a very illusive thing. I know of some great success stories of people making a living off of their podcast, but you know what the key is there, high-quality. If you take a thousand people and they all start podcasting, I mean chances are a big percentage of them aren’t really gonna have what it takes. Let’s say you end up with a hundred people that are capable of doing a great job, they’ve got good ideas, a good personality, all that, of those probably like 10 are gonna know how to get the right equipment and use it to produce a good show, I mean it’s that simple. The other 990 shows just aren’t gonna do well, so what you end up with is 10 podcasts out of a 1,000 that do well and it’s obvious why.

Actually, the next statement kinda ties into this, he says big media really owns the town and sadly I think he’s pretty much right on that, but what that means is that to be competitive, you have to compete. You’ve gotta have somebody that knows what they’re doing behind the mic, somebody who knows how to mix and engineer everything, and lots of other resources.

Now it’s possible for a one-man show to do all that, but it’s hard. It kinda does show you though that podcasting is here to stay because a lot of these big media companies have put a lot of time and money and resources into setting these things up. I mean, all your major players have usually several podcasts, not just one.

And to be honest, I get a little depressed sometimes because I go to iTunes and I search for something, and yeah, there’s lots of big time media outfits that have podcasts and it makes it real hard for Indi podcasters.

I think the place that a podcaster is gonna find though, is in the niche markets. For the most part, and there’s always exceptions, but for the most part, you’re not gonna compete with the 5 million view podcasts, the topics that millions of people are interested in. I mean you can try, but competition is gonna be tough and big media is gonna get you.

I think what we need to focus on is a niche market where maybe 10,000 or 100,000 people would be interested and podcast about that. That kinda stuff is where the Indi podcaster is gonna thrive because big media isn’t gonna cover it. Now, like I said, there’s exceptions to the rule, we’ve all heard about successes like Grammar Girl. Big media isn’t really gonna be interested, but she’s an Indi podcaster that’s doing great and appealing to a large crowd.

This is kinda a good segue into my next segment, I’ve launched a new website catered to a specific niche market and we’ll take a look at it right after this message from our sponsor.

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One of my biggest goals with podcasting, and really a lot of the work I do, is that I wanna do something that I enjoy. I really like taking pictures and using Photoshop, and I do training on that. I was thinking awhile back though, about what I could do that would appeal to a larger group of people, not just computer people who like Photoshop.

So I was thinking about things I like to do and things I’m good at, and I decided to launch a website about outdoor grilling. I did a little bit of research and I think it’s something that’s really missing out there so I launched a new podcast at realmengrill.com.

The site is still pretty new, but I did manage to get my first episode live the other day, and I tell you what, when you hear this, I hope the site is back on. That domain is hosted at GoDaddy and I made an SSL Certificate change, after spending the whole night getting the site setup and looking good, it was working just fine, but I did this SSL Certificate change and all of a sudden everything on the site disappeared! I mean, I was down.

I called and talked to a rep and he assured me that it was only because of account changes and that after awhile it would come back up, so I’m praying that it will. Hopefully by the time you hear this podcast, I’ll be back online.

Anyhow, I’m gonna try a few things with the site. I’ve got a spot for Adwords there, I’ve signed up with some affiliate programs, and I’m gonna see how it works out. My model is that the podcast will provide content that people want, and that the site will be supported by the ads and sales of affiliate products.

It’s a niche market, it’s on the edge though because there’s lots of main stream cooking programs and big media could do something like this, so I’ll have to be creative and provide something unique, but I’m willing to take that chance. Check out the site and let me know what you think, I’ll be talking about the whole setup process in the near future, in case you’re thinking of setting up something like this. Again, it’s at realmengrill.com

That’s it for this week’s show, I’m Ken Walker, you can reach me at podcasting@seocompany.ca, or just post a comment on the blog. I’ll see you next week.

Talk about a busy week, I gotta tell you. I know I missed last week’s episode and I’m terribly sorry for that, but I have been getting totally swamped with work since I moved back to the states. I’ve got a new client that just seems to have tons of work for me to do, which is a good thing so no complaints here.

I have had like, honestly 15 minutes to work on my new book and at this rate it won’t be done until like Spring of 2008 but I’m gonna try to push a little harder. This week I wanted to do an equipment review but you know what? I haven’t bought anything recently so I think that means I’m gonna have to take an online trip and look for some new equipment. The new studio is great, I’m loving it. I’m in the basement, and I tell you what, there’s a big difference when sound can only come from two walls, especially when there isn’t anyone on the other side of those two walls! I mean, the only thing I have to worry about right now is the ceiling and I’m getting ready to solve that here pretty quick.

Let’s see, what else have I been up too? Oh yeah, I’m getting ready to launch two new websites, both podcasts of course, one on Photo Restoration and the other one is kinda top secret for right now but I’ll be letting you know once it’s up. So that’s kinda kept me busy as well, but enough about me. Let’s talk about you.

How’s your podcast doing? How’s your traffic? What do you use to track your traffic? That’s a question I see all the time, people wanna know how they can tell how many subscribers they’ve got, especially with iTunes.

You wanna know the honest truth, there’s no definite way to tell where all your listeners are coming from, but if you use FeedBurner, and only give out that feed, then you’ve got a good start at it. Aside from that though, let’s say you don’t use feed burner, or you didn’t find out about it until it was too late and you already put your feed in a ton of directories, you can still see what kinda traffic you’re getting just by checking your server logs, that’s right. Your server logs can actually tell you how often a certain file has been served. Pretty neat huh?

Now, I use a WordPress plugin called PodPress, and if you’re using WordPress, I totally recommend it, but that plugin has some great stats that it keeps for you and you can see all kinds of helpful info like what is the most popular podcast, what format is most popular, if you do multiple formats, you can see how many people play the file on the website, which would mean they probably aren’t subscribed, and you can see how many are playing it by linking straight to it, which means more than likely they’re subscribed. Pretty nice anyhow, I like it.

I’d like to do a little survey here and this is on going so even if you hear this podcast late, still comment on it, but I’d like to know what software everybody’s using to create their podcast. I’ve said before I mostly use Audition but on occasion I’ll jump over to my Mac and use GarageBand, BTW did you see that iLife 08 is out? I saw that on Apple’s site the other day and I need to see if I can upgrade.

Anyhow, post a comment and let me know cause if there’s a large base of a certain app, I’ll consider doing some tutorials on that app and in case you didn’t know I do video tutorials on lots of software so I can get you some pretty nice tutorials. I’m planning on doing something in Audition pretty soon. I downloaded the latest version of that though, and there was something really weird.

In Audition 1.5 I can select different input and output devices. I can say, I want to record with my Edirol and I want to play back with my computer’s sound card. For some reason though, it wouldn’t work in 2.0, it didn’t even look like it was an option, so the trial was short lived, since I absolutely have to work that way.

Hey, since this episode is so scatter brained, I had to get something out this week and time has just been alluding me, but since this podcast is pretty much all over the topical spectrum, is anybody out there using podcasting and it’s just to support a real product?

The reason I’m asking is because that’s what I plan to do with my secret site, so I’d like to know how it’s working if there’s anybody out there doing it. Here’s my plan. I’ve got a great idea for a product and a site, I’m getting the site ready and I’ll start recording for the podcast pretty soon, but what I’m gonna do is sell the product on the site, and do a weekly podcast with tips that of course relate to what is being sold on the site.

It’s a pretty classic idea but I’d like to hear from somebody that’s doing it successfully. I mean, I’ve got another site, a client actually, that sells online training, and they’ve got a site that I do a video podcast for and it’s free training. They do that kinda hoping people will go to the paid site when they need full training on something, right?

Well, what I’m gonna do, and I’ll let you know how it works out, but I’m gonna do something very similar but of course it will be me doing it for my own site. The reason I think this’ll work is because one thing about selling online, and this is a big one, is trust.

To get users to buy from you you have to build this trust relationship and I think a podcast is really good for that. I don’t mean like just an audio file that plays on the website either, lots of people do that, I mean a regular produced show. Really, that’s what a lot of people and companies do. If you’ve ever watched PhotoshopTV, which is a weekly podcast on Photoshop, that’s basically their model. They provide somewhat of an entertaining podcast, and you learn a little along the way. Then they have their training and other stuff you can buy on the site. I’ve watched them for a long time but today I finally had the bright idea of checking their Alexa ranking…it’s like 300,000 which isn’t stellar but if you think about it in context to their niche, it’s pretty good. I mean if you can rank 300k and you’re only appealing to people that are into Photoshop, then I think you’re doing pretty good.

Incidentally, if you don’t know about Alexa, check it out it’s a great way to see how a site ranks as far as traffic and there’s lots of uses for that kinda info.

Which, you know what, now that I mentioned Alexa, I mean this is a totally mixed up episode and I’m sure you can tell that it’s very late and I’ve been very busy, but now that I mentioned Alexa, let me tell you what to do if you wanna use some of the marketing tips I’ve been giving in the last few episodes.

Go to Alexa and on their home page, they rank the top sites. These are sites that get the most traffic on the Internet. See if you can find some site that is climbing the charts and go there. Poke around and look for ways to post comments or a forum, or whatever, especially social networking sites, and post something about your podcast, in context of course. Look for ways to promote yourself.

Another good site to visit is statsaholic.com/sethgodin that shows you specifically Web 2.0 sites and you can see their rankings and whether they’re going up or down in popularity. You’ll see that pretty much all the Web 2.0 sites are social networking, but I’ll tell you a good tactic, look for one that is young, but on the rise, and sign up. You’ll get in early and can start building a reputation. Then use it to send traffic to your blog or podcast.

Anyhow, thanks for tuning in, hopefully things will settle down a bit soon, but to be honest, I don’t foresee it in the near future. I am starting to train my wife to edit though, so maybe I’ll be able to get more recording done, and she can do my editing.

I’m Ken Walker, you’ve been listening to the Podcasting Blog. Email me at podcasting@seocompany.ca, or post a comment. See you next week.

Hey everybody, thanks for joining us, I’m Ken Walker and you’re listening to The Podcasting Blog where I give you all sorts of tips for podcasting and promoting your podcast. I’ve been wanting to focus on podcast promotion for awhile and throw together some tactics that are pretty easy to do and will help you get your podcast out there for people to hear, or in the case of a video podcast, get it out there for them to see.

We talked last week about MySpace and that’s a great tool, but something that is even better, if you’re doing a video podcast, is sites like Google Video and YouTube, which is now owned by Google. Obviously these sites are geared specifically for video sharing, but what they offer is not only hosting, but promotion, you can get your podcast noticed by literally thousands of users.

The way it works is you create your content, it can be a screen capture or just you sitting in front of a webcam, or whatever other type of video content you want to create. You sign up with the service, which again is free, and then upload your video. You get to put a title, a description, and tags for the video, that obviously would have keywords in them.

It’s a little different though than typical SEO stuff, because you want to give your video a title that flows nice. So even though you use keywords, you’re not gonna use typical SEO tactics like ‘Tennis shoes for tennis pros and tennis players playing tennis’. That’s something you might put on an article, but not as a video title because you want it to flow naturally and look appealing, so you might just use ‘The Tennis Shoes Pro Players Prefer’. Then of course your video is about what shoes you recommend.

Let’s say you sign up for YouTube, you select a keyword rich title, for your description you want it rather lengthy, but again, it needs to read smoothly. I’m talking 1 to 2 paragraphs about what the video content is. Don’t make it look like an ad, put real helpful information in there. You can even put the URL of your site, but it’s not gonna be clickable.

Fill out the optional information because all it does is help people to potentially find your video and the more people see your video, the more visitors you’ll get.

So your podcast is about tennis for example, you do a video podcast on tennis shoes you recommend, and put some text as a description, maybe even your show notes. Then you upload the video.

Requirement may vary a little, but typically your video should have a resolution of 320×240 and be fairly short, like 3-5 minutes. Now, if your podcast is longer than that, no big deal, but what you’ll want to do is post some highlights. So you would edit your full length podcast so it’s less than 5 minutes, and then use that excerpt version to upload. The reason is, first the sites have limitations of what they’ll allow, and second, people don’t have long attention spans. So you want to hit them hard and fast and make them want to hear your whole podcast.

I do Photoshop training and I’m starting a new site specifically for photo restoration and portrait enhancement. Now my episodes are gonna be around 15 to 20 minutes long, so what I’ll do is edit that down to a manageable size and upload it. Another thing you can do if you absolutely want to upload it all, is cut it into 5 minute pieces and upload those separately. People can watch the first 5 minutes and decide if they want to see the rest. It’s really easy for them to find the rest of the parts because they’ll show up on the page.

Now, let me give you some pointers. First, make sure your URL appears periodically throughout the video. That way people will know where it came from and that’s seriously important because once the video is on YouTube or Google Video, anybody is going to be able to grab it, so you want your name out there. Put your logo or URL on the opening and closing screens.

Make the video unique, you’re only gonna stand out if you’re doing something different, and if you’re doing it well, which, to be honest, doing something real well is basically unique today because there are lots of people out there putting poorly produced audio and video up on YouTube. So do a good job and you’ll stand out.

For podcasts, I recommend that you release a new episode once a week, if you have the content and you’re doing it full time, consider twice a week because the more new content you have, the more exposure you’ll get and that reminds me of the podcast that I’m gonna review this week, he does an excellent job of that and right after this short break, we’ll check it out.

Mysterious Universe
One of the things that I look for in a podcast, is not only good quality content and audio, but a successful marketing strategy because when we see people doing something and being successful at it, that means we can learn from them and possibly improve what we’re doing.

That’s exactly what I found with this week’s review. I’ve actually been listening to this podcast for a very long time because it’s a well done podcast and the content is very interesting. It’s called Mysterious Universe and it covers some very interesting topics but that’s not really our focus here. What we want to focus on is the technical aspects and the marketing plan.

First of all, the content that was selected is appealing due to its nature, so it was a good selection for a podcast. Second, the audio quality is excellent and Benjamin does a great job of production work. Sometimes the audio interludes are a little long for my taste but I think his intent is to actually showcase the musicians a bit and give them some exposure.

Third is Benjamin’s marketing strategy. He puts out a free episode of Mysterious Universe every week and it is a high class production, but the way he makes his money, and he is a full time podcaster now, the way he makes his money is in providing an extended version, as well as an extra episode for premium subscribers. So if you sign up, you get more content, and since you’ve heard his free podcast, you basically know what you’re getting. He essentially hooks you with the free stuff, it’s a great tactic.

Another thing that I like about the podcast is that he’s very personal with his listeners, he even asks them to vote for him on podcastalley and a lot of times he shows up in the top 10. If you’ve got some time, definitely check out the show for its audio quality and program structure. You can find it at mysteriousuniverse.org or do a search on iTunes for Mysterious Universe.

Conclusion
We have once again reached the end of another episode of The Podcasting Blog. You can reach me at podcasting@seocompany.ca. The Podcasting Blog is sponsored in part by the SEO Company. Please visit their website at www.seocompany.ca. Have a great weekend.

Welcome to the show everyone, you’re listening to the podcast that helps you know how to podcast, otherwise known as The Podcasting Blog. If you follow the show then you know that I just moved back to the States and let me tell you I am tickled about that. I mean, I loved being down in Mexico and I was doing some volunteer work at an orphanage, which was great and I’m glad I got to do it, but I am loving everything about our new house. I’m out in the country, there’s grass everywhere, I’ve got a nice studio in my basement already setup, there’s grass in the yard, we bought a real nice place with plenty of room and there’s even grass outside!

Anyhow, we were in Mexico for about a year and it was a terribly long drive, but once we were in Missouri it was almost like I couldn’t sleep, I mean I was driving at like 2 a.m. which is not a good time for me normally, but I was pretty excited. Can you believe we bought our house just from pictures and we had some friends come look at it? I mean we picked it out, made an offer, did closing, everything without even making a trip to Ohio. Well, that’s enough about me, what are we gonna talk about this week?

I thought I’d talk a little about using MySpace to promote your podcast and what I’m gonna talk about is a technique that can get you a thousand visitors a day to your podcast page or for that matter any other page, it’s actually a technique used by a lot of people to bring traffic to a web site when promoting a product or service.

I’m just gonna give you a general overview because going in depth on this could take an hour or even more, but it’s really simple and it’s very effective.

In case you don’t know, MySpace is a big social network that people use for all kinds of socializing and I don’t advocate the site or pretty much most anything that goes on there, but if you use it strictly for business, it’s an effective marketing tool.

Basically, you sign up and setup a profile, then you start looking for friends, this is the way a normal user would use it. You can share pictures, music, blogs all sorts of stuff, and it has an email system for sending messages to other users, which is what we wanna do.

The nice thing about it, is that you can target people who would be interested in your podcast. And, with some tools and techniques that I’ll mention here, you’ll be able to reach hundreds of people a day and get a large portion of them over to your podcast.

You’ll go to MySpace.com and setup an account. Follow the instructions and setup your profile. Now, it’s very important that you fill out a good bit of the profile and direct it to the type of audience you’re wanting to reach. I’m gonna take photography as my example. So I’d setup my profile and for a title I’d put something like “I love taking pictures of nature!” then for an About Me I’d put something like “Photography is more than a hobby for me, I’m addicted! I take my camera everywhere I go and I take hundreds of shots a week.” So you’d put something that is related to your podcast, assuming your podcast is on photography, but you don’t directly promote your podcast, that is bad and will make you look like a spammer.

Next, after you setup your profile, add some pictures. You want a picture of yourself, maybe some with the family, maybe, in the case of photography, you could upload some pictures that you’ve shot. You want all your pictures to look good, especially the one of you. You’ll get more friends if the images look good. Also think about using a taller than normal picture because those stand out more.

Now you’re ready to find your target group. The basic process goes like this, you find a group that is interested on what you’re podcasting about, and there will probably not be any trouble finding one because there’s groups on everything at MySpace. Then you get an application like BadderAdder that’s available at www.badderadder.com. It’s about $40 but when you see what it can do, you’ll think it’s well worth it.

Badder Adder, and there are lots of other apps out there that do the same thing, but it goes through the group and extracts the profiles of the other members of the group. It then lets you send requests to all of those members and ask them to add you as a friend. You make it sound very friendly and personal. You add about 400 friends a day like this, and it’s mostly automatic. You have a limit by MySpace of around 4-500 friends per day, so you want to stay at or below 400.

Once you have a few hundred friends added, you’ll then use the Badder Adder to send a comment to all of those friends. Again, this is an automatic process. You might want to start with something friendly and casual, then the next day send a comment that has an HTML link to your podcast. Say something like “Hey, this is a neat podcast on photography, check it out!”

The thing is, the more friends you have, the more visitors to your podcast you’ll get. It’s a great tool to help get the word out about your podcast, and again, you’re probably reaching the people that would actually be interested in it.

There are a couple of things to watch for. You have to track the friends that you add, so that you don’t try to add the same ones again, plus you need to track the comments that you send each day, because you can only send like 225 comments a day. So day one of your marketing campaign you send 225 comments. Day two, you send another 225 but you send them to other friends, not the same ones as the first batch.

Another thing that some people do, that I’ll just mention here, is they setup several different profiles and actually do this whole thing over again with each profile. That way they overcome the 225 comments a day limitation because they’re theoretically a different profile and different person.

Social bookmarking is definitely a marketing tool that’s hot today and if you get in on it, you can promote your podcast directly to people that would appreciate it the most.

Let’s take a quick break and when we come back, I’ve got a podcast review that shows us what NOT to do.

Reviewing Mr. SEO’s Podcast

This is Ken Walker with The Podcasting Blog, and this week, just like I promised, I’ve got an example of what NOT to do with your podcast. Now, first let me start by saying that I do not like slamming people and I don’t want to make anybody feel bad. The whole goal of this segment is to hopefully help people create a better podcast and be more successful. That goes for the podcasters that I review, as well as my listeners because I don’t want them making the same mistakes.

With that said, the podcast I want you to listen to this week violates nearly every rule that I’ve ever mentioned on my blog. The show is called Search Engine Optimization Mr. SEO’s Podcast. The iTunes link will be in the show notes but you can search for Search Engine Optimization and I think it’ll show up somewhere in the list.

I wanna say again that my goal is not to bash but to provide constructive criticism. If you listen to the show, and the last episode, which as of this recording is July 17th, 2007, gives you the absolute best example of breaking all the rules.

First off, the show is very noisy. Wherever it is being recorded has got a very high noise floor, this last episode sounds like they’re recording in the bathroom. Reverberation is incredible. There’s noises from hitting the mic or mic stand, there’s shuffling around, there’s a general room ambience that is extremely loud, lots of hum and hiss.

It almost sounds like they’re using one mic and one of the hosts is fairly into the mic, while the other is across the room or something because you can barely hear him at all. The thing is, it’s not like he’s a background engineer, he’s actually a part of the show and you can barely hear him.

They also seem to be stumbling along almost aimlessly through their dialog. I mean, it appears that they have at least some idea of what they’re going to talk about, at least a topic, but not really any specifics. Now I don’t mind the whole casual conversation style and by no means do you have to have a scripted podcast, but you should at least have some notes handy and have a good understanding of what you’re going to present.

The show is also completely unedited. What surprised me is that it does start out with a jingle written just for the show, which would make you think that they take some time to produce a nice show, but that’s it, once the jingle is over, you’re dropped into this rough and raw conversation that is completely unpolished. Now, if you’re a good host and you’ve been doing it for years, it’s entirely possible to pull off a show with very little editing, but that is not the case here. You’ll find lots of dead space you’ll find tangents that they go off on that have absolutely nothing to do with the topic.

If you’re doing a podcast that is strictly for entertainment and you have something incredibly funny to say or something that will attract your audience, great for you, but if your podcast is informative, you need to try to be informative without a ton of fluff because it totally distracts from the goal of the podcast. Some might say ‘Well, it’s adding some personality to the show.’ And that might be the case, but you can do that tastefully without being over bearing, which I think you’ll agree, is the case with Mr. SEO’s podcast.

Another thing is that if your podcast is designed for a professional audience, avoid profanity. If you’re not trying to be Howard Stern, steer clear of vulgarity. I realize that Joe and Alan are Italian and have the whole Broncs thing to live up to, but it does very little for the show.

On another note, the podcast is very sporadically put out meaning you’re not building up listener anticipation because they realize that you may or may not have a new episode to listen to next week. I recommend you stick to one podcast a week unless you have tons of stuff to talk about, then you can go for more frequent, but once a month is not enough. Your listeners are gonna just about forget you’re there.

Now Joe, if you’re out there listening, my goal here is again, not to bash you, I wanna point out some things that could be improved and could actually take your show from what it is today and turn it into something of a household word in SEO, something that everybody talks about, like ‘Hey, you know what I heard on Mr. SEO yesterday?’. I mean it sounds for the most part like you know some SEO so if you put that together with a nice setup, you should be set and if you’re big into SEO you should be making the bucks and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t put a little more time and money into some better equipment and getting the thing done a lot nicer.

That’s my take, check it out for yourself, you can do a search on iTunes for Search Engine Optimization or Mr. SEO or if you want, check out their website at mr dash seo.com

This episode of The Podcasting Blog was prerecorded on location in New Madison, OH. For questions, comments, or offers of money, please send an email to podcasting@seocompany.ca. The Podcasting Blog is sponsored in part by the SEO Company. Please visit their website at www.seocompany.ca. The Podcasting Blog is a weekly podcast featuring helpful podcasting information. The views and opinions expressed on the show have absolutely no warranty and may be deemed dangerous. Children should not podcast without adult supervision.

MySpace Friend Adder

Welcome to the show everyone, you’re listening to the podcast that tells you how to podcast, otherwise known as The Podcasting Blog. This week, we’re gonna look at some of the common mistakes that corporate podcasters and marketers make.

Podcasting is a great tool for marketing and it’s something that can really help your company out in many ways. You can showcase product, you can provide education about your services, there’s even some companies out there doing internal podcasts as a way to reach employees and not have to coordinate meetings. But having a successful podcast can be tricky, especially when you see these common pitfalls.

