Record a podcast

Time it takes: 60 minutes

There are now thousands of podcasts available, but if you've taken the trouble to listen some of them, you soon realise that many are mediocre at best, and they probably left you feeling that you could do better. Well, now is the time to give it a go. Whether the subject covers open source, Linux or your favourite band, creating and publishing a podcast is a hugely rewarding process. After several months of recording the TuxRadar podcasts, here's our guide to getting the best possible output.

Setup

The most important thing to get right when creating a podcast is the recording. You need to make sure you've got a quiet environment for your performers, so avoid noisy air conditioning units and photographers. You also need to make sure you're using a reasonable quality microphone. If there's more than one person in the recording, each person should have their own mic. If not, you need to make sure they speak as close to the microphone as possible - ideally no more than 18 inches away. LugRadio used cheap piezo microphones for each member of the team, while we use general-purpose condenser microphones. Most soundcards will only record two inputs at once, which means you'll need a more professional solution if you need to record more, and a small external mixer can help balance the levels from the microphone before it makes it to your Linux machine. You need to make sure the signals are as loud as possible without clipping, as this will create distortion.

Recording

The best piece of software we've found for making the recording is Audacity. It's capable of recording multiple channels at once, and it's the only option for chopping your podcast down to size after the recording. Use the Preferences window to set up the inputs for your hardware and press Record when you're ready to start. Just leave the recording running for the entire duration of the show, and re-speak any fluffed lines or unwanted insults. We also recommend that you split your podcasts into sections, rather than leaving it as a two-hour-long stream of consciousness, but the choice is yours.

After you've finished the recording, you'll need to listen to the whole thing again in Audacity, cutting any areas that need to be cut. You don't need to be too exact about these cuts, as Audacity will try its best to avoid clipping noise. If you want to a musical interlude between each section, use the 'Add New Track' option from Audacity's track menu, copy the music from another Audacity session and paste it into the new track at the appropriate points.

Audacity is the best audio software we've found for recording, editing and mastering a podcast.

Mastering and output

There's a lot you can do within Audacity to make your recordings sound better. The Noise Removal effect is quite good at removing low levels of background noise, for example. We'd also suggest using the Compression effect. Unlike normalise, which amplifies the recording until the highest signal is maximised, compression amplifies only the quieter sections. With a vocal recording, this can help reduce the highs and lows of conversation by making a more uniform level for the whole recording. If you keep the Normalise option enabled in the compression window, you get the best of both worlds. When you're happy with the recording, use Audacity's export function to create either an Ogg Vorbis file or an MP3. If it's the latter, you'll need the Lame library installed. We found that you can use the lowest-quality settings for output; it makes very little difference to the sound quality and it keeps file sizes low.

To publish your podcast, just upload it to some online storage and post a link from a blog or web page. If you want people to be able to subscribe to your podcast so that their clients automatically download a new episode, you'll need to create an RSS text file containing certain specific tags. The typical RSS feed is too large to print, but you can easily grab the one for TuxRadar and