What I wanna do is help you not to make those mistakes, and of course we do podcasts for a number of organizations and having a professional service do the actual production is definitely something that you should consider, but in the event that you’re wanting to try to make a go at it with inhouse staff, consider those that have gone before you and learn from their blunders.

First of all, don’t completely look to the IT department to produce the podcast. Now, that’s not to say you don’t have some talented people in there, you may very well have the next Casey Kasem, but chances are you don’t. IT people are generally NOT the marketing type. Now, they might know what an RSS syndication is, they might know how to encode an audio file to MP3, but they’re not marketers.

What you’ve got to understand here is that usually, it takes a concerted effort and you’ll have to pull resources from different groups inside your company. If you’re thinking about podcasting or you’ve pretty much made up your mind to do it, meet with IT and Marketing. Have them work together. You’re gonna want a people person behind the mic, you’ll want somebody that is pretty bright, but friendly and understands your marketing objectives.

Even if your podcast is going to be a weekly update from the CEO or if it’s going to talk about products that you offer, and have guests from within the company that were involved in creating those products, you’ll want to have a host. That host should probably not be of the geekier sort, even if you’re a tech company.

On the flip side, don’t let Marketing run the whole show. I’m stressing here that you need a well rounded effort by at least two departments, possibly even more. The marketing people will know what works and what will attract your customers and achieve your goals, but they probably don’t know a whole lot about multitrack mixing, or video compression codecs. So again, work together. Even within our consulting firm here, I don’t handle everything and Bob doesn’t handle everything. Bob knows way more about SEO and some of the more technical site aspects, he knows what works to get traffic. Bob doesn’t know very much about audio.

I’ve been doing computer work for 15 years but I chose to focus more on the presentation aspect of things so I do audio and graphics. I don’t like spending my time figuring out keywords and phrases, I’d rather be behind a mic or creating training in Photoshop.

The picture that I wanna paint here is, don’t leave it up to one individual. Work as a team and draw from each other’s knowledge.

Now, that considered, I’ve got an eye opener for you. Even though most techies love gadgets and marketing people love working with people, podcasting is a whole new animal. You’re delving into the realm of audio and that involves knowledge of hardware, software, and technique. Buying audio equipment isn’t the same as buying a hard drive or video card. Connecting a phantom powered condenser mic to a USB mixer is not the same as plugging in a USB printer.

Learning mic technique mic doesn’t just come naturally. There are things you have to learn, so my advice would be that if you truly want to make your podcast successful, seek out a podcast consultant that has a great sounding podcast. Of course, the one that pops into my mind is…well, me, but you need to get somebody that can blend everything together and help out with the unknown stuff. Believe me, you can go out there and spend weeks reading and researching and you’ll learn something, but you don’t actually learn until you start doing it yourself. Save yourself the time and the learning curve by having someone show you, or at least talk to you over the phone and be there for you when you run into trouble.

That brings me to my next point. If you’re gonna do this, do it. You know as well as I do that for something to be successful it takes effort. If you’re gonna make it work, you’ve got to do real planning and you’ve got to spend real money. It doesn’t have to cost a whole lot, but look at it as any other marketing investment. Budget for it. Plan on doing it for 6 months at least, before expecting results. You’ve got to allow time for people to know about the podcast because it’s not like you’re throwing them a commercial on TV or the radio. They’ll only know about your podcast if you make it known to them, or if somebody tells them about it. And then, they’ll only hear it if they go to your site or if they subscribe to the feed.

Let me outline it for you. If you don’t spend time and money in doing it right, it won’t be successful. So there’s no point in doing a ‘one timer’, just to get a feel for it, because it’s not gonna work. Again, if you’re not sure if it’s gonna fit the bill, talk to a podcast consultant and see if your company has something to offer or if you should just stay in the ‘90s.

And I alluded to something a moment ago when I said that podcasts aren’t like advertisements on TV or radio. This is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. You have to promote your show, look at it as advertising for advertising. You’re gonna have to spend some of your efforts on getting listeners to know about your podcast. That doesn’t mean that you spend lots of money on a billboard with your podcast feed on it. It means you do things like setup a blog and have somebody in your company regularly blog, as in daily. This is where the IT department comes in, do the normal promotion and optimization stuff that you’d do for other pages that you want to get traffic for.

Submit your podcast to popular directories like iTunes. Getting your podcast listed in popular directories is a big step towards generating a listener base.

One thing to think about is ‘What are you going to podcast about?’. What will you be giving listeners that will make them want to come back and listen or make them subscribe. Does your company offer software security products and you want to talk about what’s going on in the security world? Do you sell tennis shoes? You could sponsor a podcast covering sporting events, or you could just make your own podcast.

Let’s take a quick break and when we come back, I’ll have another podcast review.

Podcast Review
This is Ken Walker with The Podcasting Blog, and I’ve got another podcast review for you this week. Now you all know that I’m big on audio quality right? So what I decided to do was find a podcast that features great audio quality, not to mention they have good content as well. It’s another instructional podcast, actually teaching you Spanish and since I’m still here in Mexico, for another few days anyhow, I thought it only appropriate.

But there’s one totally neat thing about this podcast. It’s very well done, I like the format..but the hosts are…get this…Irish. I mean, I think they’re Irish, if they’re Scottish, please forgive me. I didn’t take the time to go to their website and read much about them, but listening to them is very entertaining because of course I love the whole Celtic scene and then to hear them speak very good Spanish is pretty neat indeed.

Again, this is an example of a very well done podcast, it’s got great audio and I couldn’t find anything wrong to be honest, but next time, I promise to review a podcast that is totally opposite and has tons of problems…and believe me, no problem finding one of those. Now I typically stay away from the big corporate podcasts like CNN type stuff because those people have been in the radio and TV business for years and it’s not too hard for them to make the transition. So I’m trying to stick more with your Indi type podcasts, and this one is called, oddly enough, Learn Spanish with Coffee Break Spanish. I’ll post a link in the show notes but for you iTunes users, just do a search for Learn Spanish with Coffee Break Spanish and you can easily subscribe or at least give them a listen and hear the excellent audio quality, along with those lovely accents.

This episode of The Podcasting Blog was prerecorded on location in Ensenada, Mexico. For questions, comments, or offers of money, please send an email to podcasting@seocompany.ca. The Podcasting Blog is sponsored in part by the SEO Company. Please visit their website at www.seocompany.ca. The Podcasting Blog is a weekly podcast featuring helpful podcasting information. The views and opinions expressed on the show have absolutely no warranty and may be deemed dangerous. Children should not podcast without adult supervision.

Hey everybody, welcome to the show. If you missed last week’s episode, we’re going over possible noise causing problems and I’m talking about the typical things that I check when I’m troubleshooting a noise problem. In the last episode we talked about external noise problems like actual sound sources that might introduce noise into your podcast, we talked about some of the things that you can do to help eliminate or at least reduce that type of noise, and this week we’re gonna talk about a different type of noise, what I’ll call ‘internal’ noise or noise that is actually generated electronically and has a lot to do with the recording system itself.

This is an area that we can actually get into some pretty deep electronics theory, and I’m by no means an electronic engineer so I’m not gonna attempt to explain all that, so I’ll try to deal with it more in laymen’s terms. I have to say this though, audio equipment operates and transmits information by sending little pulses of electricity, and for right now I’m talking strictly about analog audio. Things like a microphone or an electric guitar.

What that means in a nut shell is that it is susceptible to interference from other electrical sources, like for example a computer, a high voltage cable, certain types of lighting. So there are a lot of factors to consider here and if I can’t fit it all into one episode, we’ll break it into two.

The important thing here is that you understand that electrical devices can interfere with other electrical devices, especially electronic devices. That interference can cause noise.

One of the most common types of noise is from a ground loop. Let’s say you’ve got two devices, and obviously it could be more, but to keep it simple we’ve got two. They are connected together, this could be a mixer and the sound card on your computer. Now that’s almost always a bad way to record but it’ll illustrate this problem for us.

These two devices, the mixer and the computer, are connected together, but somehow there is an alternate route that electricity can take between the two devices, and that causes your hum.

Now, if you’re using Audition or even older versions of Cool Edit Pro, you can actually analyze frequencies and if you do that, you’ll notice a large peak in the 50-60Hz range or even possibly one of its harmonics. If that’s the case, then you’ve probably got a ground loop problem. So how do you fix it?

Well, first of all, unplug everything. Disconnect your whole setup, whether it’s big or small. Electrically disconnect it, and disconnect audio cables too. I wanna mention something at this point, you might have a buddy or find an article online that tells you how to modify your gear by eliminating the ground and that your ground loop problem will disappear, don’t do it. It’s very dangerous, I’ve been shocked by the strings on an electric guitar because of fixes like that. I’ve even been hit on stage when my lips touched a mic. It doesn’t feel good, trust me.

We’re gonna start with the power distribution. Good audio quality starts with a good power distribution center. Fortunately the requirements for podcasters is not the same as for a band where they’ve got to run electricity sometimes a very long distance. Usually you’re plugged in just a few feet from the power source. Think about that though if the need arises for an extension cord, don’t use just any cord.

So here’s what you do. For simplicities sake, I’ve gotta select a specific scenario because there are thousands of possibilities and finding true ground loop problems can be a real bear. Let’s say I’ve got a computer, a Firewire audio capture device, an external mic preamp, and an effects processor, just for fun. I’m gonna turn my computer on. I’ll then make sure that my Firewire card is turned on and load up Audition or whatever application I’m running.

If you can monitor frequencies and levels, do it without anything plugged into the Firewire device. So your checking the noise floor of the device itself. You can even do a recording and see if there is any hum or noise.

More than likely, you’re not gonna have noise especially if the Firewire card is powered by the computer. Once you’ve verified that though, plug in the next device and connect the audio cables. In our example here it would probably be the effects processor. Again, nothing plugged into the input of the effects processor, but the output of the effects processor is plugged into the input of the Firewire card. Again, check your noise levels, and what we’re doing here applies really to any type of electronic noise like a hum or buzz, we’re just specifically troubleshooting a possible ground loop.

If you notice the hum at this point, don’t write the equipment off as being bad just yet, there are some things to check. Make sure your audio cables do not run parallel with power cables, in fact, it’s best if they don’t touch at all. If they have to touch, make sure they cross each other at right angles. This minimizes interference from the electrical lines.

Also, make sure the audio cables don’t pass over the equipment. Inside external audio equipment like an effects processor or compressor, there is a power supply. Pay attention to where you plug the power cable into the unit. That’s where the power supply is and your audio cable can pick up hum if it’s too close to that area.

Some other things to avoid, fluorescent lighting, older computer monitors, the big kind. Today’s LCD monitors aren’t a problem but those older ones have some very high voltages going on inside and can cause some problems if your audio cables are too close.

So let’s say that you check all this out and the effects processor still has a hum. Assuming, of course, that you have visual feedback that the hum is in the 50-60Hz range, more than likely there’s a ground problem inside the unit and you might want to get it checked out. To be sure, if you can, take the unit out of the audio chain. Turn it off. Plug in your other equipment, again, one at a time.

If you don’t have any more problem, have the unit checked out, and again, I don’t recommend you use alternate methods of modifying the power cable or anything, there are lift circuits that you can buy that will fix the problem, but that still isn’t the safest thing you can do, for either your equipment or the people operating it. I will give you a link in the show notes to an article on making modifications like this, just for educational purposes, but again I recommend you find an alternate route.

In addition to a ground loop problem, we’ve also got things that I kinda mentioned a minute ago, audio cables touching or being near to power cables, that’s bad. You can have radio interference, so make sure there isn’t anything that emits radio waves, microwave ovens can cause problems, cell phones can cause problems.

Let’s see, another tip is don’t buy cheap audio cables. You don’t have to spend $40 on a guitar cable, but don’t get the $5 ones either. Radio Shack has some real cheap junk, I know they’ve got a line of high priced cables too, but I always recommend you buy your audio cables from a music store. See if you can get shielded cables, and that’ll help reduce your noise and interference as well.

I think I’m gonna stop right here, but definitely check your system out, audio quality is a pretty big deal and anything you can do to eliminate problems like hum or buzz, is always good for your podcast. And let’s face it, people expect the best, so let’s try to give it to them.

Thanks for joining me this week, hopefully this info was helpful to you. Next week I’m not sure what I’m gonna do but I am getting ready to move back to Ohio so I’m gonna be putting the show together a bit early and I don’t have any extra filler shows right now, so hopefully I can get moved and get the studio setup in time to record after next week. I’m gonna start a series on using Camtasia Studio to record a video podcast and I think that’s gonna be a great sequence of tutorials because software training and online presentations is just so popular today, it’s a great way to reach your audience and Camtasia Studio is an excellent tool for that so look for those episodes coming sometime in August. I’m Ken Walker and you’ve been listening to The Podcasting Blog, the podcast that helps you podcast. Email me at podcasting@seocompany.ca or post a comment on the blog. Talk to you next week.

Here’s a typical situation, I hear this all the time, you’re listening to a podcast and there’s this hum or buzz and it’s pretty constant throughout the podcast. A couple of weeks ago I reviewed a podcast and I mentioned a little hum or buzz problem that they have, and believe me, it’s not nearly as bad as some of the other podcasts I hear out there.

Now first of all, let me state this, having a noise like that, a hum or buzz, will bring your podcast down a notch or two in the eyes of your listeners because it sounds like you’re using cheap gear. And you might be using cheap gear, but even if you are, most of the time, you can eliminate that noise or at least get it down real low.

If someone calls me and they say, ‘Ken, we’ve got noise in our podcast.’ Here’s what I do. First of all, I walk into the recording room. I turn on everything that is on during a typical recording. Then I listen. This is the most important part. Listen. As human beings we take our environment for granted because we’re subject to so much noise.

I do a little hunting once in awhile and I love going out in the woods. You know what I learned very early on about animals. They have great hearing. You know why? Because it’s not usually loud or noisy in their environment. That means their ears are very sensitive.

Well, the opposite holds true for us because we live in busy cities and listen to loud music and our environment is usually not perfectly silent. Plus, we have a tendency to ignore sounds that are constant. We shut them out and almost don’t hear them.

Now why am I talking about environment so much? Because there are two main categories of noise that can affect your recording. External sources, and internal sources. We’ll deal with the internal sources, which is electronically induced noise, in just a minute, but the first thing for us to look at is external sources.

Is the room quiet? Do you hear a PC fan? Most PCs have two fans now adays, a fan for the power supply, and a fan for the CPU. Both of which can be noisy. There’s a whole market of products that reduce the noise of PCs, from super quiet fans to water cooling systems, totally elaborate products. I’ll go ahead and give you a link to just one site that I found that features products like this, but there are tons of them. Always check out the product before you buy! I’m not promoting any sites or any products, I’m just giving you an idea of what’s out there.

So the computer itself is a great place to start. Can you hear it? Why is that important? Because if you can hear it, so can your microphone. Now laptops are notorious for this type of noise. They’ve got a little bitty fan and it spins fast so that it can move enough air to cool those components inside. If you’re recording on a laptop, some of the preventative measures you can take include supporting the laptop on a cooling device so that it doesn’t get so hot. Make sure there’s room for air to circulate underneath the laptop and think about getting a device that will cool it externally.

Listen for other noises though, an air conditioner running in another room or in air ducts. Some of this stuff can be removed with software later, or at least toned down, but it’s way better to get rid of it before hand, if at all possible.

I understand that not everybody can have a nice studio to record in, no big deal, but make the best of what you’ve got. Another nice tool to have is of course some sort of noise gate or downward expander that will ignore the noise when you’re not talking, but again, we’re wanting to see if we can eliminate the source of the noise, and then we deal with things that we can’t fix.

Sit in the room all by yourself, this is what I do. Listen. Is it quiet? If you’re using software that shows you your levels, turn it on. I know Audition is what I record in most of the time, and it shows me audio levels before I record. What are those levels?

Sound levels are measured in what is called dBs or decibels. I won’t get into the theory because who cares about the theories. What we wanna know is, what is loud and what is acceptable. If you can, stop by a Radio Shack or music store and you can actually get a device that will measure your room’s sound level. That way if you don’t use Audition or another software program that shows you accurate levels, you can still get an idea how you stack up to some numbers that I’m gonna give you.

The point at which you can actually hear something, the point that sound is strong enough to vibrate those little bones in your ear, I want you to think about as 0 dB. So at that point, if something gets just a little louder, you’ll be able to hear it.

From that point, things roughly increase exponentially, so some of the numbers I’m gonna give you might not make sense at first, but remember that the dB levels increase exponentially, just like with a guitar amp or a stereo. I don’t wanna get off topic here, but, have you ever noticed that a 100 Watt stereo is not twice as loud as a 50 Watt stereo? It has to do with kinda the same principal, but it’s almost the inverse, and here’s what I mean.

A typical studio, and we’re talking pro studio, is gonna be around 20 dB. That’s pretty quiet. A museum or library might be around 40 dB, but that doesn’t mean it’s twice as loud as the studio. It’s actually about a quarter as loud. Conversational speech is about 60 dB but a typical vacuum cleaner is about 70 dB, the speech is actually half as loud as the vacuum cleaner and I think you’ll agree that a vacuum cleaner is way louder than a typical conversation, especially if you’ve ever tried to carry on a conversation while a vacuum cleaner is running. So you’ve got to understand that relationship there with decibels. It’s not a set amount that is the same from top to bottom, every gain in dB is done on a ratio. A jet, which is like 100 dB, is 8 times as loud as the 70 dB vacuum cleaner.

I know I’m not explaining all of this in depth, but that’s not my goal, my goal is to tell you what numbers to shoot for. If you can get 20 dB, more power to you, 30 is great. Most houses are around 50, but that’s not adequate. If you’re at 50 dB, you’re gonna get lots of atmosphere that you don’t want in your podcast. If you can get below 50, you’ll probably have a great recording.

I’ll mention that in Audition, as well as other recording software, you’re seeing a reference level and the decibel readings are in relation to that reference. So let’s say that the reference is 85 dB, that means that your 0 reading is an 85 dB sound and that means that -15 dB is 15 decibels quieter than your reference, which means it would be 70 dB.

So now I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent, and I’m gonna take a short break and we’ll see if I can get back to some practical application of all these decibels.

(BREAK)

So what does all that mean, well, for starters, it means that if your software is showing you decibel readings in negative numbers, like Audition does, you can’t really know what level you’re talking about unless you know the reference level. Now, in Audition, I believe the reference level is 85 dB, so that means that if your level shows up in Audition as -60 dB, that you’ve got a 25 dB room, because 85 minus 60 is 25. If you’ve got that, you’re doing great.

Remember, a good recording environment is going to be around 15-20 dB, but that’s a good studio. Not a lot of studios even have a noise floor that low.

Now, when I go into a room to troubleshoot a problem like this, I like to take a reading before I do anything, that way, I can say ‘I dropped your noise floor 10 dB!’ or whatever. Sit in the room, don’t move around or talk, take a reading if you can, then isolate problem sources.

When you’ve found and eliminated everything you can think of, take another reading and see how much it helped.

Now, what are some common problems and how do you eliminate them? Well, we’ve already talked about the PC fan and other types of fans. You can get quieter fans, or, if it’s doable, you can separate the mic from the PC by having them in separate rooms.

This is actually what I do because my studio is a room built inside of a room, and if I had the PC in the room, it would raise my noise floor up a bit. Now my PC is liquid cooled and it doesn’t have a single fan in it, but there are still noises like the hard drive. So I’ve got my PC on the other side of one of my walls, and all the cables go through the wall. I get a very quiet room. I’d even do more to it to reduce the sound, but I’m getting ready to move to another state in a couple of weeks, so I’ll wait til I get there.

But you can do the same thing, run a mic cable into an adjacent room if you have to, hit the record button, and walk over to the other room and do your podcast there. You can shut the door, close the window, you don’t have all that equipment. And that can even be a good idea because it’ll change your environment and maybe make it a little ‘less’ studio which some people feel more comfortable in.

Another thing you can do is plug your mic in, put some headphones on and crank the gain up quite a bit and listen to the room amplified, that’ll help you isolate noise problems, and it’ll also help you find a good spot for your mic. There might be directions that your mic just shouldn’t be pointed. So mic position is another way to eliminate noise problems.

Thanks for joining me this week, I hope you can take this information and apply it to your specific situation. Next week we’ll deal with the flip-side and talk about electrical noise and some of the typical noise problems that I find, as well as the solutions. I’m Ken Walker and you’ve been listening to The Podcasting Blog, the podcast that helps you podcast. Email me at podcasting@seocompany.ca or post a comment on the blog. Talk to you next week.

This week’s show is a screencast so if you’re watching on a video capable device, you’ll be able to follow along and see what I’m doing.

If you heard an episode that I had awhile ago, I mentioned the coming release of Sound Booth, and from their promotional hype, it looked real interesting and sounded like it might be great for podcasters. So I was pretty excited when I found that it had actually been released and I could download a demo.

What I found was a pretty impressive list of improvements that I’d honestly like them to incorporate into Audition, and hopefully they’ll do a little of that in the next major release of Audition. I doubt they will though because Sound Booth supports the Mac OS, not including Power PC versions, so that means the code for the app is very different than the code for Audition. So, chances are, it’s not just simply porting things over to Audition, but it would be nice if they could rework Audition to include some of these features. Let’s look at the good features first, which by far are more numerous than the bad.

First of all, I really liked the way you can fade the volumes in and out. You see these icons at the beginning and end of the wav file? You can click and drag these back and forth to fade your audio, and you can drag up and down to adjust the envelope or shape of the fade. Best of all, you get real time graphics that represent what’s going on. I love this feature.

This is akin to the hot scrubable volume levels, just select a section of audio, and this dB level appears here, where you can click and drag to scrub through the volume, again, with real time graphical representation. Very nice.

Since we’re talking about volume, another neat feature is this instant Louder button. The first time you click it, the selected audio is normalized to -.5 dB. If you click it after that, the volume is amplified by 3dB, except if it’s already at -.5 dB, in which case it is hard clipped. Obviously you wouldn’t want to go overboard with that, but it is a nice button.

There are some other neat things like the way the noise reduction works and the Rumble filter which does a pretty good job, but what I really like is Autoheal!

You know what I’ve been wanting in Audition for a long time? I use Photoshop a lot and for a long time, Photoshop has had the ability to fix little imperfections in pictures by sampling the pixels around the bad spot, and it’ll heal that bad spot. So you can remove things like moles or pimples or whatever. I thought, ‘You know, why can’t they do that with audio?’ Well guess what, now they do.

Auto heal lets you select a region of audio, and I’m gonna go into spectral view, and I’ll play this file and you’ll see we’ve got a foreign sound. I can select that area, and click Autoheal. Sound Booth analyzes the surrounding audio and heals it seamlessly, very nice.

I used to have to do this same thing in Audition, but I’d have to just remove the offending sound, and that made it sound sometimes, hollow in that region. Auto Heal fills the area in and does a pretty decent job at it.

If you want to change the duration of your audio narrations, it’s got some pretty good algorithms for doing that, and it will work more aggressively on silent sections which will help your audio, especially voice, not sound so chipmunk.

There features are all pretty nice, but what is probably the absolute best thing is Auto Compose. Wait till you hear what this does.

With music beds, one thing is that you pretty much have to pick a stock bed which will be at a stock length, usually like 15 seconds, 30 seconds, a minute, 3 minutes, etc… And if you had, say a 45 second promo, you’d have to either stretch a shorter clip, or shrink a longer clip, or do some fancy looping or something.

Well, with Auto Compose, you select from the included scores, which I only got one with the demo, I don’t know how many you get in the full version, and you can specify the length that it runs. It takes care of making it all fit into that length.

It doesn’t stop there though. You have the power to adjust what is called Intensity. This is, essentially, how many instruments are included in the mix. If you raise the intensity, you’ll have more instruments playing harder, if you lower it, you’ll only have a few softer instruments.

Something that’s really neat though is that you don’t just have to set the intensity for the whole song, you have keyframes that you can adjust and you can have the song start out mellow, and then build up to very intense, at a specific location, then go back down to mellow! Now that is pretty neat.

You can do the same thing with the volume and with the amount of synthesizer that is in the mix. I see this feature going a long way fast.

And incidentally, it’s real easy to make loops in Sound Booth, I won’t demo it in this video, but it is a fairly simple process.

So, those are some of the high points, things that really hit me as intuitive and nice. So what about the bad points?

Well, there really aren’t a LOT of bad points, but to me they are BIG bad points. First of all, absolutely no video editing at all. Now, I didn’t really expect that there would be, because after all, it’s called SOUND Booth right? But, since it’s geared towards doing video projects, adding music or reworking the audio in a video, I had hoped there might be some basic editing. Cutting video or transitions or something.

And the second bad point, which is by far the real kicker, there is no multi-track support what-so-ever! In my preliminary review that was based on their marketing hype, I mentioned that they didn’t mention anything about multiple tracks, and my fears were justified. In fact, I haven’t even found a way that you can work with multiple audio files on the same timeline, so you can’t even have your Auto Compose score and add several small audio clips playing back to back, and mix all that down together. I mean, Lame with a capitol L.

That means that mixing in commercials would be impossible. Now, I think they’re trying to compete with things like Garage Band but not having multi-track is going to absolutely kill them. If they added that though, they would probably get a big share of the market because so many of the features are very nice. They need to add some support for enhanced podcasts, and they’d completely take over.

Since we’re focused on podcasting here, I’ll tell you where this app would fit in. If you typically sit down and record your podcast, then you just want to edit it, as a whole, then save it as an MP3, you’re fine. You could even add the Auto Compose score and give it a pretty nice sound, although, I’m not sure you could have a separate intro and outro for the score.

Also, if you do a screencast like this one, you could record your video, edit it in another app, like Camtasia Studio for example, and then you could bring in the edited video and work on the audio, which is what I did for this episode.

If you do commercials, or have an interview that you have to mix in, or anything more complex than just sitting down and recording the whole podcast at once, it’s not gonna work for you.

So there you have it, you can decide for yourself if it’ll do what you want. Download the free trial at adobe.com, and I’ll put a link in the show notes.

I’m Ken Walker, you’ve been watching The Podcasting Blog. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to send me an email. podcasting@seocompany.ca.

Thank you, thank you, thank you…is that not an excellent intro? Yes, it is! Although, I’m thinking about making another one just so I can mix things up a bit.

First off, let me apologize again for taking so long with this week’s podcast. I could give you a list of lame excuses but instead I’ll just say “Sorry, I’ll try to do better”. You know, it’s really lame when a podcast consultant tells you to produce your podcast on a regular basis, and they themselves barely get a new episode out each week, and very rarely is it released on the same day, I mean talk about lack of consistency, I mean practice what you preach right!

Anyhow, this week I wanna talk about script development in your podcast. Don’t get all scared cause I’m gonna have a kind of loose interpretation of the word script. Really, it’s a good idea to have something in writing for you to go by, but that doesn’t have to be a word for word script, it can be more of an outline, but it’s a good idea to have at least something to go by.

You want something that’s gonna help you with the flow of your podcast, and by all means that could be a word for word script. You’re gonna have to think about some things though because you don’t want your podcast to sound like you are reading it.

Now, that was a bit exaggerated, but you get the idea. I’ve got no problem with a word for word script, but you’ve got to have some skills as maybe a voice-over artist or at least practice a lot so you don’t sound like you’re reading it.

Obviously, this doesn’t work on every podcast cause you might have another host, you might have a guest to interview, whatever, but having some type of monologue or again, at least an outline, helps the flow go and it helps you not sound like a bumbling idiot!

If you’re gonna interview somebody, write down your questions, give some real thought to what your listeners want to hear and write down those thoughts. Think about what you’re gonna talk about, and I don’t mean just “I think we’ll talk about playing the guitar”, be more specific like “I wanna talk about health issues related to playing guitar, like arthritis, fatigue, and carpel tunnel syndrome.”

Don’t be afraid to make the podcast organic and branch out a little, but try to be focused. Now, one thing you can do is take a piece of paper and a pencil, or if you prefer use your computer, it kinda depends on how fast you can type, jot down an outline for yourself of how the show is gonna go.

Maybe you’ve got a section for news, a section for commercials, a how to section, whatever, jot down that format and leave space in between. Then go back and write down what you’re gonna talk about, general ideas, write down thoughts that you have, things you wanna talk about.

What I’m dealing with here is obviously a one-man-show type scenario where you’re doing all the planning and you’ll do the actual recording etc…Things work a lot different if you’re a big time podcaster and you’ve got people doing your recording and editing for you and maybe it’s more of a live show, but that’s a totally different animal.

So you’re the producer, you’re the host, you’re it. You can refer to those notes while you’re recording. Now, that being said, there are different styles of on-the-air announcers, if you want your podcast to sound ‘live’ and ‘natural’ then you’ve gotta either practice reading your script and not sounding like you’re reading, or you’ve gotta work from just an outline and do everything in a less ‘produced’ style.

On the other hand, a lot of people like the CNN or NPR style where it’s pretty obvious that there are no emotions involved and it’s just straight information. If that’s the style you’re going for, no problem, but keep your segments pretty short cause that’s gonna be a little boring if you’re talking straight for more than 5 or 6 minutes.

Now, most of what I’m saying is geared towards a newbie that doesn’t have a lot of experience podcasting or doing something similar, where you’re interacting with people to some degree. Real outgoing personalities won’t likely be doing an NPR style podcast, and you might not want to be tied down to a certain script, again, no big deal, but at least give yourself an outline. It’ll make your show sound more professional, and it’ll get your listeners the information that you want them to have because you’ve taken the time to think about what you want to say.

Let’s take a break and when we come back, I’ll review the Behringer Virtualizer Pro.

The Behringer Virtualizer Pro

Awhile back I picked up a new Behringer Virtualizer Pro model DSP2024P which is a 24-bit multi-effects engine featuring full midi control and tons of effects, in fact it’s got 71 algorithms and up to 7 adjustable parameters per algorithm, but that’s nothing more than what you can read on any site selling the thing, so what we’re here to do is see how it really performs.

First off, you can pick it up just about anywhere for about $100 and that’s a good thing because as it turns out, you might wanna get two or three of ‘em, more on that later.

That said, it’s a hundred dollars, as usual with most of Behringer’s equipment, don’t expect top quality components. The thing is built in a pretty solid case, but things like knobs and buttons have a definite ‘cheap’ feel to them. That doesn’t mean it won’t last long, but it does mean you wanna take good care of it.

Adjusting the parameters was a bit confusing at first but you’ll get the hang of it. The problem with most of these ‘all-in-one’ type devices is that most of the knobs perform double-duty or even triple-duty so you can’t always see clearly what you’re adjusting. For example, four of the adjustment knobs are labeled ‘Edit A’ ‘Edit B’ ‘Edit C’ and ‘Edit D’. Two of those are also labeled ‘Edit E’ and ‘Edit F’. You just have to know what A, B, C, D, E, and F are…or just play with it and you’ll find out.

The preset manager is pretty straight forward and sufficient, but EVERYTHING is number based. You have no clue what the effect algorithm is just by looking, you just get numbered presets. So, either find a few you like and memorize their numbers, or print out this handy PDF and lookup what you want.

Now, about buying two or three of them, something that they don’t really tell you clearly upfront is that of the 100 factory presets and 100 user presets, you can’t actually create your own ‘from scratch’ preset. So, in other words, you can’t say ‘OK, I want an expander, and an EQ, and distortion’. Nope. Only the algorithms that already exist can be edited and you can save THAT as a user preset.

So, for example, if they have a preset that has, say, Tremelo and Reverb, you can adjust the Tremelo rate and depth and the Reverb tail, and you can save that as a user preset, but you can’t add Chorus.

The unit works well as a vocal or instrument processor, and it’s got a direct box built-in so you can plug a guitar into it and go straight to your mixer. It’s got a few interesting vocal effects as well, aside from just your standard reverbs.

My take on it is that for $100 you can’t really complain too much. It’s a little bit on the noisy side, some of the effects are noisy, and the unit itself is a little louder than I’d like. I also wasn’t thrilled about not being able to choose which effects were in my patch, but like I said, you can add a second one or even a third if you had to and you’d hook them up in series, then you’d have about every effect you needed, but it would be a bear dialing it in. It is midi configurable though, which is pretty neat so if you’re pro-MIDI it can change programs for you while you play away.

‘But Ken,’ you ask ‘why are you featuring this on a podcast about podcasting? After all, this is for musicians.’ True, I say, and yet, it’s much more than that. Like I said, this thing does lots of vocal type effects including compression and gating, not to mention special effects so you can produce neat intros and even commercials. If you wanna sound different, it’ll change your pitch. If you wanna sound way out, it’ll do that. So if you’re on a budget and want more than just a compressor, this could be your ticket.

I’ll take a quick break and when I get back we’ll have this week’s pick for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Since I plan on doing this as a regular segment possibly with each episode, I figured I’d better start out with a review of a good podcast. So, this week we’ll look at a very well done how to podcast, it’s actually a videocast on using a great 3D modeling application called SketchUp.

The podcast is called The Sketchup Show and usually has one of two guests on the show, either Mike or Alex and they really know their content. They’re good at what they do and they’re also good at showing you how to do it. They actually have a site that sells their Sketchup training and this is a pretty good example of using a podcast to promote something else, which in this case is their paid training.

You watch the podcast, you find out how good their training is, and you decide to buy a DVD, it’s that simple.

Some of the things that I like about the podcast is the video quality. Bad quality video and audio is very lame. There is a hum that’s usually present in their clips, but I can overlook that since it’s not overbearing. It could be easily fixed though so if either of you gentlemen, Mike or Alex, happen to hear this podcast, drop me an email and I’ll help you out. The video quality is pretty good though, not HD, but still, it’s better than most of the stuff out there.

You can subscribe to The Sketchup Show in iTunes either by clicking the link provided here in our Enhanced podcast, or by searching for it in iTunes. You can also go to their site at www.go-2-school.com/podcasts where you can watch their training or click an iTunes subscribe link. So, whether you’re into 3D modeling and want to learn how to use Sketchup, or you just want an example of a good video podcast, take a look at The Sketchup Show.

Adios

You’ve been listening to The Podcasting Blog with Ken Walker, if you’d like to drop me an email, you can reach me at podcasting@seocompany.ca or as always, you can also post a comment on the blog. By the way, if you’ve been following along with the last few episodes, I’ve been recording in Audition and bringing my audio over to Garageband for final mixdown and adding the enhanced portions like artwork and clickable links. I’ve noticed though that the audio is real loud and borderline distortion so I’m gonna either play with that in Garageband, or do the mixdown in Audition and just add the mixed version to Garageband, we’ll see. Until next week, happy podcasting.

You are listening to another fantastic episode of The Podcasting Blog, with me, your host, Ken Walker. I’ll be your podcasting pilot for the next 15 minutes or so, as we soar through the latest and greatest in the podcasting sphere.

This week I’ve got a great treat for you, I’ve actually got a guest speaker, can you believe it? You’re not gonna have to listen to me for the entire 15 minutes. Sarah Wilson is gonna join me today and talk to us about turning your podcast into cash. She’s got some great ideas for generating revenue with your podcast.

Later in the show I’m gonna talk about using enhanced podcasts, which reminds me to let you know that this week’s episode is enhanced meaning that we’ll have some artwork and clickable links when pertinent, so if you’re watching on an iPod or in iTunes, be sure to check that out.

That also reminds me that last week’s podcast deal with Garage Band went fairly well, I didn’t have as much control over some of the audio stuff, as what I’m used to with Audition, but it was fairly straight forward. I did manage to find the special effects for the tracks, which is a good thing, so I can add Reverb and other stuff, but it looks like you have to add effects to the track, as a whole, so I don’t think you can just add an effect to a specific segment. Anyhow, I decided to try a hybrid this week and I’m doing all the recording in Audition, and then I’m gonna bring it over to my Mac and do everything else in Garage Band.

And now, without further adieu, lest I continually ramble on and on…here is Mrs. Wilson.

Hey everybody! Sarah Wilson here and I wanna talk to you today about some options that you have in making money with your podcast. Now, there are lots of different kinds of podcasts out there, so this doesn’t go for everybody. If you’ve got a company and you’ve started using podcasting to promote your products or services, this isn’t really gonna fit your marketing strategy. But if you’re actually trying to make money directly from your podcast, I think these tips will help you out.

First off, if your podcast is either entertaining or relates knowledge, you’ve got a good potential for making money with it, especially if it’s a well produced show. Some examples might be somebody that does training on Photoshop, or if you’re an Excel guru and you do screen captures of what you do. You can use an application like Camtasia Studio or even Macromedia Captivate and record your desktop while doing an instructional video. A great example of this is a site Ken does a podcast for on computer software. Go to www.youlearnlive.com and you’ll see what I mean.

It doesn’t have to be software though, if you’re good at anything and people are listening to your show and they’re finding out things about your topic, then you’ve got a great opportunity. It doesn’t have to be a screencast either, if your podcast is only audio, just like in radio, people can listen and get lots of great info.

Now obviously we have the standard options of maybe selling ads on your website, or even in the podcast itself, but think about this…what about selling a compiled DVD or CD that has all your past episodes? You’ll have people that don’t want to bother with downloading 50 episodes and they’ll order your DVD for like $15 or whatever, depending on how much content you’ve got and how professional your show is.

Another alternative here is to only give access to like your past 5 episodes, and block access to older shows, you can list the shows so that viewers can see what the content is about, but they’ll have to either buy your DVD or you could also make the episodes available for download in a members only section.

Having a member account is another great possibility. There are so many scenarios that you could use here. You could have a free podcast released once a month, and then release 3 ‘members only’ podcasts the rest of the month, so we’ve got lots of options.

What I lean towards is trying to give away as much of yourself as you can, for free, and then make your money on extras. Here’s why. If you produce great content, people will watch or listen to your podcast. If that content is good enough, LOTS of people will watch or listen to your podcast. The more people you have, the more your podcast will grow. Then you decide how you want to generate revenue. Either charge for membership and then don’t do commercials, or offer your content for free and get some advertisers. Never mix the two though. Nobody is going to want to pay for your content AND see commercials.

On a side note, the commercial deal doesn’t just stop at the commercials themselves. You can usually sign up with an affiliate program and send traffic directly to advertisers so that people can click a link on your site, or in your enhanced podcast, and then any sales generated by those links will get you some extra cash.

Quick Tips
Hey everybody, Ken Walker here. We’re gonna talk about one of the hottest things going in podcasting right now, which is enhanced podcasts.

Last week I think, I gave you some stats on percentages of people that listen to podcasts on a portable MP3 player versus listening right on their computer and it showed that lots of people still listen on their PCs. Whether your podcast is playable right there on your website, or even if they use iTunes, people will choose to listen on their PCs. They might listen while they work, they might listen while they browse the web, whatever.

Well, a regular podcast involves audio only, so no interaction is required. The audio plays and the user just listens, a lot like regular radio. An enhanced podcast though, provides a couple of different things to make the experience a little more interactive and definitely more engaging.

When your listeners are listening to your podcast in iTunes, they see your static album artwork, which is what you setup and linked to when you setup your iTunes podcast. In a standard podcast, that artwork just stays the same throughout the podcast. With an enhanced podcast though, you get to change the artwork throughout the podcast. Here’s how it works.

First off, you get to specify points in your podcast as markers or cues. For example, you could set each different segment as a cue point, like we did in this week’s show. This makes it very easy for your listeners to jump to a certain point. I know on the iPod that enhanced podcasts that have these cue points are great because you can skip straight to the section you’re interested in. Apple calls these cue points ‘chapters’.

It’s kinda like having different tracks on a CD. If you’re not interested in the content that’s currently playing (like if it’s not your favorite song on the CD) you can skip to the next chapter, it’s that easy.

Well, what you can do on top of that is change the artwork for that particular chapter. Now think of the possibilities. If you’re interviewing someone, throw up a picture of ‘em! If you’re reviewing a product, throw up a picture of the product. Even better, let’s say you were doing some sort of slideshow presentation, now you can actually present your slides as you go through the presentation. Now, you can’t do animation, at least not yet, but if your viewers would benefit from still images, this has a lot of power.

This is totally different from doing a videocast or a screencast, this is simply still images that are embedded into your podcast, and show up as album artwork. Again, Apple calls them chapters but they can really be thought of as anything you want, depending on what type of content you’ve got. You might call ‘em segments, slides, bookmarks, whatever.

That’s not all. In addition to the artwork changing, you can also put clickable links in your podcast. With Apple’s Garage Band, which I’ve recently started using to do final mixdown of my podcast, you can associate a clickable link with the album artwork in each section. This of course doesn’t work with portable MP3 players, but again, lot’s of people are viewing or listening to podcasts on their PCs.

So if you’re mentioning a sponsor, or talking about a product, or you’ve got a guest on that has a website, all of these things will make it easy for your listeners to find out more information. Put a link up to your own contacts page, or an email address. While they’re watching the podcast they can click the link and open the content, it’s great.

So you’ve got artwork, you’ve got chapters, you’ve got clickable links. What can you really do with all that? As it turns out, the possibilities are almost endless. Think about this, maybe an online contest or survey and people can click a link to place their vote. Remember those choose your own adventure books? Well, how about an audio version?

And really I could probably think of a few more applications in a fairly short time period, but I think you get the idea. Now, as with any good thing, there are drawbacks. As of right now Apple’s got the market because you can only view enhanced podcasts in QuickTime or iTunes, or on an iPod. You can create enhanced podcasts in a number of Apple apps like Garage Band and Chapter Tool, but you can also use an application like Camtasia Studio to make enhanced podcasts on the PC. I see a lot of this changing in the near future as enhanced podcasts become more popular.

With that said, it’s important to announce to your listeners, as well as put something on your website, that you’re providing an enhanced podcast. Let them know that the podcast has clickable links and that the artwork reflects content in the podcast, cause like I said in the beginning, lots of people are listening while they browse the web or while they work and they’re used to regular old non-interactive podcasts, so you need to make them aware that you’re providing some extra content and if they want to visit that sponsor’s site or take a look at what your current guest is up to, or follow along with your pictorial on how to change a light bulb, they can click links in your podcast.

Conclusion
Alright, that wraps up this week’s episode, you’ve been listening to The Podcasting Blog with Ken Walker. If you’d like to drop me an email, you can reach me at podcasting@seocompany.ca or as always, you can also post a comment on the blog. Until next week, happy podcasting.

This week’s episode was recorded entirely in Garage Band and is in a new format (m4a)

Hi everybody, Ken Walker here and I’ve got a great show for you this week. Most of you know that I’m a die-hard Audition user and I’ve been using it for years, but this week, for the first time ever, I’m recording the entire process in Apple’s Garage Band and at the end of the show, I’m gonna tell you what I think of it. For the marketers in my audience, I’ve got some new statistics for podcast listeners, as well as a tip on promoting your podcast. All that and more, in this week’s episode of The Podcasting Blog.

Podcasting News

Internet Marketing is definitely big today, and podcasting is no different. If your company is looking for a way to branch out and really link up with your clients, podcasting is the tool, or at least one of the tools, that you should implement if you haven’t already. I was reading the news the other day and came across a study conducted by The Diffusion Group that said 11% of adult broadband users, that’s highspeed internet or fast internet for you hillbillies, and that breaks down to 12 million U.S. consumers, listen to a podcast at least once every month.

They even predicted that by 2012 that number would be around 24% which is something like 38 ½ million people.

Now here’s what they say is stifling the growth factor. One thing is that podcasting is still looked at as too complex for low-tech people, meaning, they’re afraid of it. They think they couldn’t do it or that they don’t have what they need in order to be able to take advantage of podcasts. That means that they don’t find out about a big majority of what’s out there and that the quality of a lot of podcasts is at least as good as what they can hear on the radio, except that it can be a lot more focused and of podcasts are way better than radio for lots of other reasons.

It’d like to see the age groups that were surveyed for that cause I think that’ll say a lot about what’s going on, but in any case, what needs to be done here is a wave of advertising on how easy it is to listen to podcasts, and I should probably even do a tutorial on using iTunes like maybe even downloading and installing iTunes, and finding podcasts to listen to. Just to show how easy it is. The whole feed aggregator thing sounds scary to most people I think because they’re like, “I’ve got to learn a new program” or something, but iTunes is totally simple.

Of those 11% more than half of them listened to their podcasts on a portable player, meaning they downloaded it first, and then listened to it later. And less than half listened on their PCs. I listen to podcast on both, so I don’t how that type of answer would score.

It also looks like the people that listen on portable devices listen to more podcasts per month, but the PC listeners aren’t too far behind.

And you know what I like about surveys like this? At some point they’ll have a bit of information that is actually very helpful, and this one is no exception. On the average, if someone is actually subscribed to a podcast, they are more than likely signed up for at least 3 other podcasts, and 70 percent of the listeners use iTunes to listen to their subscribed podcasts. There again I underscore that iTunes is king of podcasts. Get your podcast listed in iTunes and make sure you’re using those iTunes tags in your RSS feeds.

Now again, I’d like some more info on the group surveyed and things like ‘how many users listen to podcasts every week’ or ‘what types of jobs people have who listen to podcasts’, I’d really like to know that.

Either way you look at it though, podcasting is here to stay, it’s not just a fad.

As it turns out, the overage was for storage and they said I was at 7.2Gig and my account was 5 Gig. Once I found that out I was a little put out because another hosting company I use simply stops your transfers when you max out, which I assumed GoDaddy would to. I mean, if you’re paying for 5 Gig, I figured they’d a lot that to you since it’s real easy to do. Instead though, they let you go over, and just charge you extra. A lot extra. In fact, I could have paid for TWO WHOLE YEARS of hosting over at Host Monster for what GoDaddy charged me for one month. And they give me way more space and way more bandwidth than GoDaddy. I use them for another one of my domains, but now, I’ll be using them for two of my domains. I didn’t want to hassle with the transfer from GoDaddy, but that irks me.

I won’t even talk about going to my FTP site and trying to find 7.2Gigs of data…after all, that’s how much they say I’m using. OK, so I will talk about it. After voicing my opinion on their policy, and mentioning I was going to take my business elsewhere, the rep said “OK” and I hung up. I called back again hoping that I could talk with someone that had made it all the way through high school and actually cared whether they worked or not the next day. When I asked him where I could go to see my usage, thinking that in the GoDaddy Control Panel they would have some time of stats so I could be careful not to go over my limit, he said he’d have to escalate that request to higher level tech support and they’d get back with me. Huh? You mean I can’t even see for myself how much storage space I’m taking up? Nope.

So later on, I get an email from tech support that says basically, we checked your stats and you’re using 7.2Gigs. Thanks.

Not the response I was looking. So, while you will hear lots of GoDaddy ads on other podcasts, you won’t hear one here. But, you will hear this…

SIGN UP FOR HOSTING AT HOST MONSTER!

See You Next Week

Well, once again we have come to the end of another fun and enlightening episode of The Podcasting Blog. I’m Ken Walker, thanks for listening, if you wanna drop me an email, podcasting@seocompany.ca is my address, I respond to all email personally, except for spam which I just delete. As always, you can also post a comment on the blog. Until next week, happy podcasting.

Podcasting News

Podcasting is becoming so big that you can now buy insurance to cover your content in the event that you’re sued, that’s right, you could actually be sued because of your content, what is this world coming to? Of course, you know everybody’s sue happy these days and there are, no doubt, going to be some very dumb law suits against podcasters in years to come, but now you can get a special policy that’ll cover not only the legal liabilities you might have, but you can even get your equipment covered.

Let’s say you recommend a product, or make a statement about a company, if you’re doing that kinda thing to just a friend, no big deal, but if you put it out there for the public eye, or in this case the public ear, then you’re taking a chance that the wrong person is gonna hear it and claim that you caused them grief or slandered them or that after listening to your podcast their eyes crossed or whatever. The real stupid thing about law suits, in my opinion, is that somebody can sue you and even if you’re not at fault, it could cost you thousands of dollars. That’s where this insurance kicks in and covers those legal fees for you. A typical policy apparently costs around $50 a month but that doesn’t include equipment coverage. For more information take a look at Susman Insurance, and there will be a link in the show notes.

New Media Expo

Optimizing Your Podcast

That New Media Expo looks very interesting, if you plan on attending, make sure you sign up before the end of the month, which would be June 30th because after that, the cost goes up $50. Of course, you can still register for the free pass, but you wouldn’t get most of the really neat stuff that’ll you’ll learn by going to the sessions.

This week, I wanted to talk a little bit about how you can get your podcast to rank higher in search engines. For those of you that already to SEO or search engine optimization, you know the drill. You find out what the page is about, you do some research and find out what keywords are gonna be most effective and target those keywords. You might write articles and use the keywords, create headings and again target those keywords, all that basic SEO stuff.

For podcasts, it’s gonna work the same way. Unless you absolutely don’t care about your site ranking high, you’re not gonna just sit down and start recording. Do a little research. Think about what topic your gonna discuss, target keywords just like you were doing a regular written article. Then make sure that you use those words in your podcast. Be specific too, but not to the point that you sound like a parrot. In other words, if you were optimizing for real estate, you’d do some research and you’d focus on something, like maybe ranch real estate. Writing an article, you’d use ‘ranch real estate’ just about every time, if you found out that ‘ranch real estate’ was a good phrase.

In your podcast, that might sound kinda dumb to keep saying ‘ranch real estate’ over and over again, but at least mention it and then guess what, later on when you’re talking and you just say ‘real estate’ or ‘land’ or ‘ranch’, you can still go back and edit the transcript. This isn’t deception, it’s just that computers can’t decipher podcasts yet, so we have to help them to know what the podcast is about. A listener can tell that we start talking about ‘ranch real estate’ and when I mention ‘land’ later on, they’ll know what I’m talking about, and this is maybe an exaggerated example, but you get the idea.

Of course you’re gonna say, “Ken, that’s what the keywords and tags are for.” Yeah, I know, but what site do you think is gonna rank higher in a search engine, the one that has ‘ranch real estate’ as a tag, or the one that has ‘ranch real estate’ 10 times in an article, PLUS a tag? This is why it’s very important to transcribe your show, or if you wanna work from a script, do it that way. Either way, you wanna know what keywords you’re gonna target, just like you were doing a written article. Now, we don’t expect PEOPLE to read the article, we want them to listen to the podcast, this is just for the benefit of the machines that are reading the article.

Podcasting Quick Tips

Today is an absolutely beautiful day and I have no business being inside, so we’re gonna wrap up this week’s episode pretty quick. I just wanted to offer some general advice that’ll help you be a better podcaster. First of all, listen to podcasts. If you’re podcasting, you should be listening to at least a dozen podcasts every week, and it doesn’t count if you listen to a podcast that publishes once a day. What I mean is at least 12 different podcasts, that’s 12 different podcasters. You’ve got to hear diversity, you’ve gotta hear what other people are doing, what sounds good, how they’re making transitions, what kind of content appeals to you.

This is still newly charted territory and as podcasters we can do way more than either radio or television. For example, a radio station or TV show can’t pop up a clickable link to a website. They can’t afford to have content that’s only appealing to 500 listeners. So while we can learn from the way radio stations and television stations handle things, we’re not bound up like they are and you’re gonna have to see what other people are capable of doing so you can decide if that’s something your show could use.

So pull up iTunes, do a search on podcasts and make sure you’re subscribed to at least a dozen different shows, and make sure that you download those shows and listen to ‘em. Try to find shows that are updated at least once a week. Make sure you pick two or three that are in the same field you’re in, so they’re dealing with the same topics you would be covering, and then diversify. Pick something random or something else you might be interested it. Try to pick good quality shows. I make it a point to check iTunes every couple of months to see if there is anything new. I also go through the podcasts I’m subscribed to and if there are any that have lost my interest, I delete them and find another to take its place. Try to note what you don’t like about a podcast, and make sure you don’t do it in your show.

My second tip is a little more technical. Learn how to hand-code an RSS feed. That way, you’ll know everything that’s involved in getting one to work. Eventually, you might have to go in and fix one that’s broken, and having already put one together by hand, will make it a much easier job. And with that, I have a special announcement. Next week I plan to do our first screencast episode on The Podcasting Blog where I’m going to…drum roll please…I’m going to walk you through hand-coding an RSS feed.

That’s it for this week, thanks for joining us, this is Ken Walker with The Podcasting Blog, you can reach me at podcasting@seocompany.ca. As always, you can also post a comment on my blog. Bye for now, I’ll see you next week.

Room acoustics is overlooked a lot, especially in the home recording studio. With podcasting getting so popular though, and people getting much more serious about it, I honestly expect the topic to become more common.

Pretty much every room has its own sound, when you walk in the room, there is an enormous amount of factors that control what that room sounds like. The size of the room, the materials that make up the floor, the walls, any furniture in the room, all these things affect the sound of that particular room.

For the podcaster, believe it or not, room acoustics can play a big role in your sound. For one thing, small rooms generally have a very bad sound for voice work, at least if they’re left alone. So if you have a small bedroom where you do your recording, you’re definitely gonna want to treat it with something. This effect is usually very pronounced in a bathroom, it gives you the “I’m a great singer syndrome” which works great while you’re in the shower, but it doesn’t work so well when you’re doing a voice recording, particularly spoken voice.

Let’s get into some acoustical engineering real quick and then we’ll get down to the treatment. The reason it’s good to know what problems you’ll face is because there are different types of treatments meant specifically for different types of problems. For example, you don’t generally buy a bass trap to treat flutter echo.

Now, if you record in a very large, open room, you’re probably going to be better off then in an untreated, smaller room, but, with the large open room you have the problem of people walking by, doorbells ringing, things like that, plus the small room gives you a little bit of privacy. The kinds of sounds we’re going to be worried about are some low frequency standing waves, excessive reverb or flutter, and a dead, flat sound. The latter is actually the opposite type of problem from the first two, which I’ll deal with shortly.

By the way, what we’re talking about today has very little to do with sound proofing, which keeps outside sounds from coming into your studio, and inside sounds from leaving your studio, that’s not what this is all about. This is strictly about controlling the sound that’s generated inside your studio, mostly you and your co-host or interviewee.

In a small room, especially if it is symmetric, and a square room is much worse than a rectangular room, but both are difficult. In a small room, you have parallel walls. Two walls face each other at parallel, and you have two sets of these walls. The problem is that when sound is generated, albeit a guitar or just you talking, that sound stands a good chance of bouncing off one wall, and hitting its matching parallel wall, and bouncing right back. It can go on and on and of course sound travels very fast so you don’t hear a bouncing, you hear what sounds like a sound just going on and on until it just runs out of energy. It makes things kinda muddy sounding. It’s more prevalent with lower frequency sounds but it can occur at higher frequencies as well.

You have to approach this in three different ways. Absorbtion, diffusion, and absorbtion. The reason I say it like that is because there are really a couple of different kinds of absorption, because there are different kinds of sound. For the sake of making this plain and easy, we’re just gonna say low frequencies and high frequencies. Low frequencies are strong and they can go right through walls and bounce around all over the place, not to mention we can hear them very well most of the time. So for those frequencies, you want what is called a bass trap. You can buy these at music stores or online, but I’m gonna include a link to some great plans on making your own and they work very well and will cost you much less, you can even make them look fairly decent.

Basically you have a container, at least with the do-it-yourself kind, and you fill it with sand or insulation, and the container, which is fairly large, is sealed so it’s air tight. You usually put them in the corner and depending on your room, one or two will probably do you. It’s designed to absorb those low frequency waves that will help you tweak the sound of your room tons. After you get a couple you’ll probably notice a big difference right away, again, depending on your room size and what’s already in it, also depending on what sound sources are in the room. Play your stereo with heavy bass, then drop a couple of these in the room and play again.

The other kind of absorption that we want to do is for the high frequency signals and these cause a lot of reverb or echo. Reverb is actually a very rapid and decaying echo. Echo you would get in a very large room or like if you’re at the Grand Canyon. Reverb you’ll hear in a parking garage, or the bathroom. The reverb you hear is noticeably different depending on the environment. It could be tight and close together, stopping quickly once the sound source stops. Or it could be long and drawn out, making things sound very muddy or unintelligible.

A little tiny bit of reverb is OK for your voice, but if you can actually hear it when you play your recording back, it’s too much. Ideally, for podcasting or radio type voice work, you want a pretty dead sounding room. Incidentally, when recording musical instruments, you probably want a live sounding room, meaning that you can hear reverb. With voice work like this though, it’s better to have the room too dead, than too live, because you can always add a little reverb to sweeten it up, but you can’t take it away once it’s recorded.

You’ve probably got a guitar playing buddy and you’ve heard about egg cartons or carpet on the walls right? Don’t waste your time. Egg cartons do VERY little to control sound and I’ve even read of studies showing that they actually accentuate certain frequencies. That’s not what we want. Carpet has a limited effect, it can tone things down a good bit and in a pinch I’ve even used it. The thicker the better, but carpet has drawbacks.

I’m gonna sound like an acoustical foam salesmen here but, carpet is generally more flammable, plus it deteriorates fairly quickly, not to mention it won’t look very nice on your walls. I have no idea how you’d get it on the ceiling, which actually will need to be treated a bit as well.

This week I’m gonna be reviewing a product by Auralex which is an acoustical treatment manufacturer, one of many. Studio foam generally excels in all these areas where carpet isn’t so good, plus the foam works better than carpet as in it absorbs more sound. Aside from Auralex though, there are tons of other places where you can get foam, and even a bulk supplier that I know of.

True acoustical foam IS NOT the same as like what you’d get for doing cushions or something for a chair, it’s a different animal. The cells are made differently and the material is much more rigid, so don’t run out to an upholstery shop and staple a bunch of 1 inch foam on your walls. Studio foam usually applies with contact adhesive or something similar to liquid nails, although it is a special formula since the regular liquid nails will eat foam.

So you stick the stuff to the wall, and you don’t completely cover the wall, instead on parallel walls you want to try to stagger the placement of the foam so that you don’t have one foam pad directly across from another foam pad. That way, you really cut down on standing waves because when a wave does hit the wall, it will run into a foam pad on the parallel wall.

Believe it or not, I actually do have a do-it-yourself solution for this, but to be honest, I don’t really know if it’s worth it because I don’t think it’s much cheaper and the studio foam generally looks better. However, in all fairness, I will throw in a link because I think the gentleman did a great job on his tutorial and I respect people that make things themselves.

Our last problem is that of diffusion. We actually don’t want to totally absorb all the sound in your room because that might cause you to go crazy. You know those commercials they used to have where they’re testing the phone line and they have this black room with foam all around it and they drop a pin on the table next to the receiver? Well, they really have rooms like that. But people don’t realize what quiet is until they go in there. It’s very eerie and people get nauseous if they’re not used to it.

Instead, what we want to do is absorb lots of sound, and then diffuse the rest of it, meaning that we’re spreading the sound out and breaking it up into little pieces, scattering it all around the room. That way no one sound is focused on a particular part of the room. To do this we can use diffuser panels, which are just squares, mostly hollow, with real weird patterns on them that look very, random. Sound hits them and gets split up, bouncing in all kinds of different directions. It’s a good idea to put them on the ceiling, in general. Your room will not sound quite as dead, but the reverb in the room will die very quickly.

And of course, I’ve got a do-it-yourself link for a diffuser project that I highly recommend. I suffer from ‘tiny studioitis’ as I have an 8’x8’ room inside a room for my studio and the sound was initially terrible. I built a bass trap which helped a lot, and then treated the walls, that helped too, and I also found this diffuser panel idea on the net and that helped even more.

Sometimes, it’s not an ‘one’ thing that does it all, but it’s the combination of several treatments together that make your studio sound great for voice narration, which is what podcasting is. Studio foam will make a big difference, but the other treatments are just as necessary.

Product Review
I was doing an installation of sound equipment in a very large venue and the architects didn’t know much about sound, and didn’t ask anyone, so they built a huge square. After the fact, I was asked to fix the ever present reverb that totally muddied up the sound. I had installed very high end audio equipment but you can not fix reverb with EQ. People couldn’t understand the speaker and they were always asking the front of house engineer to turn the volume up, which only made things worse.

Given the extremely high ceilings, the only option was about $5,000 worth of foam. I called up Auralex and they were extremely helpful, suggesting models of their foam. I happened to be about 2 hours from their warehouse so I sent a driver over to pickup the load.

As soon as a third of one wall was covered, BIG difference. I mean this place had a good 4 seconds of reverb. After the foam was on the walls (which were about 25 feet high) it was amazing. You could hear reverb in your left ear, which was facing the center of the room, and no reverb in your right ear, which was facing the foam on the wall! I finished the install, which went fairly nice, just spray some adhesive on the wall, some on the foam, and stick.

The only downside to this was that the carpet in the place was grayish and on the phone the salesman told me the foam was ‘charcoal’. Their brochure photo showed charcoal as well, but this charcoal was more brown, and even plumish. They said that the foam process yielded less than consistent results, and that it truly was the correct ‘charcoal’ foam.

I’ve since found that they have a more cosmetically appealing line which is covered with an acoustically transparent fabric, which I would probably use the next time the need arose.

All in all, I cut the reverb time by more than half, which considering the room size and ceiling height, was pretty good. They didn’t want the front of the room covered, where the stage was, so that area would have helped a lot more. They could have also used some diffusion on the ceiling, but that was out of budget for the time being. The foam itself was a good product, it worked well, it was a little costly in my opinion, but you get some great support and a lot of selection.

That’s it for this week, you’ve been listening to the Podcasting Blog, I’m Ken Walker. You can contact me at podcasting@seocompany.ca or just leave a comment on the blog. Until next week, happy podcasting.

If you’ve listened to many of my podcasts, you know that I’m a quality minded individual and that I like lot’s of audio tools, mostly hardware. I still think hardware is the best way to do just about anything, but, sometimes you’re in a bind and you need to use some software to get you out of that bind.

Let’s say you show up onsite to do a podcast and you’ve got your laptop and your USB recorder, or maybe even just your portable USB recorder, and you’ve got your mic and you record your podcast, and then when you get back home and start editing, you hear this fuzzy noise and you remember that when you were recording there was a fan going, and you forgot to turn it off. Or maybe your laptop fan kicked on and it’s pretty loud, so it ended up getting recorded. These types of noise problems can usually be dealt with and you can get pretty decent results.

I’m gonna give you some tips and tricks to removing noise in both Adobe Audition and Audacity. I’ll be using Audition on a PC running XP, and Audacity on a Mac G5 running Tiger.

If you’d like to see a screencast of something like this, leave me a comment and if I get enough interest in it, I’ll see what I can do.

First of all, I’ve got a file here that I want you to hear, and the file’s got some constant noise in the background, like a fan or something. I’m gonna use this same file for Audition and Audacity and we’ll see which one, if any, sounds better once we’re done.

Now, without doing a screencast, this is tough to. I can’t really show you what I’m doing, so again, if I get enough people interested in it, I’ll definitely get one setup. There are a couple of different tools you could use, depending on the nature of the noise that you’re dealing with. Some noises can be filtered out with equalizer settings, some have to be filtered out based on a pattern that they create, and that’s the approach I’m gonna use today.

First, let’s hear a sample of the file, with the noise.

Ok, now, if you’ve got some junky little PC speakers, I don’t know how much difference you’ll hear because those kinds of speakers are pretty noisy anyway, so hopefully you’re listening with some decent quality speakers. That noise was made by a fan that was on during the recording.

Fortunately, these kinds of noises are the ones that are easiest to remove because they’re doing the same thing over and over, and constantly. That creates a sound pattern, and both Audition and Audacity deal with those kinds of noises in basically the same way. You first sample the noise, so you find a section in your clip that is ONLY the noise you want to remove, then you go through and remove that sample, or anything closely matching it, from the entire file. It’s like taking a snapshot of the noise, and then going through and matching up frequencies and patterns, and anything that matches that noise, gets removed, or at least the volume of the noise gets reduced.

The thing that’s nice about this, is, it gets removed even in segments of your audio where you have legitimate audio. Like, if you’re talking, the fan noise is still there right? But both of the noise removal tools I’m gonna use will go through and match that noise pattern, and essentially remove it, even in places where there was other audio, like you talking or whatever other audio might be there.

Now, in both cases, you have to be careful, it’s not like a magic wand, you have to be careful not to use it too much, because you can take away from the audio that you do want and it’ll make your voice sound kinda robotic.

Let’s do Audition first. I’ve got my file open in Audition. Like I said, we first find a segment that contains ONLY the background noise. So look for a pause, or silence at the beginning or end of the clip, and when you’re looking at your audio, notice the fluctuation in the wave form. Play the file and follow the playhead. Listen for silence and background noise, and you should be able to see a very low signal at that point, and I’ll try to post a picture on the blog that matches up to that.

You wanna try to get a second or two of strictly background noise. Highlight that section and then right click. Select Capture Noise Reduction Profile. This uses that segment that you selected, as your pattern for removing noise from the file. So, in other words, it looks like nothing really happens cause at this point, nothing in the file was changed, it just captured the profile.

Now select your entire file, or the segment that you want to remove noise from. Sometimes you might have your whole podcast mixed down into one file and maybe just a segment in the middle is noisy, where you did an interview some place and there was some kind of background noise.

So you’ve selected the segment that you wanna remove the noise from, then go to the Effects menu, go to Noise Reduction, and then Noise Reduction again. This’ll load a dialog box that has a lot of parameters and shows you visually what the noise reduction profile looks like, from a spectral point of view. You can look at all that stuff later, for now, we’re just gonna take the default setting for everything and go ahead and preview to see what it sounds like. So with my file selected, I hit Preview and I get this:

Now, that’s not too bad, so we’ll go ahead and click OK, and then Audition will go through our file and try to match the noise reduction profile and remove it. A lot of those parameters that you saw on the screen there, can help you fine tune what’s going on, and I have had to use them on occasion, but generally, the default values work fine. Where it really helps is if the frequencies of your noise and the signal that you want to keep, are pretty similar or close to each other. Then you’ve really gotta do some tweaking to get it sounding decent.

Once Audition is done, it’s a good idea to take a look at your file and see if there are any gaps that still have a little noise, especially if it’s still audible, and what you can do is select just that segment and repeat the noise removal on just that segment and that effectively just keeps lowering the level of noise there, so do it as many times as you need to, but a lot of times, once is enough.

So now if you listen to the file, it should sound a lot cleaner:

OK, so that was Audition, now let’s hop over to the Mac and we’ll do the same thing in Audacity. By the way, Audacity is available for both the PC and the Mac, I’m just using the Mac today so that everyone knows that this show is not prejudice.

Basically, the same principal applies here. Get a profile, then apply the reduction, so our first step is, locate a gap in the audio where you can visually see ambient noise. And I’ll go ahead and play the original file again:

OK, now we select a second or two of ambient noise, then go up to Effect and then Noise removal. You have to complete step 1 first and get the noise profile. Then we go back and select the entire file and click Effect, and Noise Removal again. Audacity’s interface here is a lot simpler than with Audition, which is good on one hand, and on the other hand, it might mean our control over how the noise is removed, would be kinda limited cause we don’t have a lot of the options in Audition.

Regardless, we do have a slider for how much of the noise we want to filter out, and you might think at first, well, all of it right? But again, if we try to do too much, we can make our voice sound like a robot and generally, that’s not the effect we’re looking for, so leave it in the middle your first time around, click the Remove Noise button, and then if you have to, you can undo and go back and make some adjustments.

So after removing the noise in Audacity we get this:

If you listen hard there, you’ll hear the voice sounding kinda robotic, so I’ll undo the noise removal and go back in, this time, I’ll lower the amount of noise removal that Audacity does. That gives us this version:

That sounds a lot better. Again, you can go in there, just like with Audition and select specific segments and just keep repeating the noise removal to get it just as quiet as you please. Ideally, you want that waveform to be flat whenever nobody’s talking. Gaps between words should just be totally flat with no little squiggly lines or dots. This is one of the reasons I recommend a noise gate or downward expander, cause it eliminates the need to do this processing and saves you tons of time in the long run. If you’re podcasting on a budget though, this is the way to get that ‘studio’ sound without forking over a lot of cash.

Speaking of cash, Audacity is free and I’ll put a link in the show notes, to where you can download the latest version. Audition, on the other hand, isn’t free, but you can download a trial at Adobe’s website, and I’ll put up a link to that as well.

As you can tell, the process is very similar for both apps, and as far as quality, here is the finished Audition file:

And here is the finished Audacity file:

With both of those, I could do a lot more playing with it, and of course we could add some EQ and kinda enhance it a bit, but that’s what we get with the default noise reduction settings for both, and I think both of them sound fine. That’s it for this week, you’ve been listening to the Podcasting Blog, I’m Ken Walker. You can contact me at podcasting@seocompany.ca or just leave a comment on the blog. Thanks for listening, and I really mean this, you…are…the…best listener I have, and next week, I’m gonna do this all over again and make another podcast especially for you. Bye.

Review – FeedForAll

I’ve got an excellent tool to help you both manage and promote your podcast called FeedForAll. With FeedForAll you can create, edit and publish RSS feeds. They’ve got both PC and Mac versions and it’ll even create RSS feeds that are compatible with iTunes. Now, this is software that you actually buy. You download it and you can try a demo for like 30 days I think. It’s $40 and it seems pretty powerful, it was a bit cumbersome to use though, there are lots of options and not much is automated.

I’m gonna use it to post this episode, so we’ll see what we get in iTunes. I’d like to see more of a simplified process, but I haven’t really used it and actually read the instructions so this is kinda just a ‘first impressions’ kinda review. Like I said, I’ll use it to put this week’s podcast up and next week I’ll let you know how that went.

You can download FeedForAll at www.feedforall.com and there’s gonna be a link in the show transcriptions.

You’re getting a two for one deal this week, cause I’m gonna mention an RSS feed service, but this one is free and it’s called FeedBurner. Go to www.feedburner.com and you can sign up there for free. It’s a pretty good place to manage your feed at, and what it lets you do is use the service to format your feed and you’ll also be able to track your subscriptions, as long as you use the feed link that you get from them.

So in other words, you submit your real RSS feed, then they’ll give you another feed and that’s the one that you use when doing directory submissions. That way people use the feedburner feed and they’ll be able to track how many people are subscribed. They’ve also got a ton of other tools that are available for free, like chicklet creators, signature creators, things like that. You get a lot more than you’d expect from a free service. And with that, let’s take a quick break and checkout some podcasting news.

News

Google has been seen as powering podcast ad growth. Podcasting advertising revenues are expected to nearly quintuple in the next five years, according to a report to be issued this week by eMarketer, Mediaweek. That would mean marketers will spend $400 million dollars on podcasts in 2011, which would be only 2% of spending expected this year in the interactive ad market.

James Belcher, the eMarketer analyst, credits most of the ad growth to Google. He expects the company to develop an audio version of AdSense which would allow any podcast producer to include ads in their shows. Podtrac’s Mark McCrery, who has been building an advertising sales network for podcasts, was quoted by Mediaweek saying companies are buying spots in podcasts., “They are investing…getting some good learning and coming back for more,” he said.

Meanwhile Oneupweb said its podcast audience measuring technology has been scaled up for use within a corporate environment and has begun to attract the attention of major media publishers. CEO Lisa Wehr said its technology for smaller publishers has been in use about six months by about 25 clients. She detailed some observations about podcast use:

Evergreen content attracts an audience long after it’s initially uploaded. Credit visibility in search engines for additional downloads. Corporate podcasts, those done by companies, are downloaded primarily during lunch hours. Podcasts of an educational or entertainment nature are most popular at 4 p.m., presumably when people are getting read for the commute home.

Mondays and Tuesday are the most popular days for podcast downloading, probably due to their promotion via banner ads and press releases early in the week.

Having statistics on podcast consumption helps persuade decision makers to support podcast production.

Content – Podcast Promotion Tips

What we’ll do first here, is I’m gonna give you some pointers on promoting your podcast, and then we’ll deal specifically with the process on iTunes. There’s a few simple principals that you can do, and they won’t take a real long time. The best part is you can do it yourself, even if you’re not a net savvy tech person.

One thing that’s pretty easy to do is look around for other podcasts that are on a similar topic to yours. If you breed dogs, find another podcast on dog breeding, find several if you can. Comment on the shows, comment on topics that were discussed in the show. If you covered something similar, mention that in your comment and post a link to the episode of your podcast that covers it. Mention the other podcast in your podcast, you can even offer to let the other podcaster take a break by guest-hosting their podcast for them, in return for being able to mention your podcast. I think one thing that is gonna be real big in podcasting is social networking.

Competition is stiff out there, but don’t look at individual podcasters as competition. If you podcast about woodworking, find another woodworking podcaster and become friends.

Another thing you’ll wanna do is submit your podcast to as many directories as possible. Places like iTunes, Podcast Alley, Podcasting News, iPodder, Yahoo, Odeo, AOL, MSN, Bloglines, Google Reader. And then it doesn’t stop there…on the services, register with them and subscribe to your own podcast. I know that sounds a bit strange, but here’s a little info about it.

First of all, with a lot of them, you’ll have to register first, before you can submit a podcast. Some of them though, you can just submit a podcast. Now, on things like Odeo, or PodcastReady, you’ll have to register and then you can subscribe to podcasts. If you subscribe to your own podcast, then the search engine for the service will make sure and index your podcast, so that ensures that it’s in the list. It’s also a good idea to see your podcast from the standpoint of a regular user so you know how everything looks.

Robin Good has a great list of directories and services to submit to and I’ll place a link in the show notes where you can get that list.

And of course, hand in hand with directory submission, is make your podcast search engine friendly. That’s something that I basically have to mention anytime we talk about what kinds of things we should do to promote a podcast. If a search engine doesn’t like your podcast, they won’t index it, and that means people can’t find it. Remember folks, podcasts are audio files. Search engines can’t index an audio file, at least not yet. Tags are great and I’ll mention those shortly, but what is even better is if you can get your podcast transcribed like you see on our site. That can be time consuming but find somebody that has a lot of time on their hands and have them transcribe your podcast. This helps search engines index the contents of your podcast, and it also helps you get more content on your site, which is gonna eventually help you build a little more weight with the search engine.

Tags, like I mentioned, are real important. All the platforms support some type of tag or keyword field where you can put keywords that match the main points of your podcast. There are two ways to go about this. One is, just browse through your transcript or listen to the podcast, and pickup main points and use those for you tags. Another method though, if you really wanna try to push your site to the front, is to target keywords that not only appear in your podcast, but are popular on the search engines.

That involves a lot of research. You have to see what keywords are popular and target those keywords, then you use the keywords as headers in your transcript and as tags for the appropriate post. So for example, you find out that ‘apollo moon hoax’ is a popular search term. If you do a podcast on conspiracy theories, you’ll probably eventually cover that topic…you know, like, at least a couple of times a week, but what you’ll do is use the phrase as title text, and then, if you’ve done your research before hand, make sure you use the phrase in your podcast so that it’s transcribed and also use it in your tag section.

Some other things that work pretty good is making sure that if you’re an expert at something, find as many forums online as you can handle, signup with ‘em, and start answering questions. Two things though, put your podcast in your signature on the forum, and if it’s allowed, post links to your podcast, to specific episodes, that deal with a pertinent topic that’s being discussed in the forum. This is basically the same thing as the blogging point I mentioned earlier, but I forgot to mention forums.

And one of the best ways to promote your podcast is, make it top quality. Make it sound good and have good content. If you’ve ever heard a great song on the radio, but the station was just too far away and it was all staticy, more likely then not, you just went to another channel. Even if you loved the song, it just wasn’t worth it, right? People are gonna do the same thing with your podcast. If you’ve got great content, that’s fantastic, if it sounds like you’re using a portable cassette deck with a built-in mic to record it, they’ll move on down the road.

OK, so there are some tips, and now like I promised, let’s talk about iTunes. iTunes is pretty much the biggest directory out there for podcasts, and if you can get listed there, and target the right keywords, provided you’ve got good, original content, you’ll get listeners. The process is pretty simple.

First of all, you’ll need an iTunes account. So download it and signup if you haven’t already. On the iTunes Store page, click Podcasts, and hopefully they won’t change this in the near future. Once you get to the podcasting page, scroll down to the bottom and you’ll see a link to submit your own podcast. Now here’s the catch. iTunes is gonna try to validate your feed and you’ve got to have some things in place for them to accept the site, then once it’s accepted, they’ll review it and decide if they wanna let you in. For the most part, I think they let just about anybody in cause I’ve heard some pretty way out podcasts that weren’t exactly state of the art, so more than likely, you’ll get in.

I’m gonna put a link in the transcript to some info on iTunes, but you probably won’t want to read it. http://www.apple.com/itunes/store/podcaststechspecs.html if you’re bored, check it out. It does show you how you can test the feed before trying to submit and there’s a lot of other helpful info there too, they just make it very intimidating.

I’ll mention too that a few tools out there make submission and formatting to iTunes a lot easier. Podpress, which I’ve talked about before, is a great tool if you’re using Wordpress for your website, Garageband also helps you out with iTunes, and GigaVox’s Audio Lite is supposed to take care of a lot of iTunes specifics when it finally comes out.

One thing that is nice on the Apple site is an example RSS feed and if you don’t have or use an app that does it for you, you’ll have to create the RSS file yourself and that could be a bit tough if you’re not into HTML, so I highly recommend you use an app that will package your podcast and produce the needed iTunes tags.

Another thing you’ll wanna do is create some artwork. Having a nice image can make your podcast look more professional and set you apart from the less serious podcasters. I believe you want an image 300 x 300 pixels and this appears as album artwork when people see your podcast, so if you can’t come up with something yourself, think about outsourcing the project and pay somebody $100 to make one for you. Again, something sharp, it doesn’t have to be fancy, but nice looking, not just the name of your podcast.

The process for submission is pretty simple. You log in. You pick a category, and you submit. Like I said, they’ll review it, I don’t know if they actually have people listen or not, but they review it somehow and they’ll send you an email with an ID for your podcast.

It’s not a tough process folks, I talk to people and they’re like ‘You’re in iTunes! How’d you do that?’ It’s real simple, you just have to know it’s available.

Well, I think that pretty much wraps up this week’s show. You’ve been listening to The Podcasting Blog. If you’ve got any questions or comments about the show, you can address them to podcasting@seocompany.ca and I’d be happy to get back to you, of course you can also post a comment on the blog. This is Ken Walker and I hope to see you back next week, until then, happy podcasting.

Review

Our main topic this week is on external processing, so I thought it would be a good idea to do a review on some external processing equipment and the newest toy that I have here in the studio is the Symetrix 528E. It’s basically a compressor, but it actually does a little more than that.

To start off, it’ll take up 1 space in a rack and you get an XLR jack that’s phantom powered. That means you can hook your mic right up to it, and it gives you a decent mic preamp. It features a series of processors, the first of which is a De-Esser. Well, actually the very first thing is an input gain which lets you adjust the volume of the input signal. But the first real processor is the De-esser. What this does, is help take the edge off of those high sibilance sounds like ssssss and shhhhh. A De-esser is basically a compressor that works only on a band of frequencies. So within a certain range, a high range, it will limit the signal to help keep those sounds from becoming harsh. It’s a subtle effect but it does help, and with the 528E you can adjust the frequency band that is attacked, as well as how much the signal is compressed. You can also turn the effect off or on.

Next in line is a downward expander and a compressor. These two work together and they do a pretty good job. They’re both turned off and on together, but if you want you can adjust them so that only one is actually processing audio.

The downward expander is a big time saver for me. It’s almost like a noise gate and for those of you that don’t know what a noise gate is, it’s a device that lets you set a level of loudness that as long as the signal that a mic is picking up stays below that level, no audio is passed. OK, so if, for example, you have it set to -30dB and there is a noise in the room like a computer fan, but the noise is at a constant -35dB, then it’ll be as though the fan isn’t on because the noise gate will stay shut. As soon as you talk into the mic and go over -30dB, then the gate is opened and ALL the audio picked up by the mic will pass through.
Now that does NOT mean that it masks out the PC fan or whatever other noise is in the background. It only means that as long as the noise is below the threshold that you set, nothing will pass through. Once the gate is opened, everything passes through. The thought here is that the signal level of what your trying to record should be much louder than the noise, so if the noise is only heard when you’re actually speaking, it shouldn’t be too bad, and generally that’s true.

The downward expander isn’t exactly a noise gate, but it works in much the same way. You set a threshold and any sounds below that threshold get compressed, they get squashed down to where they’re almost nothing. Then as soon as you start talking, and again we’re dealing directly with podcasting here, as soon as you start talking, the downward expansion isn’t going on any more and the full signal passes through the processor.

Where this really saves you is if you have some background noise, or occasional background noise. You can set the threshold to just above that noise and while you’re recording, it’ll seem like everything is totally quiet. Then when you talk, your voice pretty much overpowers the background noise. Obviously this doesn’t work for very loud sounds, it’s only meant to help with little problems.

On the other extreme we have the compressor. This takes loud sounds, which would typically be you, and compresses them down or squashes them down by a predetermined amount. This helps your volume levels to stay pretty constant even if you were to get very excited and all of a sudden get a little louder. It also helps keep your signal from over modulating and getting distorted. You don’t have to fool with attack and release because the 528E is designed for voice so those values are factory set. The only three knobs for this area of the unit are the threshold for the downward expander, the threshold for the compressor, and the compression ratio which is basically how much compression you want on the signal. Again, there’s a switch that turns both the expander and the compressor off or on, but you could operate them independently if you wanted to just by adjusting the threshold levels either extreme minimum or extreme maximum.

The next section gives you a three band EQ and all three bands are sweepable, meaning you can adjust the frequency that is affected. So there’s some engineering jargon for you this week, sweepable means that you can adjust the frequency. What I mean by that is, most stereos have maybe a two band EQ, treble and bass, or maybe they have a 5 band graphic equalizer with 5 different frequencies that you can adjust. In either case though, all the frequencies are preset. The bass might be set to around 200Hz or the treble might be 5000Hz, they’re all preset and all you can adjust is the amount of gain that is added or cut from the frequency. With a home stereo, a 5 band EQ might be OK, but if you want to really work your voice and get something that makes you shine, it’s good to be able to pick what frequencies are worked on. People are all different and different settings have to be used. What works for a man probably won’t work for a woman.

So with this 3 band EQ, you can adjust the frequency that gets affected, then you can adjust how wide of a band is affected, in other words, how many adjacent frequencies are also affected, and you can either enhance that frequency, or detract from it. You’ve got a button to turn the whole EQ section off or on.

One kinda neat thing is that all of the effects have inserts in the back and you can actually re-route the order that they are processed in. For example, let’s say you wanted to do the compression first, then the de-esser, then the EQ. Also, you can run another processor into the chain by sending the signal from the de-esser stage to your other processor, and then back into the compression stage, just as an example.

At the very end of the chain is an output gain that lets you get your signal up or cut it down to fit whatever your recording device is.

So those are the features, but how does it perform? Well, we use it here in the Podcasting Blog studio and to sum it all up, I like it a lot. Everything works and it works good. The compression is almost unnoticeable. The EQ helps you give your voice a little thickness and clarity, and the downward expansion is indispensible for studio work when you don’t have a $50,000 studio. Just the downward expander saves me time in post production work because I don’t have to go through and remove ambient noise. The compressor saves me time because I don’t have to go through and level my volumes.

Symetrix is pretty high-end gear and you’ll find these processors in radio stations all over the country. Expect to pay about $500 for one. It’s not the cheapest upgrade you can get, but just so you know what kind of difference it makes, I’ll shut all its features off and let you hear for yourself.

OK, now everything is off and this is basically what things sound like. It’s a little noisier, the volumes aren’t the best, and the voice sounds pretty flat. The S’s are also a little sharper. Now let’s turn the de-esser back on and you’ll notice a slight change in sibilant sounds, not a lot, but enough to take the edge off. Now we’ll turn the downward expander and compressor back on. You’ll hear it got much quieter right? And now we’ll kick in the EQ which will give us a bit better definition. The Symetrix 528E.

Commercial: SEOCompany.ca

Content

Let’s talk about external processors and why you might want to use them in your podcast. Lemme start with this. Podcasters are not all radio engineers. Just like a lot of radio talk show hosts aren’t engineers. They know something about a topic, and they want to share that knowledge, or talk about those kinds of problems, whatever, but they have an engineer that knows audio. Most podcasters though can’t afford an engineer, and really, you probably don’t need one if you have the right gear and know what to do with it and how to use it. That’s what we’re all about here, one of the purposes of this podcast is to make you sound like a 50,000 watt radio station, if at all possible, without you having to hire an engineer.

The reason that I said all that is that I come from a music and production background. I play guitar and piano and I’ve done a lot of recording, I’ve been around it all my life. That made the transition to podcasting very easy for me because of my technical background. I’ve also been working as a computer geek for about 15 years starting out as a bench tech and then as a network admin and now a software instructor. So from the technical side of things, this was all pretty easy for me and very natural, but that’s not the case for everybody and what you’ll find out on the net, is a lot of people that could produce a good podcast, as far as content, but they’re pretty clueless on the technical side.

That’s where we wanna fit in and help out, either by producing your podcast for you, or by helping you have the knowledge to do it yourself. Somebody might say “Ken, that doesn’t make sense. How can you have a business doing podcasts for people, and at the same time turn around and tell them how to do it themselves?” The answer is simple. Not everybody has the time or resources to do a podcast themselves. I’ll tell you everything that’s involved in doing it right, and you decide if you wanna try it yourself. I hope that with these podcasts I’m gonna help somebody out there and they’ll do a great job. I wanna educate business owners about how effective podcasts are, how much they can help their site, and I wanna help the hobbyist that wants to podcast about breeding rabbits.

Honestly, I didn’t mean to ramble on about that so much, so let’s get back to the topic here, external processing. What is external processing? You’ve got your mic, and your audio capture device, whatever it is, and then we’ve got the computer. After our audio gets recorded, we can process it with effects and plug-ins. Those are little software programs that DO something to our audio signal. We could add reverb, we could normalize it or amplify it, all of which is done after the signal has been recorded.

Well, if we use external processing, we’re essentially doing all of that processing AS the recording is being made. So for example, I could have an effects processor that adds reverb, or compresses my signal. The difference is, the processing is done between my mic and my audio capture device, and it gets recorded like that.

Right away I’m gonna say that some people prefer to record perfectly dry, meaning absolutely no effects, and then do all the processing later on. For some things, that’s OK I suppose, but it won’t take you long to realize that having a compressor on during your recording will save you lots of time in editing later. Especially, imagine that you always record totally dry, with no processing, then you always go in and run the same compression plugin with the same settings. Then you always run the same normalization with the same settings. All of that will take time, and you always get the same result. So why not use an external compressor to do it and get the same results every time, without having to run the plug-ins?

Now, plug-ins aren’t bad, I use them myself. They give you access to equipment that you might not have the money to buy, or you don’t use often enough to justify it, especially if you’re not a full time podcaster or musician. One thing you can’t do with a plug-in though is hear what things will sound like WHILE you’re recording. For example, you put your headphones on and you start recording. You’ve got your compressor on, your noise gate, some EQ maybe a sonic maximize, even a little reverb if you want, but you’ll hear it exactly like it’s getting recorded.

There are two reasons that people just use plug-ins. The first is cost, and hey, if you don’t wanna spend the money or you can’t afford it, don’t buy it. The second argument is that they want the dry signal alone and then they can do with it what they want.

This argument works for some things, but mostly way out effects. If you’re always using the same plug-in with the same settings, do it externally and save yourself the time. For me, if I can save myself 10 minutes per podcast, then I’ll make back the cost of my equipment pretty quick.

External processing is done in series which means that your mic plugs into the first device, usually a mic preamp and compressor, and then the output of that device will go to the input of another device and it will continue like that until it gets to your audio capture device. Now, in practice, you’re probably gonna have one or two devices in your signal chain. Like maybe a preamp and compressor and an equalizer. For podcasting that’s about all you need.

This week’s review featured the Symetrix 528E which has pretty much everything that a podcaster would need for voice processing in one nice little package. If you get something like this you can plug your mic into it and then plug the output into your audio capture device. You could also go out and buy a mic preamp, a compressor, a noise gate, and a parametric EQ. In that case you’d daisy chain all of those devices and then finally go to your PC.

Now those of you that aren’t real serious about podcasting, or you just don’t wanna spend the money, you don’t have to. You can get a lot of good results from plug-ins, I personally think external processors sound better, but that’s just my opinion. Get a good quality mic and a good audio capture card and you can make some great podcasts with plug-ins.

Again, for podcasting, the big tickets are compression and EQ, probably some type of noise gate or downward expander too.

News
This week’s news comes from the UK but I think if we had a similar study done in the US we’d see similar results. Figures from Edison Media Research suggest the audience for podcasting is on the rise, and that general awareness of the medium is growing rapidly.

The stats, which were originally presented at the Corporate Podcasting Summit in London, show that awareness of podcasting grew by 70%, while actual use increased by only 18%.

The audience for podcasts is up by 18% from a year ago. In 2006, 11% of those surveyed listened to audio podcasts; in 2007, the number was 13%

Podcast awareness has grown in the last year, from 22% to 37%

Video podcast use is up by 10%, from 10% to 11%
The podcast audience:

49% are female, 51% male. Age distribution is relatively even also, with more 55+ listeners than in the 18-24 age group

Podcast users are twice as likely to have incomes over $100,000 and nearly twice as likely to have incomes between $75,000 and $100,000

Podcast users were 36% more likely than others to have made online purchases, and 4 times as likely to have purchased songs online

Podcast users spend 50% more time online

Podcast advertising has been predicted to grow from $80m in 2006 to $400m in 2011. This makes sense when you look at the relatively high incomes of podcast users, and the fact that they are more likely to make online purchases.

The stats come from a poll of 1,855 telephone interviews in January 2007. A study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project last November put the US podcast audience at 12%.

Recent UK figures suggested that 8% of the UK population has downloaded a podcast.

Outro
That’s it for another episode of The Podcasting Blog, I’m Ken Walker and I hope you’ve enjoyed the show. Next week we’re gonna take a look at promoting your podcast and I’ll let you know some details on getting your podcast into iTunes and some other directories. If you’d like to ask a question or comment on the show, you’ve got two options. My email address is podcasting@seocompany.ca, or you can just post a comment on the blog. I’ll see you back here next week, same time, same place.

I forget where I actually heard about this company but their name is GigaVox Media, Inc. and you can find them at GigaVox.com. What turned me on to them, and again I don’t remember where I heard about it, but it was a program they have called The Levelator. This program is pretty neat, it does some of the work that a sound engineer would typically take care of. Basically, you’ve got an audio file and maybe you have two different sound sources in the same file, like if you did an interview on the phone maybe or even in person, but one of the speakers is louder than the other. Well, part of what the Levelator does is level things out and make you both sound more at the same volume.

They say that it’s not a compressor, limiter or normalizer, but it’s more like all three and from what I saw, it’s pretty impressive especially for working with a file real quick and not wanting to do things manually. You can even use it on a dry audio clip with one sound source, just to balance things out.

The install went very smoothly and using The Levelator is a no brainer, as long as you know one little secret, and that is, there are no controls. You can’t tweak anything. You don’t open files, you don’t import files, you simply drag an audio file onto the already running The Levelator and it does it’s little number. Now that’s actually a drawback to me, I’d like to see the addition of being able to open files from The Levelator and choosing where the output file goes, but as of right now, you have to open the window where the file sits and drag n drop it onto The Levelator.

It only works with WAV or AIFF files, so raw content only. It works on Windows 2000 and up, including Vista. It also works on the Mac OS 10.3 and 10.4 with either PowerPC or Intel chips, and get this, they have it running on a variant of Linux so you Linux users might have another new app to play with.

It’s also free for both commercial and personal use, which is kinda nice. If you’ve got some nice recording gear, you’re probably not gonna have much use for it, but it’ll really shine for people that don’t have compressors or don’t have the skill set for recording phone interviews on different tracks, things like that. So, check it out, it’s called The Levelator and while you’re there, take a look at another GigaVox product, Audio Lite.

Now, as of this post, Audio Lite has not been released, so this isn’t really a review, more like a heads up. From the demo, it looks like a real interesting program and I can’t wait to get my hands on it. It’s got lots of automation, ad management, and just like The Levelator, it’s free, so we’ll see.

Using Commercials

Since lots of you people listening are wanting to, more than likely, make a little money at podcasting, I figured I’d throw in this little tidbit this week. Yes, you can use commercials to generate revenue for your podcast. Don’t get too excited though, at least not yet.

You’re not gonna make a ton of money on commercials until your podcast is very popular, and I mean VERY popular. Advertisers usually don’t waste money so they’re not gonna spend a whole lot until you can prove that you have thousands of listeners.

Now, in one sense, advertising on a podcast is a good idea because you’re most likely to reach your intended audience, so it’s a lot more focused, here’s why. With TV and Radio, anybody could be listening or watching. You could throw up a bunch of ads that they’re not even interested in and couldn’t care less about. With podcasts though, you’re dealing with people that are probably very interested in a specific topic or theme. They might be into astronomy or hiking or eating out, so if you have a focused product that would interest specific targets, then you’ll probably get a higher return on investment than you would with Radio or TV cause the percentage of interested people is much higher.

Advertisers already know that you advertise where it counts, so certain products get advertised on certain shows, but with Radio and TV, people miss shows, they get phone calls, they take breaks, who knows what. But with a podcast, people are gonna listen to the whole show, top to bottom. If they get distracted, they’ll pause it. These are people that want the content, that’s why they subscribed to the RSS feed or searched for it, they want it, so if you’ve got a good show, they’ll listen.

So you’re job is #1, have a great show. Podcast about something you love and make it informative and interesting. #2, get lots of listeners. Do that with site optimization as well as the guidelines in rule #1. #3, find advertisers in your specific vertical market, or the vertical market that you’re going to create. Find companies that have something your listeners want or are interested in.

My advice to you is, don’t start taking a bunch of off the wall ads that aren’t specifically related to your topic, why? Well, your listeners probably won’t like it. They’re listening to you because you give them something they want. If you start giving them something they don’t want, they won’t listen. You’ll have fewer listeners and you’ll have to charge less for the ads anyway, so it’s better to give them what they want and charge more for fewer ads.

And with that…here’s a message from our sponsor.

Commercial

News

You’re listening to The Podcasting Blog, and now for Podcasting News.

In an example of how schools can use technology to enrich curriculum, one California high school is offering a class in podcasting production, reports MacNewsWorld.

Taking inspiration from the National Public Radio programs This American Life and Car Talk, Atascadero High School computer science teacher Gary Bissell has proposed a course in producing video and audio segment broadcasting on the Internet — call it podcasting or vlogging or whatever.

Bissell drew up the course outline after attending a county education seminar that taught him how to podcast.

“Public speaking is involved, audio editing, script writing, organization and presentation,” Bissell said. “They’ll be introducing background sounds like they do on NPR sometimes, to make it a little bit more exciting, and using background music, too.”

After production, movies and sound files can be uploaded onto the school’s Web site for downloading by the general public. Students can also upload their work onto YouTube or other video sharing sites.

As a starting point, Bissell suggests several ideas to whet the students’ apetite, such as interviewing the oldest person in their family, tutorials on how to repair or construct something, and a video of their favorite hobby.

“It’s like listening to a radio broadcast on your own time,” said Bissell, who has taught at Atascadero High for 22 years.

So if this catches on, maybe I’ll be teaching a podcasting course at ITT next year.

Outro

Thanks for joining me this week. You’ve been listening to The Podcasting Blog. Join us again next week when we’ll talk about..I dunno…something…else…interesting, I’m sure.

You might have one of those golden voices that just makes people melt when they hear you, so maybe you won’t need what I’m gonna tell you, the rest of you though, can benefit tons by incorporating music and sound effects into your podcast. I know that generally I stick to a pretty straightforward format and just talk about the details without a lot of fluff, but today I’m gonna have to break away from that mold for just a bit to help illustrate what I’m talking about.

We all know that music is powerful. Music is moving, it effects our emotions and mood. It can even give us an adrenaline rush or put us to sleep. You wanna carefully select the style of music that you use on your podcast, but make sure that you’re using something. Also make sure that the music isn’t overpowering, unless that’s a specific effect that you’re looking for. For example, in a car dealer’s commercial, loud music might be the norm, but if you’ve got a nice orchestral piece playing while you talk about some upcoming community events, you want the music in the background, loud enough to hear, but low enough to be unobtrusive.

You might think that there really isn’t a lot to talk about with music and podcasts, you just pick the music you want and play it for your intro or whatever, but what I’m wanting to help with is not just an intro theme. You might have transitions where you do news, or upcoming events, or even commercials for your podcast. If you’re trying to make money with your podcast, don’t just sell time for the commercial, tell your client you produce the commercial as well, if you wanna get into that kinda thing.

Honestly I wouldn’t think there’s much to talk about with music either, but I’m surprised how many podcasts I hear that have no music, or the music is so loud you can barely hear what the host is saying. So give your music some thought, and we’re gonna move on to sound effects for a minute, but later in today’s episode we’ll come back to music and I wanna address some legal issues with commercial music.

Ok, now we’re talking about sound effects. This, of course, will not fit into every podcast and you might not use them every time, but try to get a decent selection of typical radio station type effects which would be zingers, zaps, whooshes, and other transitional type effects. They’re very handy and if you structure your podcast into different segments, they can really help break things up.

For example, things are really starting to take shape here and you’ll notice a lot of enhancements over the next several episodes. We’re gonna be putting together more of a structure for each show and have regular features like podcasting news and equipment reviews, so I’ll be utilizing some transitional effects and music. This just gives the listener something interesting to listen to. People are spoiled. They expect to be wow’d. That doesn’t mean that you’ve gotta plaster your show with sound effects, but it does mean consider it. Of course, format is also a factor. Shows that are entertaining will need to be entertaining. Shows that are all business, can be pretty straight forward.

One place you will use sound effects a lot is with commercials. For example, listen to this audio bit that doesn’t have any sound effects…

…now listen to the same segment, with sound effects…

…big difference right? Again, I don’t wanna see a string of distastefully used sound effects in podcasts, but keep it in mind as something to add a little something special. And if you think about, take for example an NPR broadcast, why do they report on something and include sound bytes of things like ambient noise, or somebody chopping down a tree, or whatever? It’s because that creates more of a link between the listener and the topic. So if you’ve got a podcast on landscaping, use some tool sounds like a leaf blower, if you’ve got a podcast on sewing, maybe you have a regular segment and for an intro you can have some scissor sounds or a sewing machine or something. The point here is, be creative, use discretion, and have fun with it.

OK, now we’re back to talking about music in your podcast, by the way, did you notice how that transition kinda breaks things up and gives us a fresh start? OK?

So with music, you’ve got some things to watch out for. First of all, don’t assume that you can just pull a CD from your collection, or pop a song out of your iTunes library, and start podcasting with it. Lot’s of people do it, and they even get away with it, but that doesn’t make it right, does it?

Seriously, copyright laws protect the owners of a sound recording and here’s why. If I go out and record a song, maybe I didn’t even write it, but I bought the rights to use it. So I record it. There are now at least three people involved, and actually many more. First theirs the author of the song, then there’s me, then there’s the producer. So you go out and buy my CD and now I get paid, the producer gets paid, and the songwriter gets paid. Everything’s fine right? Yes, so far.

Now you start a podcast and you start using my song as your theme music. Then you become real famous and millions of people listen to your podcast. Here’s where it gets a little sticky. On one hand, you could say I should like the exposure because millions of people are hearing my song on your podcast. On the other hand, I could say you owe me money because millions of people are hearing my song on your podcast and they don’t need to go buy it themselves! Or that my song made you famous. Then besides me there’s the producer and the songwriter that are both gonna wanna have a talk with you, only they’ll use their lawyers to do so.

If you absolutely HAVE to play commercial music, you can get a license and then you’ll be legal. This all gets very detailed and if anybody knows of a simpler method, please let me know. Some of the organizations that handle licensing are ASCAP, BMI and SESAC. I believe though that they only handle certain musicians and you’ll probably also have to get some licensing from the record labels that produce the music.

You’re probably wondering how you could ever get caught playing commercial music in your podcast..the answer is simple. There’s an organization called the RIAA that actually goes about looking for websites that play commercial music and if they find you, they might ask you for proof of your license. If you don’t have it, you could be sued. Now usually they’ll try to help you get licensed, but they’re definitely not the kind of people that you want to be rude to or ignore, kinda like the IRS.

Now believe it or not, I said all of that just to scare you enough so that you’ll take the much easier route of just using Royalty Free music. Full buy out music is a little more expensive per piece, but that’s because you’re buying a license that says you can pretty much do whatever you want to with it, provided you’re not coping it and reselling it. For example, if you use a royalty free track, you have to talk over the track so that somebody couldn’t just save the song and have it all to themselves, so you have to mix it in with your content. Royalty Free means just that, you don’t have to pay any royalties to use it. That’s why you can buy a CD at the mall with 14 tracks for $12, but you might pay $12 for just one royalty free track.

I’ll go ahead and give you a couple of links to some royalty free music sites and usually they’ve got some good deals even on bundles that’ll give you a selection of music for different moods, and this is especially a good thing to have if you’re gonna do commercials or different segments in your podcast. RoyaltyFreeMusic.com of course is a big one, they’ve got tons of categories, and PartnersInRhyme.com is another one, again lots of categories. Usually with this type of thing you’ll get a set for a particular song which gives you a full length version, then maybe a 60 second version a 30 second and a 15 second version and that’s really handy for different transitions and segment lengths. For a full selection though, you might pay $80 for a set of 8 or 9 songs with these different variations. Again, you’re buying a license though, so this way you’re legal.

Of course you’ve also got the option of having someone do a custom music theme for your show, but that’s gonna be a little expensive. The benefit of that is that nobody else will be able to use it. Another option is using some sites on the Internet that specifically list music that’s legal to play on your podcast. If there’s a band that wants some extra exposure or a label that’s trying to get some good public relations, they’ll post music on these sites and it’s free to use in your podcast. You’ve gotta check them out though because sometimes it’s only for non-profit podcasts, they usually have a way to buy the music for a commercial podcast and it’s usually pretty reasonable. Some of these sites include AudioFeeds.org Kahvi Collective Magnatune and PodSafe Audio just to name a few I think there are others out there and this is probably gonna be even more popular in the future because if you want the exposure, you’re gonna get it.

That’s it for this weeks episode, I really hate talking about this legal stuff cause that totally takes away from the fun part of podcasting, but I consider it my duty to inform the uninformed and who knows, maybe I’ll keep somebody from going to jail or something.

People that are in the entertainment industry know how to work a mic. An amateur will walk up to a mic and first of all, they’re kinda afraid of it because they’re being recorded or amplified over a PA, so my first suggestion is, get some mic time. Don’t be afraid of your microphone. Different mics do work a little differently though, so that’s why you need to log some high quality time with your mic. Do lots of recording and note the effects of distance and volume.

There are basically two different styles of microphone, dynamics and condenser. I don’t wanna forget about ribbon mics either, but those are typically outside of a podcaster’s budget. If you’ve listened to my other podcasts you know that I prefer a condenser in the studio, but with either one, placement is key. Here’s why.

Aside from the two main styles of either condenser or dynamic, we’ve also got patterns to worry about. There are omni-directional, unidirectional, bidirectional, cardiod, and super-cardiod. Omni-directional patterns pick up sound from all around the mic. This is typically a bad choice for a podcaster’s mic because if there’s noise anywhere, it’ll get picked up. Unidirectional mics pick up sound best from one direction. They tend to reject sound from the sides. Bidirectional mics pickup sounds equally well from two different directions and usually have a figure-eight pattern, so if two people were standing on opposite sides of the mic, it would pick them up equally well if it was aligned properly.

A cardiod mic is a unidirectional mic and it has a pattern that is kinda heart shaped, which is where I think they get the name cardiod. For voice work, either a cardiod or better yet a super-cardiod is the way to go. A super-cardiod, which I’ve also heard called a hyper-cardiod, the mic is most sensitive in a very small area in front of the mic. There’s also a small area behind the mic, that’s just a little bit sensitive. You get real good rejection of signals on the side of the mic, meaning it doesn’t pickup much from the sides.

Now an omni-directional mic does give you the most accurate reproduction of sound, but any good quality cardiod or super-cardiod will actually add some tonal color to the recording and is usually a desired effect. One drawback though, is in the bass response. If you get real close to a cardiod, you’ll hear the ‘proximity effect’ which adds tons of bass to the sound. To help with that, there are two things. Most mics have a bass rolloff switch that essentially kills the bass below a certain frequency, and of course we also have proper mic technique, which is what we’re wanting to talk about today.

If you’ve ever watched a professional singer on stage, you’ll see them ‘working the mic’. That means that they use the distance and angle of the mic from their mouth, to benefit the overall sound. For example, if they’ve got to really belch out hard to hit a high note, they’ll pull the mic away from their mouth so that the overall sound remains constant, even though they’re pumping out way more volume.

If they want to whisper, they pull the mic in close. When I’m recording, I unconsciously tilt my head a bit on certain words that contain what are known as plosives. Words that begin with the letter ‘P’ or ‘T’ for example. If I say ‘Peter Pan Peanut Butter’ and don’t watch my plosives, I’ll get ‘Peter Pan Peanut Butter’, which doesn’t sound very professional, right?

The trick to this is your interaction with the mic. You can’t fix a plosive once it’s been recorded. If you can, plug in a set of good quality headphones and listen to yourself talk while you record. You’ll learn to move your head away or turn a bit when you’re going to say certain words. That’ll be hard at first, but if you keep your headphones on while you listen to yourself, you’ll get real comfortable with it and you’ll be able to see what you have to do to prevent those plosives.

Now, I guess we should start with mic placement before we really get into this. I’ve found both in the studio and on stage, that most people just don’t know how to use a mic. They don’t know what’s required to get good sound, they kinda figure ‘It’s a mic, it just works.’ And that couldn’t be farther from the truth. They haven’t made a mic that works as good as the human ear, and I seriously doubt they ever will, so that means you’ve got to help your mic.

Hopefully you’ve got a unidirectional mic. You’ve gotta find out where the pattern is though. With most mics, it’s pretty straight forward, you talk into the end of the mic, but that’s not the case with a lot of condenser mics. With your headphones on, move around the mic and talk. Listen to the quality of the sound. With large-diaphragm condensers, you’ll be talking more to the front of the mic, than the end.

You’re gonna find out real quick that placing your mic is easiest done with a boom stand. I’ve got a couple of stands that just mount to my desk and I can move my mic around wherever I want it. Those desktop mic stands are pretty much worthless as far as I’m concerned. You’ll hear every time you bump your knee or tap the table. Buy a mic that has a shockmount and then use a boom stand. I promise, you won’t regret it.

So now, with your boom stand and your shockmount, start about 8 inches from the mic. Don’t talk straight into the mic either, that’ll cause more plosives. Envision the pattern that the mic makes, and talk ‘across’ that pattern at maybe a 45 degree angle. If you were singing on stage with a dynamic mic, you’d do it totally different, but in the studio with a condenser, I’ve found this works best.

Another thing that helps eliminate plosives is a pop-filter. This mounts to your stand and sets in front of your mic, like you see in the photo here. It should be about 2 inches from the mic, and it’ll not only help subdue plosives, but also keeps spit from hitting your mic.

Now what I’m gonna do is demonstrate the differences in sound by not placing your mic correctly. I’ve already show you what a plosive sounds like, so I’ll refrain from any more. This is what it sounds like if you’re too far away from the mic, this is what it sounds like if you’re too close. This is what it sounds like if you’re outside your mics pattern, kinda like you’re far away, and in the case of a large diaphragm condenser, this is what it sounds like if I’m talking into the mic as though it’s a dynamic stage mic. Not good, huh?

So now you know, don’t just take it for granted that you’re using your mic correctly, this is where your audio signal starts, so it can’t get any better than what you start with.

Aside from these options, I guess I should mention headset mics. I really try to discourage people who want to use a headset mic just because good ones are very expensive, and I don’t mean $50. Shure makes some great quality headset mics, but they’re meant more for the stage. If you go get one of those cheapy headset mics from Staples or Wal-Mart, you’re gonna have bad audio quality, period.

One thing I almost forgot to mention is to put the mic just above your mouth, vertically speaking, you’re still 8 inches away, but make it where you’re talking up slightly and definitely not down to the mic. The reason is, that’ll help your throat to not be constrained and again, makes it where the mic isn’t straight across from your lips so it lessens plosives.

If you don’t have a very pronounced voice, bring the mic closer, you have to capture as much fullness as you can, and that isn’t done by amplifying the signal later on. Believe it or not, correctly placing your mic can be more important than buying an expensive one.

Before I finish up, I’ll just remind you, do your recording with a headset on so that you can hear yourself, at least until you’ve been doing it for awhile. If you don’t have any way of monitoring yourself while you record, then do a lot of recording and listen carefully to your voice. Move around a lot and talk so you can hear the difference when you play it back, and don’t do the old ‘Testing..1..2..3.’. Get some real copy and go through the motions. Talk like you’re talking to your friends, talk about the weather, talk about how great you’re gonna sound once we’re done with you, whatever.

I think next week, we’re gonna do a little production work and talk about using sound effects, zingers, and music in your podcast.

I’ve told you a little bit about compression in other episodes, but this time I’m gonna dedicate the whole podcast to it because honestly, it’s a little more complicated than just flipping a switch, and this is something that people tend to get confused easy. Compressors are “dynamic range processors” they’re also called “variable gain amplifiers” or VGA’s. They affect the dynamic range of sound by varying the “gain” or volume of that sound.

If you were recording a concert, there might be a potential for the loudness of that concert to peak around 120dB, and that is very loud. You’re recording equipment though, let’s say it has a range of 75 or 90dB, and if you go over that, you’re gonna get distortion. What we’ll have to do is be able to turn down the dynamic range so that we get a recording that doesn’t sound distorted. You could do it by manually turning the volume down on the mics but the problem with that is, you’re too slow and by the time you lower the volume, you’ve already over-modulated and recorded, junk. So first, the compressor does the job for us automatically.

In the music world compressors are used on just about anything that has a fluctuating volume, things like guitars, drums, vocals. A simple explanation is that a compressor will make a big change in volume into a little change in volume, so it kinda balances things out.

Most compressors have 4 main controls and they usually have two secondary controls. The main controls are Input Level, Output Level, Threshold, and Ratio. The secondary controls are important for things like voice work or even if you’ve got a noisy guitar amp, and these controls are Attack Time and Release Time.

The Input level is simply how much gain should be applied to the input signal. For example, if you set it to ‘0’, that means you’re getting the exact same volume level that you are sending it. If you set it to -3dB, then you’re reducing the gain of the input signal by 3dB. If you set it to +3dB, then you’re turning the input signal up by 3dB.

The Output level is on the other end of the compressor. The input level is the first adjustment, and the output level is the last adjustment. Once everything has been compressed, you’re setting how much amplification, or reduction, should happen to the signal. So this is another place for you to control the volume into the next piece of equipment which could be a mixer, a PA, or a recording device.

Usually, we don’t want the compressor running all the time. This is where the Threshold comes in. Think of this like the thermostat for your air conditioner. You set it at a certain level and if it gets hot enough, the air conditioner kicks on. Once the temperature gets cool enough, the air conditioner kicks off. Well, the threshold behaves pretty much the same way. You set a volume level where you want the compressor to start working. Any signals that are below that level, won’t be processed. Once a signal reaches that level, the compressor starts to do its work, based on the next parameter, the Ratio.

The Ratio is probably the trickest part of compression. This is the relationship between the uncompressed signal, and the compressed signal, and it’s described as a ratio. The reason it’s a ratio is because it’s dynamic. There’s not just a ‘set’ level of amplification that occurs. If the ratio was 4:1, then an input signal of 20dB would have an output signal of 5dB. You can figure that out by just taking the input level and divide it by the ratio, so 20 divided by 4 is 5. If your ratio was less, like 2:1, then your 20dB signal would turn into a 10dB signal. A real high ratio, meaning a lot of compression is going on, like 10:1, would take your 20dB signal and make it a 2dB signal. So ratios from 2 to 6 are considered ‘gentle’ meaning they’re more subtle, but over 6 would be considered ‘hard’ and is usually pretty noticeable. For studio and podcasting work, you want to stick with the more gentle side of compression. Start with a 2:1 ratio and see how that sounds.

Another parameter we can set is the Attack Time. This is a number, usually expressed in milliseconds, that tells us how quick the compressor will start to compress a signal that has gone over the threshold. So if it’s set to 200ms, a signal will go above the threshold for 200ms before it gets compressed. The reason for this is to help things sound a bit more natural. You don’t want everything sounding like it’s hitting a brick wall, acoustically. So the attack time is used to flow the compression in.

Let’s say that you start talking and then you stop. The compressor’s gonna stop too because your signal will go below the threshold. If you stop just for a split second and then start talking again, that’s gonna sound a bit strange because your volume will jump around suddenly a bit. So to compliment the attack time, we have the release time. This is also set in milliseconds and it determines the amount of time for the compressor to turn off after the signal drops below the threshold.

There are a couple of other features that I should mention just in case you’re looking to buy a new compressor, first, you can get processors that include other effects AND a compressor, so that’s one option. You can also get dedicated compressors. As a general rule, you’ll get better quality with a dedicated compressor. Second, you can get stereo or mono compressors. That just tells you how many independent signals can be run through the compressor. A stereo compressor lets you run two signals, independently, so you could run two mics through it. A mono compressor just lets you run one signal through it.

A feature that is built in to a lot of compressors is a De-esser. This is a selective compressor, it compresses signals in a given frequency, around 5-8k. It does that to soften ‘S’ sounds so they’re not as harsh. It’s usually a subtle compression, so it’s not something that most people will notice a whole lot.

Aside from that, you’ve two main categories of compressors, tube and solid-state. Without going into engineering terms, I’ll just say that tube compressors generally have a much warmer sound and a lot of times they’re used just because of that, they kinda add a presence to the sound. Solid-state isn’t all that bad, it kinda depends on personal tastes.

With compressors, you WILL get what you pay for. The more expensive models can do a lot of compressing and leave the signal still sounding natural, while the cheaper models will sound compressed the more you compress. Prices vary drastically from a couple of hundred dollars to thousands, so see if you can go to a music store and try one out. You’ll wanna hear how it sounds with strictly voice going through it.

I’m gonna go ahead and give you three different models to look at in three different price ranges, just so you can get an idea of what’s out there. For podcasting, as always, don’t spend a ton of money, but get the best you can afford. Compression won’t make or break your podcast, but it will help your sound quite a bit.

Compressor #1
Compressor #2
Compressor #3

These are all from Musician’s Friend, with which I have no affiliation, but they generally have a good price.

On the front page they had a bundle that looked real nice for someone that’s wanting to get into podcasting and doesn’t have any equipment except for the computer. It even included software for recording. Now, I haven’t used this equipment myself, but it’s put out by BEHRINGER and for the most part, I like their equipment. The best part is, the whole package is $179 and it gives you everything that you have to have to get started.

I’d consider this a major step up from a cheap mic recorded through a stock sound card. Let’s look at what you get, and I have no connection with BEHRINGER or AMS, so this isn’t a paid advertisement OK? I just saw a great deal and figured I’d help out those of you that are on a tight budget.

The mixer itself has 8 inputs and stereo outputs. It’s a small mixer, but it’s way more flexible than a typical podcaster is gonna need. Two of the inputs are XLR which means you have two places for XLR mics, just in case you’re gonna do interviews.

The EQ section is typical for something like this, three bands Hi – Mid – Low. The thing is firewire too which is a very nice feature. It’s kinda like the mixer IS the sound card, so you’re gonna get pretty quiet operation.

It comes with a large diaphragm condenser mic, again I’ve never used it but I can pretty much guarantee it’s better than anything you’d buy at Wal-Mart.

You get a pair of headphones and it even comes with a windscreen for the mic, and all the cables you need to hook everything up. Really, for somebody getting started, this is a turn-key solution and would work great for a portable setup with a laptop.

It looks like it comes with a special version of Abelton Live and it also looks like they’re giving you Audacity, which is pretty much free but that means there’s a good chance they’ve at least tested it or they probably wouldn’t distribute it.

Again, the whole deal’s $180 at American Music Supply, check it out. Definitely let me know if you get one and what kind of experience you had with it.

If you really want to promote your site, you’re gonna have to do a little bit of research, or you have to hire somebody like us to do it for you. You have to look at the contents of your podcast or your website, and determine special words and phrases that express the content of the podcast or website.

For example, let’s say you’re podcasting about Wilderness Survival (which gives me a good idea for a podcast), you’re gonna start by using a keyword tool like one of the ones I linked to in this blog. You’ll probably search for the keyword phrase ‘wilderness survival’. You’ll find out how often people search for that term and if you use the Overture tool, you can even see how often per hour, but most of those types of tools are gonna give you numbers like how often people search for that term per month.

With a lot of the tools, you’ll also see other searches that are related to your search. This’ll kinda give you an idea of how popular that particular keyword phrase is. You might spend 20 minutes just thinking of keywords and finding what’s the most popular search terms, and then you’ll use those keywords for your posts. You wanna use them in the content of your post, in your podcast if possible, and as meta tags.

You might have some generic ones that apply to all your podcasts, and you might have some others that apply specifically to certain episodes. For example, you might have ‘wilderness survival’ as a keyword for all your podcasts, and one podcast might also use the phrase ‘rocky mountains’ while another podcast uses ‘appalachian mountains’. That way, if somebody searches for ‘wilderness survival’, all your podcasts could show up, but if they look for ‘wilderness survival in the rocky mountains’, then the pertinent podcast that has that ‘rocky mountains’ in there, is gonna get preferential ranking.

There’s a huge selection of keyword tools here and also tons of stuff all over the web. It just depends on how much work you wanna do to promote your site. Next week I plan on having Bob Mutch on the show and Bob’s a SEO genius. He’s gonna tell us some of the basic work that’s needed to promote a podcast from an SEO standpoint and for those of you who don’t know, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. So Bob’s gonna tell us how to go through our site and optimize it so that the search engines really like the site. So next week’s show should be very interesting and you’ll learn a lot about how you can make your site rank better in a search engine.

If you wanna get a lot of listeners, whether you’re advertising a product on your site, or you’re using GoogleAds to generate revenue, or you just have a big ego and you want a lot of people listening to you, there’s a few simple steps that you can take that’ll help you get more exposure and generate more traffic.

Web Site Promotion Strategy

One big thing a lotta people miss is transcripts. It’s tough work, but transcribe your podcasts. That means that every word spoken gets turned into actual letters on the screen. The reason that’s so important is because search engines like Google and Yahoo go poking around on the Internet looking at websites. They keep track of the words that appear on a given website, and then when people type words that they’re looking for, the search engines tell them what sites have those words.

With a podcast though, Google or Yahoo don’t have any way of knowing what kind of content is on your site. If you do a fantastic podcast on extreme stamp collecting, the search engines won’t really know because they can’t listen to your podcast, all they can do is read the text on your site. The more text you have, the better. So transcribe your podcast and then you’ll post an article on your blog with the text for the podcast, and then at the top or bottom of the text, you have your player.

Another reason for having the text is for outbound links. Outbound links are links to other websites and they can help your rating with search engines as well. Whenever there is something pertinent in your podcast, use some of the text to link to something on the Internet like a news article, or a website, anything that has to do with your podcast. If you talk about a product, link to the company’s site.

Your next step is to submit your podcast to several podcast directories. There’s no real simple way to do this, it’s a lot of grunt work, but it pays off. You need to let people know you’re out there, and podcast directories are a great way to do that. Some of the ones that come to mind are PodcastBunker.com, podcastalley.com, podcastready.com, podcastingnews.com, podfeed.net, and iTunes. Google ‘podcast directory’ and I’m sure you’ll find enough to keep you busy all night. Some of them will just add you, others will preview your show first, I know PodcastBunker only lists shows that sound at least as good as the radio. Always focus on good audio quality and you shouldn’t have any problem getting listed.

Also use meta tags in your articles. Meta tags aren’t as popular as they used to be, but they’ll still get you extra points in a lot of search engines. If you’re using WordPress, you can install one of several Meta Tag plugins that’ll insert tags into your posts, and all you have to do is a little bit of research on what keywords pertain to your article, and attach them to the post, but that’s something that we’re gonna talk about next week.

With your site, there are two main aspects that we have to consider. We’ll call the first one Experience. This includes the functionality of the site for your users, and the aesthetics or how it looks. Those are both pretty important today cause there’s a lot of competition out there, so you want your site to look nice and you want it to function logically and be easy to navigate.

The second aspect is on your side of things. How do I see what’s going on with my site? How do I determine what works and what doesn’t? How do I get my site to validate? Things like that, not to mention if you’re trying to make some money with your site by putting some advertising up or having sponsors.

So for right now, we’re just gonna make believe like you want a simple site that looks clean, isn’t flashy, and basically plays your podcasts. The beauty of WordPress is that you can make seriously big changes to the way the site looks, and the ‘behind the scenes’ functionality, very simply.

I’m gonna recommend two modules to you that will both play your podcasts. One is very simple and just plays your podcast. The other is actually built on the first one, but it’s got a lot of extras and it’ll help you get your RSS setup and ready for iTunes, and it’ll also help you get some statistics like how many times a particular podcast has been played or downloaded.

The first one is the audio.module. This is a very nice looking Flash player and it’s clean. Again though, this is simply a player, it’s nice though because you can set it up so all you have to do is put a link to your MP3 file in your blog post, and the player will just put itself there automatically, it’s really a nice player and it’s the one I use on this site.

The second option is for something a little more robust. It’s called PodPress by Dan Kuykendall over at mightyseek.com. PodPress does a lot of the work getting your podcast ready for iTunes and it also keeps some statistical information for you. Like I said, it’s built with the audio.module so it has a nice Flash player, and it gives your subscribers links for downloading your files or playing them right on the web. I use it on another site of mine to do screencasting.

And basically, as far as being able to do a nice podcast, that’s all you need. Pick one of those modules and start podcasting.

The good news is, you can probably have yourself setup very quickly and publish your first, real podcast in less than an hour. You just need a couple of things. A place to put your files, and some software to manage your posts.

Finding a company to host your podcast is easy. If you want, you can just go to Google and search for ‘podcast hosting’. You’ll see tons of sites. Some pretty good ones are switchpod.com and hostmonster.com, but there’s a lot of sites that are good, so instead of just recommending one to you, since nobody’s paying me to recommend them, I’ll just tell you what to look for.

You want a pretty good amount of storage AND bandwidth because you’re gonna be storing a lot of audio and the more listeners you have, the more bandwidth you’ll use. For example, let’s say your podcast has an average size of 6MB. If you do one show a week, then each month you’ll need 24MB. No big deal so far right, but you’ll probably want to keep your older shows so that they’re available to your listeners. After a year of podcasting, you’ll have used up almost 300MB. This is for a pretty short show, like maybe 15 minutes. If you have a 30 minute show, it doubles.

So look for the amount of storage that you get with the hosting company, and then you need to think about the amount of bandwidth. Don’t think that you have to use a company that specifically says it streams audio and video, because ANY hosting company can host your podcasts. Some of them might not be too happy if your show becomes real popular, but you shouldn’t have problems with most of them. Usually a hosting company will tell you that you get a certain amount of bandwidth per month, and they never actually expect you to use that much, ok, it just sounds good. If you do start using it though, they might give you some trouble, so when you get a thousand listeners, expect some kind of communication from them.

On the other hand, other companies don’t really care and they’ll let you have what you paid for. Here’s how you figure what you’re capable of. Let’s say a hosting company offers you 200GB of transfer. Again, your show is about 6MB. If you have one show a week, that means each of your 4 shows can be streamed more than 8000 times! Chances are you’re not gonna get 8000 subscribers your first month, but here’s the thing. You’ll have new people listening to your podcast all the time. If they like what they hear, they’ll probably listen to archived episodes, so don’t just count on the number of subscribers.

The good news is, for most podcasters, 200GB of transfer per month is probably more than you’ll ever use, of course you do have to take into account the average size of your show.

For 200GB of transfer and a gigabyte of storage, you can easily find something for 6 or 7 dollars a month, most hosting companies will even be more generous on your storage. You’ll be able to pick a domain and setup an account usually very quickly.

So spend some time, check references, I don’t think I’ve seen any hosting companies with support forums, but you should be able to Google the company and see if people have had issues with them.

Once you’ve got a host and you’ve gotten all the account information you need, like log in and FTP info, you’re gonna have to put some software on your server that’ll run your site. If you wanted, you could design your own website from scratch, but that would take you way longer than what I’m gonna tell you.

One of the biggest things on the Internet right now is blogging and the reason is, it’s easy. Anybody can do it and the software is free. All you have to do is download it, do a little configuring and upload it to your server. There’s lots of choices out there, like MovableType, Drupal, and WordPress. They’re all very customizable and you can get a nice looking site very quickly. WordPress has what they call their famous ‘Five minute install’ and the last time I did it, it was just that, 5 minutes, done.

My next post is gonna feature how to go about setting up WordPress since again, that’s what I use and it’s very easy to do. I’ve also done a lot with Drupal so feel free to post any comments on that and I’ll see if I can help you out.

The reason that blogging platforms are such a good idea for podcasts, is because they’ve got some real desirable functionality, out-of-the-box. You’ll post your blog and anybody coming to your site is gonna see your latest episode right up at the top. They can leave comments on it, they’ll be able to listen to past episodes and you can categorize each episode so that podcasts that are on a certain topic will show up together. All you’ll need is usually a few plug-ins and you’re ready to go.

And one of the neatest things with blogging packages is their support for RSS which is something that we’ll be dealing with in a future episode, but RSS makes it possible for people to subscribe to your podcast, and then whenever you post a new podcast, they’re notified right away and that’s kind of a reminder to listen to your podcast.

So next week, we’ll talk about WordPress and I’ll let you know some of the modules that you’ll need right away.

Before we mix everything down, we just wanna do a little bit of processing on that voice track. Hopefully your audio levels are somewhere around -6 to -3dB. That’s a pretty good place to be because when you’re recording, you need to have a little bit of headroom. Headroom is the amount of ‘cushion’ that you have between your loudest sound and 0dB, which in the case of digital recording would mean distortion.

When your signal goes over 0dB, it’s gonna sound terrible, so you wanna keep it at or below 0dB. To do that safely though, it’s a good idea to shoot for something like -3dB and then if you need to, you can amplify it a bit, or better yet, you can apply some compression, which is what we’re gonna do today.

Some of what I’m gonna tell you is kinda dependant on you specific situation, and a lot of people that give advice like this don’t give specifics for that very reason, but I think I can give you some real numbers and just tell you where you can play with it.

Let’s talk just a little bit of theory for a minute. The reason you want your signal in the -6 to -3dB range has to do with what is called the signal-to-noise ratio. When nobody is talking into your mic, and there’s nothing special going on, that’s your noise level. Try recording without anything going on and you’ll see a level of noise.

You want your talking voice to be a lot louder than that noise level because any amplification or compression that we do, is going to affect that noise. Here’s what I mean. If your noise level is around -30db and when you talk it reads about -20db, that means your signal to noise ratio is 10dB, which isn’t very good. If you amplify your signal, the noise is gonna get amplified as well.

On the other hand, if your noise level is around -50 and when you talk you register -6, that’s a difference of 44dB, much better. Now when you amplify your voice, it’s mostly voice that gets amplified.

So you’re gonna try to record your voice at between -6 and -3dB. If you go under a bit, or over a bit, no big deal, as long as you don’t go over 0dB, which is called clipping. If you actually do that, you’ll know why it’s called clipping, your signal actually gets clipped.

Instead of doing a straight amplification, we’re gonna use a compressor that comes with Audition. Before we do that though, let’s get rid of as much noise as we can from the source signal.

In an earlier podcast we used the Noise Reduction effect and now we’re gonna do the same thing. If you’ve got your session open, double-click it so that you’re in Edit View. Find a segment of silence and hit F9. Highlight the noise. Right-click it and capture the noise reduction profile. Then select the entire file and click Effects, Noise Reduction, and then Noise Reduction.

If you want you can play with the settings later, for now just take the defaults. This filter is gonna go through the whole file and filters out the sounds of the noise. Now it can’t take out everything, but it’ll usually give you something workable.

Go ahead and play your file now and see how it sounds. It should be a lot quieter. Also listen for digital artifacts which sometimes pop up if you applied the filter too strongly. It’ll make your voice sound very digitized.

Now with the entire file still selected, click Effects, Amplitude, and then Dynamics Processing. Without going into too much theory here, I’m just gonna give you the settings I typically use for a podcast voice track, and again, you can play with it if you want to. I’ll probably dedicate a whole post to how compression works later on, for now, make sure you have the Traditional tab selected, that way you can punch in some numbers. There’s a picture on my post that shows you all the settings. Just make them match.

Click on the Attack/Release tab and take a look at the next picture. Basically, you want a quick attack time and a fairly quick release. Here’s why. When you start talking, you want the compressor to kick in right away. When you stop though, you might start again quickly, so you give yourself just a little bit of time, a split second. If you don’t start talking within that 50 milliseconds, then the compressor is gonna shut the gate. Again, I don’t wanna get too detailed about this just yet, so we’ll leave it at that for now.

If you want, you can save your settings as a preset so you can pull them up later. I’m also gonna show you how you can apply this effect without actually changing your file, but that comes later.

So click OK and your audio is gonna get leveled out. This helps quiet passages sound louder, and louder passages sound a little quieter. It also helps your noise levels go way down when nobody’s talking.

We’ve got one more thing to do before your podcast is ready and that’s a little EQing. With the whole file still selected, click Effects, Filters, and Graphic Equalizer. Now this part, I can only give you a little advice. Everybody’s voice is different. If you’re a woman you’ll do this differently than if you’re a man.

For a male voice, go ahead and give yourself a little bit of bass, not too much though. Don’t make yourself sound fake. Also add some subtle highs and a little bit in the 1 to 2k range. I’ll post a picture of my EQ settings so you can get an idea of where to start. Use the preview button to hear what your voice sounds like with the EQ applied. Audition has a preset called 30-band Punch and Sparkle and that’s a good place to start. Also, if you’re using a real Graphic Equalizer you can kinda make it match these settings and then you don’t have to do it with software. If you’re using a Sonic Maximizer, chances are you won’t need to do any of this EQ stuff at all.

So click OK and now we have a processed voice file. Listen to the voice all by itself and see what you think. If you use the Preview buttons then you can tweak the sounds before applying them. In another podcast I’m gonna show you how you can use the Effects bus to apply these effects without having to actually change your source file, which is an excellent feature.

Now go back to multitrack view and click File then Export and then Audio. Save your mixed down file as an MP3 and you’ll want to look at the MP3 options and try one of the presets, like maybe 128k. I don’t recommend that you go much lower than that because you wanna have a good quality broadcast and it’ll start to get noisy below about 96k.

Give your newly created MP3 a listen. I always recommend that you listen to the whole thing once it’s mixed down, just to make sure you didn’t make a mistake somewhere. At this point you should have a good sounding MP3 and we’re ready to talk about some hosting and platform options.

Here’s what we’re gonna do. Remember that there are lots of different options for your podcast. So this first one is gonna be just a simple voice track with music at the beginning and the end. That music’s gonna fade out when the voice starts, then near the end it’ll fade back in.

Save your voice file as a WAV file. That ways it’s not compressed. You also wanna make sure that you recorded at 44.100kHz, 16-bit. I usually record the voice track as mono since there’s pretty much no reason to record it as a stereo signal.

Now comes the music part. You decide what music you’ll use. I mentioned briefly before, you can try to get away with playing music that you like or you can purchase royalty free buyout music. It’s totally dependant on your taste and what your podcast is about. The music can be a file that’s already on your hard drive, or you can get the audio from a music CD, Audition can rip the file or import one. If you get the file off a CD and you’re gonna use the same music for all your podcasts, rip the song to your hard drive and just keep re-using it from there cause it’ll load a lot quicker that way.

Whatever way you get the audio, open up the music file and now you should have two files open. Your voice file, and the music file. I like to work with the Organizer window since I usually have a lot of files open at one time. If you don’t see the Organizer window, click Window and then click Organizer up at the top. That’ll show you all the files currently open.

Right-click on your voice track, inside the Organizer. Then click ‘Insert into Multitrack’. It looks like nothing happens, but your file got inserted into a multitrack session. Do the same thing for your music file. Right-click it, then click ‘Insert into Multitrack’.

Right above your waveform, you should have a tab that says ‘Multitrack View’. Click on that tab.

You’ll see your voice file and your music file, on two separate tracks.

What we’re gonna do next, and the way we do it depends on which pointer tool you have selected. On the toolbar, look for these buttons.

The one on the left is the Hybrid Tool. I personally like it because it lets you do more. The catch is though that it doesn’t behave like a standard move-type tool. If you want to move a waveform with the Hybrid Tool, you have to right-click and hold the button down, then move your waveform. If you don’t like that, you can use the Move tool and click-n-drag the regular left mouse button.

Either way, you want to move your voice track to the right a bit. Think about how much music you want to play at the beginning, and move the voice file that much. For example, if you want 5 seconds of music and then your voice starts, move the voice file 5 seconds to the right. If you can’t tell how far you’re moving it, look at the bottom of the window, there’s a timeline.

You’ll probably also want to make sure that you Display Time Format is set to decimal. Right click the time at the bottom and click Display Time Format, then set it to decimal.

If you play your file right now, you’ll hear music, then five seconds later your voice will start. There’s gonna be one problem though. The music will be very loud compared to the voice. Here’s where the engineering comes in.

Select the music file, then you’ll see a green line across the top of the file. That’s the volume level. If you click on that line, you’ll set a point where the volume can be adjusted. For example, click on the line just below where your voice audio starts. That’ll put a handle there just like in the graphic that you see here.

Now drag that handle down towards the bottom, and you’ll have to experiment with what levels work for your voice and music. Generally, once you start talking, you want the music audible, but not loud, you want it kinda in the background.

This’ll make a diagonal line from the beginning of the file, to this point. Now you click on another point right next to it, to the left, and drag that back up to the top. What you get now is music that plays at normal volume, then right before you start talking, the volume drops down real quick. You can move those handles around to adjust your timing. You want the music to fade right before you talk. Again, there’s a graphic on the website that shows you what it should look like.

For this demo, I’m just gonna do about 20 seconds of music. So about 20 seconds into the music, right click and select Split. This splits the music file into two pieces. Move the second piece down towards the end of your voice track. Add another handle about 5 seconds from the end of you first segment and drag it up so that it’s even with the first handle you did. You should now have something that looks like this.

Hit the home key on your keyboard to take you to the beginning of the file, then click Play. Listen to the music and the fade out. Pay attention to the timing. If it sounds good, you’re set. If not, play with the handles to get it to work. Remember, this green line represents the volume level of the music, so you just tell it what to do. As the play head moves through the file, the volume of the music follows the green line. The next step is to do the same thing, but in reverse.

This time you’ll use the rest of your music file for your outro. Move the second half of the music down to the end of your voice file. Let the music stick past the voice for 3 to 5 seconds. That’s how long the music will play after you stop talking. Drag the left side of the outro so that the outro is maybe 30 seconds long. You’re gonna set your volume levels like a mirror image. This time you start at zero and fade in to a good music bed level. Then after you’re done talking, bring the volume up. It should look like the Fade Out image on the site.

Position your play head to just before the fade out, and click play to see how it sounds. If you need to, play with the levels and the positioning.

Make sure you’re still in Multitrack View and click File and Save which will save your session, that includes all your audio files and their positions, all these little settings that you’ve made. Next week, we’ll make your voice track sound a little more professional by doing some voice processing.

Since obviously there are dozens and dozens of different scenarios that you could have, I can’t offer a step-by-step guide for each situation so here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna take you through my production process. Again, I’m using Adobe Audition to record and mix my audio. I’m using an Edirol UA-25 as my audio capture device. You don’t have to have this exact piece of hardware, and even if you’re using an internal sound card, no big deal, but what we will have to assume is that whatever you’re using, it is working with your software.

In Audition, you can check your levels by pressing F10 before you record. This will show a level indicator and you should see it move around when you’re talking. On the front of my Edirol I have a knob labeled SENS and that stands for sensitivity. It’s actually gain but that’s a little more foreign to most novice computer people. It’s sorta like volume, or at least for now you can think of it that way. It determines how sensitive the mic is.

Mic Settings
If your mic has an adjustable gain, set it to 0dB. The other settings are usually for recording something very loud like a guitar amp or drums. I think most USB sound devices have a clip or compressor. I’ve also got a Creative Labs 0404 and it actually has LED lights that indicate level. You want to turn the gain knob up so until your normal ‘loud’ voice just barely triggers that clip light, or the yellow-red area if you’ve got LEDs. Clipping is bad and it won’t sound good, so you want to adjust your gear so that clipping is minimized. The Edirol has a peak limiter that does a pretty good job, but still, try to set your levels so that it’s not needed in normal use.

As I said, in Audition you can monitor the levels before you actually record. Once you set your levels, you’ll probably leave them alone unless you use your mic to record other things or for example you recorded something much louder like singing. With Audition, the level indicator should come close to peak, but never hit it. There are some squares on the right side of the indicator and they turn red if your signal peaks. If this is happens, lower your gain a bit and click on those red squares to reset them. Then do some practice talking again. Make sure you’re not clipping. Don’t just do the old ‘Testing…1..2..3..’ either. Really talk. Just like you’re going to when you record. Position yourself about 6 inches from the mic and point it so that it is not straight into your mouth. Depending on how good the mic is, you’ll get different tonal sounds with different positions. You can experiment a bit making recordings with different positions and different distances from your mouth. For example, position the mic 6 inches from your mouth, at a 45 degree angle and then record, in your normal talking voice, ‘This is what I sound like with the mic 6 inches away at 45 degrees’. Then move the mic to another position and say ‘This is what I sound like x inches away at xx degrees’. Do several of these while recording and then you can listen to the whole thing and decide which makes your voice sound better.

Record Your Podcast
Go ahead and record your podcast. Once you’ve finished, edit it. Audition will let you take out everything from gaps of silence, to ‘um’ and noise as well. Here’s what I do.

Look for a long gap of silence where you didn’t say anything and there is no noise except for the natural ambience of the room you’re recording in. This will probably show up as just a small level of sound. When you play back this part, you’ll hear ‘noise’. You might have to turn your speakers up a bit. It will likely sound a bit ‘hissy’. Fortunately, I don’t have a lot of noise because I’ve got good gear, put even if you do have noise, you can get rid of most of it.

With a silent section visible, hit F9 and you’ll go into Spectral view. This view lets you see frequencies. Use the marquee selection tool and select just the low frequencies for that period of silence, and those frequencies will appear on the bottom. If you have high frequency sounds, you might want to select them as well and you might want to try to find the source of any strange noise and eliminate it. After you select the ‘noise’, right click it and select ‘Capture Noise Reduction Profile’. You have to select a second or two worth of audio, but then Audition is going to use that noise as a sample, and go through the entire audio file and remove those specific noisy frequencies.

Hit F9 again to go back to normal view and select the entire file. Then go to Edit -> Noise Reduction -> and again Noise Reduction. The profile you just captured will be loaded, and then you can click OK.

Now play your file back and you’ll probably find that it sounds a lot cleaner. If you want, you can also preview the noise reduction and adjust the level of reduction before you click OK. Sometimes you can use too much noise reduction and your audio will sound very digitized. I can’t go into all the options in the Noise Reduction dialog, but if you have specific questions, you can post them and I’ll try to get back with you.

Once you’ve got the noise out of the file, go through it and clean up gaps or mistakes. If you fumble over your words when you record, just stop talking, keep recording, take a deep breath and regroup your thoughts, then continue. This is the point where you can edit it out and make it sound like it flows very naturally. Editing in Audition is very easy, you just click and drag with your mouse and hit the delete key. One thing that speeds up this process is making sure that the play transport controls are assigned to keys on the keyboard. That way you can play and stop the file with quick keystrokes instead of moving the mouse a lot, it’s just a lot quicker.

First, you do some research. Obviously you’ve selected a topic that you’re interested in. Hopefully it’s something that you know a lot about. You don’t have to be an expert, but your listeners will be able to tell if you know what you’re talking about, or if you just read a book and tried to ‘teach’ them you’re newly acquired knowledge.

With that in mind, it’s not bad to do some research if the topic merits it. If you were starting a Podcast on Physics and you wanted to do a show on the difference between General Relativity and Special Relativity, it’s OK to do some reading and refresh your mind. But, if you’re having a guest on the show, and you’re not claiming to be Mr. Physics Knowitall, let your guest do the talking and you just prepare some questions. Again, if you’ve chosen your topic correctly, you’re probably already keeping up on a lot of it.

Interviews
Speaking of questions, when you hear a radio or even television interview, do you ever wonder how they come up with questions so easily and the guest just has the answer ready on the spot? Well, they don’t, most times. There are two little known secrets to producing a good interview. First, get your questions ready before hand. If you’re going to have a guest on for an interview, think about what you want to ask them. Think about what your listeners will want to know. Then give the guest a copy of the questions. That way, they have time to formulate the answers and not sound like an idiot!

The second secret is, Internal Edits. Once the interview is over, you’ll go back and clean things up by removing dead space, fumbles, or boring parts of the interview. That way both you and your guest sound like professional individuals! Now don’t go overboard with this. It’s OK to sound human. It’s OK to say ‘Um’ once in awhile. It kinda depends on the balance that you want to strike, between an NPR broadcast and a live radio show. Again, formulate your questions, give your guest the questions ahead of time, and things should go pretty smooth.

This advice, of course, is only helpful if you’re planning on doing interviews. You don’t have to, but interviews do help liven up your podcast and they’ll definitely keep your listeners attention if your podcast is longer than 20 minutes. And I’ll give you a bit of helpful advice on time, try to keep your podcast in the 7 to 21 minute range if it’s just you talking. People will lose interest after that.

Co-Hosts
Another popular technique in recording is a co-host. This also helps liven things up. If you’ve got a friend who’s interested in the same thing you’re interested in, have them co-host the show with you. If you’re into astronomy and you’re part of an astronomy club, see if anybody there wants to do an astronomy podcast.

Recording Your Podcast
Assuming that all your ducks are in a row and you’re ready to click ‘record’, go ahead and record your first podcast.
Once it’s done, you’re gonna edit it. Once you’ve edited, go back and listen to the whole thing to make sure you didn’t make any editing mistakes, after all, you have millions of potential listeners and you don’t want any mess ups!

Now you’ll put that voice file into a multi-track session. You’ll bring in some audio for an introduction and an outro. Next you’ll do any processing of your voice track. Clean up noise. Amplify or normalize it. Tweak the EQ a bit if you want to make it fuller.

You’ll arrange things so that your music comes in (and this is just a sample, it’s what we do on this podcast, you don’t have to do it exactly like this), but you’ll play your music, then start your voice audio. You could have an introduction audio clip, followed by the main clip, or you could record it all at once it depends on your show’s format. You’ll probably lower the volume of the music for a bit and talk over it, then fade the music out. At the end of your podcast, you reverse it by fading the music in and then it ends. In other words, you’ve got a little bit of production work to do even after you have a good voice file.

Don’t worry if we’re going too quick here because believe me, I’m gonna be very particular each step of the way. Right now I’m being very general, just to give you an idea of what’s involved, but when we actually go through the process, each step is gonna be spelled out very clearly.

After everything sounds good, you mix it down to a single file, because remember that all your elements are on different tracks. That single file will be uploaded to your server, and then you’ll create your blog and point it to the audio file.

What do I mean by ‘full production’? Well, first, let’s look at what you get with some of the free solutions. I’ve reviewed only a handful of packages out there like WebPod Studio, for example. And what they give you is a very simple way to record a podcast and package it, as is, and then distribute it. That means you sit in front of the mic, hit record, talk, hit stop, package. That approach might be OK if you’re talking about 3 or 4 minute infocasts or something, but not if you’re planning on doing a real radio-style show.

Here’s what happens with a high quality show. You record you show. You go back and edit any terribly bad mistakes. You cue up music for the intro and outro. You tweak the sound a bit and clean up any noise. Then you mix the whole thing down so that it sounds like you have a huge production team and some highly skilled talent sitting in front of the mic (and that would be you).

So how do you get all of that? First I’ll be very general, and then I’ll talk more specific.

Multitrack Recording
Those of you that are completely new to the world of recording might not be familiar with the phrase ‘Multitrack Recording’, but that’s OK. When we’re done with today’s podcast, you will be. Multitrack recording involves just what it says, several, or multiple tracks. You’re talking on one track. There’s music on another track. You might have a guest on the phone on a third track, etc. What this allows you to do is edit or enhance or manipulate each of the tracks individually. When everything is all mixed down, you get just the standard stereo left and right channels, but you could have used half a dozen tracks to make it sound right.

The software that you select has to be capable of multitrack recording. This way, you can control your music separately on one track, your voice on another and so on. This is what will give you that automated, professional radio station kind of sound.

Royalty Free Buyout Music
I could do a full podcast on just this topic, and perhaps we will in the future, but now’s a good time to mention it. It’s a good idea to have at least a small collection of royalty free buyout music. This is music that you pay a little more for upfront, but you can do pretty much whatever you want to with it. You might want to have theme music for your show, or just want to play something while you do a read, either way, you’re safe with buyout music. Otherwise, you might have to pay an organization like BMI in order to play music.

Most music is copyrighted and there’s lots of people out there that will play it anyway, but there’s also lots of people getting in trouble for playing it, and that’s probably not what you want. Don’t think that just because you like a certain singer or band, that they’ll be happy with you playing their music. Chances are, they won’t be.

Buyout music isn’t real expensive either, you can get a CD of 40 or so songs for probably less than $50. It’ll make your podcast sound a lot more professional.

Commercial Software
Now for some specifics. My goal here is to be able to show you how to create a great podcast. In order to do that, I’m going to have to teach you skills from several different venues. You’ll have to learn about audio, about voice work, about equipment, and about software. That means that eventually, I’m gonna just have to show you what I do. Exactly what I do. So at this point, I’m gonna tell you what I use. You don’t have to use it. I’m not telling you that it’s the best and only software out there, but it’s what I use and that will make it simpler when I tell you how to do something.

It’s called Adobe Audition. It used to be called Cool Edit Pro and actually I used it way back then which is kinda while I’m still stuck on it probably. Adobe bought the product several years ago and they’ve made some great enhancements to it in the last few years.

It has a great selection of effects built right in and it does just about everything I need. ProTools is another program you could consider, I’ve heard a lot of great reviews about it, but I’ve never really had the need to change.

Whatever software solution you chose, you have to be able to record your work. Edit it. Mix music or other audio with it, and then mix all that down to an mp3 so you can put it on your site. The free software that I’ve looked at was VERY limited but you could probably pull it off with something like Audacity, and if you’re on a budget, software is one place that you can sometimes get something for nothing.

We’ve got our equipment and our software, our next podcast will cover some Podcasting theory like, ‘How to Podcast?’ and Podcasting Best Practices.

This is actually a very fun topic. If you’re a musician like me, you love audio toys and that’s what we’re gonna talk about today.

For the podcaster, this category is not essential. So keep that in mind as you absorb this information, none of this is mandatory, however it will separate the men from the boys, so to speak. Audio processing at this level or I should say at this phase, means sculpting your audio signal before it gets to the computer. You’re gonna enhance the audio before it gets recorded. The benefits of this would be not having to take the time to apply the same effects every time you produce your podcast. You can also get some truly amazing sound with processing hardware. Let’s look at just some of the main types of processors and I’ll give you a brief rundown of what they’re used for.

Compression

Compressors are used to help you not saturate your recording and over modulate it. Over modulation is distortion. It means that your signal won’t sound clear and clean. For voice, you always want clear and clean. Compressors also help your signal to be more balanced, so that the difference between quiet passages and loud passages won’t be as drastic. With a good quality compressor you can turn the volume up so that quite sounds are still heard, but then louder sounds will be compressed or squashed down and that keeps them more on an even level. Radio stations, and I’m talking AM and FM, generally run through a compressor, they run everything through it from the DJ’s mic, to the music so that you hear everything and you don’t get blasted all of a sudden with a loud song. Another thing that most compressors have is a limiter, and that basically just insures that no matter what, the audio level does not go above a certain point. That’s mostly useful in a live PA setting, but a compressor is a good thing for a podcaster.

EQ

Equalization is our next topic. Since we’re talking chiefly about your voice, this isn’t as tricky as it would be for live sound. You have two options and I’m gonna feature both of them in this same segment. Traditional EQ would be the first option and it involves getting something like a 31-band EQ and tweaking different frequencies to get the sound that you want. You don’t want to over do this though because if you do it will sound fake. For example, don’t try to give yourself an extremely strong bassy voice. On the other hand, if you have a very rich, deep voice, you can accentuate it. Don’t forget to add a bit to the high end and give it some crispiness though. While I’m not gonna be able to show you how one of these units works, I will be showing you how to do it with software and they function essentially the same way.
The second EQ option would be to use something like a Sonic Maximizer, they’re also called Aural Exciters. This is a really nice tool for people who don’t want to fuss with setting all those frequencies manually. Basically, a sonic maximizer analyzes the frequencies that are present in a signal and you tell it what you want to accentuate, usually by just turning a dial. You can give it more punch or more crispness. The sonic maximizer takes the guess work out of it all and gives you a strong, intelligible signal that sounds great. It’s kinda like the loudness button on a stereo, it gives you a tighter low-end and a crisper high-end. If you’re gonna go with a mixer, than definitely consider a sonic maximizer. Besides, it’s something else that has lots of lights on it and it’ll make you look a lot more impressive when you show your friends your studio.
A good quality dual 31-band EQ is gonna be between $150 and $300, while a sonic maximizer is gonna run about the same, $100 to $300. BBE is probably the biggest name in the industry but Behringer is another. Behringer seems to give you fairly decent equipment for a little less than most other manufacturers.

Preamps

One thing that I almost forgot to mention, and it’s actually a pretty important one, is preamps. A preamp is the first thing you plug your mic into. Preamps affect your tone. They have a strong influence on how you sound, tone wise. Again, this is not crucial to your podcast, you can do without any of this stuff, I just wanted to make this fairly comprehensive and make you aware of your options. If you listen to a signal that is processed through a high quality preamp, and one that is not, you will hear the difference. A decent preamp’s gonna be about $300 and they go up to well over $1,000 so again, don’t rush out and buy one but keep it in the back of your mind for when you want to take another step up.

For now, that’s all I’m gonna cover, there are other signal processors out there but those are mostly for live situations or for singing.

Now I know you’ve probably got a great Sound Blaster card and you want to use that. Well, actually you can, if you want to and I’ll show you how in just a minute. As a matter of fact, at this point I’m gonna have to break away into two different scenarios again. The first one is for the user that doesn’t have audio equipment yet and the second one is for somebody that has a great sound card and they want to use it.

Purchasing a Recording Device

For the user that does not yet have anything but what their computer came with, I’m going to recommend that you purchase either a USB or Firewire external sound capture device. I use an Edirol UA-25. Creative Labs makes a device like this, as well as lots of other manufacturers, but I like the Edirol and I like the Roland preamp that it uses. These devices are not just ‘external sound cards’, they actually sculpt the sound a bit and you’ll get a slightly (and in some cases extreme) variance in sound with different devices.

You want at least two different channels so that you can have a second mic and record an interview. Look for something that has built-in compression and phantom power. Most of these devices today will come with all that, but double check. As far as the actual use of the device, I’ll be telling you what it’s all for and how to use it once we get that far, for now, you know what I use and you know the general specs if you want to purchase something different.

Using an Existing Sound Card

If you’ve already got a good sound card, you can still use it, although I seriously doubt that it is up to par with today’s USB and Firewire devices. Number one, it will have ’self noise’. Since it’s inside the computer, all those electronic components will cause it to have an electronic hum. Once you add other devices, like a mixer and a mic, which will all add their own noise, it might get to the point that it’s too loud to be usable. A real good mixer and a real good mic will be quite, but if you can afford to buy a real good mixer and a real good mic, you can probably afford a USB or Firewire solution.

Now, all that aside, it’s still doable. You’ll need a small mixer which will allow you to hook your mic up. The mixer will have to provide phantom power to the mic, and then the output from the mixer will plug into the line in connector on your sound card. I’ll see if I can get a graphic of that posted. One thing the mixer will let you do is probably tweak the frequency a bit, for example adding a little more bass to the sound. Be careful with this though, you want a pretty flat, dry signal, and again, if you have to alter it a bit to give it some punch, we can do that with software later on.

We’re going kinda fast with the setup here but I’m trying to give you the information you need to know at this point, so that you can get what you need or decide how you’ll use what you have. When we actually start recording though, I’m gonna be very detailed, but at this point, explaining too much would just be more confusing.

The bottom line is that you need a fairly decent recording device. Every link in your audio chain is important. If you start with a nice mic and connect it to a device that isn’t very nice, you’re audio isn’t going to be very nice. One nice thing about the external USB and Firewire devices is that you can plug them into a laptop and do all your production work on the laptop, so your studio is essentially very portable.

Mic Stand

Last time we talked about mics and you’re probably going to find out that most of your nicer condenser mics either come with, or have an option for a very special isolation mount. The goal of this mount is to isolate the mic from the stand. Why is that? Well, sound can be transmitted through the floor, desk, ceiling (or whatever the stand is attached to) and then to the mic. This isolation mount, or shock mount, helps keep that sound from being transmitted to the mic, that way if somebody lightly bumps the desk or taps their foot on the floor, the mic doesn’t pick it up.

Again we’ve got several options here but I’m gonna try to limit your selection by just telling you what the best thing to do is. Get an adjustable boom stand. This is what they use in real studios. You can get one that mounts to your desk and it has a series of springs and pivot points and you can pretty much move it wherever you want to and it will just stay in place. You’re gonna pay about $80 for the cheapest one and maybe $175 for a real nice one. I’ve got two so I bought the cheaper ones and I’ve got a picture of one of them posted on the blog. This type of stand provides lots of room so that it’s not getting in the way on your desk, and like I said, it makes it easy to reposition the mic. If you want a great source for boom stands, leave a comment and I’ll give you one of my trade secrets.

Filters

While we’re talking about the stand, I’ll go ahead and mention pop filters. These filters attach to the stand and kinda cover the front of the mic. They’re made of a very thin material that essentially filters out loud and punchy sounds like P’s and B’s. You’ll want to train yourself to talk into the mic correctly and become very gentle when you pronounce certain sounds, but until you do that very well, the pop filter will help out a lot. It’s also good for keeping moisture off the mic from people speaking very close to the mic. I’m gonna see if I can pull my filter up a bit and let you hear what a popped P sounds like, and again, part of this is training and part of this is having a filter. Some people get too close to the mic and the pound out pretty prominent P sounds. That’s gonna get very annoying to your listeners and it just doesn’t sound professional, so pay $20 or so and get a decent filter, it’s not something that typically wears out so you should have it for a pretty long time.

Room Ambience

This is something that’s a bit more difficult to tackle. It’s hard to give precise advice on something that can vary as much as acoustics. I can give you some general rules though. You want your room to be what’s called ‘dead’. Now that doesn’t mean that it has to be ugly or that it can’t ‘look’ lively, it just has to sound ‘dead’. That means there isn’t an echo, or more precisely, reverb. Reverb is like a lot of little echos real close together. It’s what you get when you sing in the shower. It makes you sound better, right? In the shower, yes. In your podcast, no. You want a very dry sound, and then if you have to, you can add something to it. If you’ve got a lot of reverb already, you can’t take it away.

That said, carpet is probably best, though rugs will deaden a wood or tile floor. You can also consider getting some acoustic absorption panels, and a little goes a long way. You’d be surprised how ‘live’ many rooms sound, even small bedrooms. You put some acoustic panels on the walls and all of a sudden, it’s a studio! I mean it’s really amazing.

Since most podcasters are not going to be doing a nationally syndicated program, I’m not gonna spend much more time on acoustic treatment, but I will say this, do your podcast when it’s quiet. You’re probably not going to spend the money on a full blown sound proof studio, so you’re going to have to be creative and smart. Don’t record when you’ve got children screaming in the next room. Don’t record when the neighbor is mowing his lawn. Some of that we can fix with editing, but not if it’s a constant problem. Once you’ve got all your equipment setup, do a recording of ‘just the room’, and then play it back. You’ll get a feel for how loud something can be outside your studio, and not be too loud for your recording.

I’m not gonna be biased as far as PC or Mac. I personally use a PC but in that respect, as far as Podcasting goes, it doesn’t really matter. If you were asking me about setting up a professional, full featured studio, I might lean towards a Mac but that’s mostly due to their reputation in the music industry. You’re gonna see that everything after this point is totally independent of the platform you’re using. I will make one exception and that’s Linux. Although I have had Linux on several machines, I have never seen a sound application that’s as advanced as what’s available on Windows and Macintosh platforms. I’m not saying there isn’t one, but I haven’t seen it and I’m quite comfortable and satisfied with the tools I’m currently using.

The key here is that you obviously have to have a computer. It can be a laptop or a desktop. You don’t want something that’s real slow though because you’re going to be doing some audio work and that can get intense. The faster your computer, the less time you have to wait around.

Now we’re going to start at the beginning of what is called the ‘audio chain’. The audio chain encompasses everything that has to do with audio. It starts with your mic and ends with your speakers. Everything in between is also part of the chain.

The Microphone

Beginners don’t understand how important this step is. I will tell you right up front that you’re not going to find a mic that makes you sound like a radio DJ. Don’t look for the mic to do magic (although it can help with the illusion!). You have to start with a good quality mic because your final sound is only going to be as good as it was in the beginning. If you go to Radio Shack and buy a $20 mic, you’re going to have a $20 voice. That means not only will your voice have poor quality, but the signal will also be pretty noisy.

There are tons of mics out there, so I’m going to take two routes here. I’m gonna give you the general features to look for in a mic, and I’m also gonna tell you what I’m using. First, you’re gonna want a large diaphragm condenser mic. This is a studio mic. It’s not typically what you’d see on stage, but more like what you’d see at a radio station. These mics are generally very sensitive, they also have some adjustments that you can configure. Some of the things you can adjust will be the pattern of where the mic picks up sound. The response, which is how the mic handles frequencies. And a lot of times you can also adjust the levels of the mic, which control just how sensitive it is.

Without going into a lot of audio engineering, you want a mic that can be configured unidirectional. That’s the pattern. Now if your mic is selectable, that’s great, but you’ll want to set it to unidirectional because you don’t want it picking up sound from all around the mic, just what’s in front of it, which will be you. As far as the response goes, you just want a flat response. If you want to boost any frequencies (give yourself a touch of ‘DJ’ sound) we’ll do that later with the software or a processor. And then for the levels, leave it at it’s most sensitive setting. Some mics have like a -10dB attenuation and that’s just for when the mic is used close to a very loud source, like a guitar amplifier.

The mic that I use is a Marshal MXL 992. This isn’t a very expensive mic, it’s around $150-200, I forget exactly what I paid for it. I actually have two so that I can do interviews. It’s a pretty quiet mic, meaning that it doesn’t have a lot of noise that comes from the mic itself, and some mics are very noisy. It has a great frequency response and reproduces voices quite well. All your condenser mics are going to use XLR cables and need phantom power, with the exception that some operate on batteries but that isn’t very popular these days.

There are some alternatives, like a USB mic for example. But since I haven’t used one of those and they don’t offer you the flexibility of tweaking the audio before it hits the computer, I’m not gonna suggest those types of mics. If you’re on a tight budget and you just want to record on your laptop, it might be a possibility but I’d definitely suggest you demo one first or at least make sure you buy it form some place where you can return it if you don’t like it.

Welcome to this, the first episode of The Podcasting Blog, I’m your host, Ken Walker, and I’ll be your guide to all things podcasting. This first episode is gonna primarily introduce the main goal of what we’re gonna be doing here and I’m also gonna talk a little bit about where podcasting is going and some of the things that we’re starting to see. This podcast is for anybody that wants to know about how to make their own podcast, whether you wanna do that just for fun or if you’re starting a marketing campaign for your company, whatever, we’re gonna deal with everything and anybody interested in podcasting is gonna learn a lot. The first part of what you’re gonna hear in this episode is actually an original recording from when we first started podcasting and back then our episodes were a lot shorter, like around 5 minutes, but as time went on things started to really move forward and we started to change the format and put a little more time and energy into the podcast. So what I decided to do was to go back and redo some of those early episodes and change ‘em over to the new format, maybe add another segment or two, so that new people that are just finding us and weren’t there through our growing pains, so that they’ll get the full benefit of what we offer today. So with that, here again is our very first, original podcast on what we’re all about.

Though there currently exists hundreds of blogs on how to podcast, I haven’t found one that actually walked the reader through the entire production process from beginning to end.

By that I mean showing details of how the audio is recorded, edited, produced, and then finally distributed.The goal here, therefore, is to create such a blog. My blog entries, starting with this one, are going to be laid out in such a way that they walk you through, from beginning to end.I’m going to take you from “What do I podcast about?” to audio editing to RSS Distribution and SEO practices.

Now, this is a tall order. What many bloggers do is offer you some very vague information. Realizing though that the people who want to podcast are not all computer geeks, I think a niche exists here where I can help the average computer user (and maybe even the below average user) produce a good quality podcast. You’ll hear me say this over and over, your podcast has to have great content AND it has to sound great.

Have you started listening to a podcast where it sounds cheap? I mean, maybe there’s no music at all, or worse yet, it sounds like they have a portable CD player nearby and when they want music, they just press play and point the mic at the CD player? Those kinds of podcasts don’t usually last long and they don’t usually get a lot of listeners.

Let’s start with content. You have to have an idea of what you want to podcast about. Nobody is going to subscribe to your podcast and listen to you talk about whatever comes to mind. Think about what you like to do. Think about something that you enjoy. If you have a hobby like gardening or even reading books, you can podcast about it. If you are really good at your hobby, that’s even better.

While we’re talking about none-technical issues, you might also want to think about ‘Why’ you want to podcast. Is it just for fun? Will you try to attract a lot of listeners and use advertising to make money? What are your motives? This will just help you determine how much time and money you want to invest in your podcast.

Your topic doesn’t really matter from the perspective of these articles, because the information will all be applied the same no matter what you’re Podcasting about. For the sake of making things easier, I’m going to pick a topic that I like, and we’ll do a walk through of how I would go about Podcasting about that topic. Let’s say the topic is photography.

So if I had to number things, I would say the first step is: Determine why you want to podcast (and again, this is only so that you have an idea of how much time and money you want to put into it), and then the second step would be to pick what you want to podcast about.

Since there are many different levels that you could be at in your podcast commitment, I’m gonna try to be sensitive to that when making recommendations of hardware and software, however, I’m not going to show you how you can podcast with $25 worth of equipment and 5 minutes worth of recording time. That said, these articles are for someone who is fairly serious about Podcasting, whether it’s just for fun, or profit.

Podcasting News

Adobe’s got a new application that might interest podcasters, well, it’s not really new yet because it hasn’t been released, but it’s called Sound Booth CS3 and from the looks of it, this could be the perfect tool for podcasters and especially video bloggers. It looks to me like a marriage of Adobe Audition and Adobe Premiere, which means that it’s not really a full blown audio editor and it’s definitely not a full blown video editor, but it gives you the look and feel of Premiere and a lot of functionality of Audition. The best part is that they didn’t just take existing functionality from Audition, but they actually made things better. For example, you can visually adjust volumes directly in your waveform and you get visual feedback while your adjusting, that is totally excellent!

Some of its more impressive features are built-in music production and composition, which means that you can take a built-in track, and adjust the way it sounds by adjusting its mood, the amount of instruments that are in it, and dynamically its length, but I’m not talking about just stretching it, you can just say “Hey, I need more music.” And it composes a song for you, to your exact length, that is nice. Its got built-in stuff for improving vocal quality, which again would be handy for podcasters that don’t wanna fool with audio equipment, its got real tight integration with Premiere Pro if you happen to be doing some heavy video editing, which is one thing that it doesn’t really let you do. You can’t actually edit the video, though it looks like it has great support for working with videos, at least from the audio stand point.

The biggest selling point here is that it’s for people who don’t do full audio production, but want to sound great. So, like having an EQ preset for a male voice narration, things like that. I’m hoping that it does auto-ducking like GarageBand, but I couldn’t find that feature listed. All in all, it’s about $200 which is a little less than Audition, it doesn’t do real multi-track but if you compare it directly to Audition, the things that stick out are the interface and the people it’s designed for, which is people that don’t really have an audio background. Audition is a little more complex maybe, to use, but it’s more powerful, you can insert cue points for Flash, which is kinda neat, but I’ve saved the best for last. Probably the biggest thing about Sound Booth is that it’s going to be available on the Mac platform, can you believe it? For years Adobe has ignored the cries of Mac users and Audition has only been available for PCs, now you’ll be able to get an Adobe audio product on OS X. Check it out at www.adobe.com

SEO For The Road

That’s this week’s show, thanks for listening. If you find anything at all helpful in this podcast, let me know, I love getting mail from listeners. You can reach me at podcasting@seocompany.ca and by all means feel free to post a comment on the blog. I do moderate those though, so only nice comments get approved and absolutely no spam. I’ve got an ‘SEO for the Road’ for you this week, make sure that you include links to big name sites in your podcast and be sure to provide clickable URLs in the text of the podcast, either in show notes, or hopefully your transcribing the podcast and you can make sure the link is in the transcript because that’s gonna help your site rank better. I’m Ken Walker, see ya next week!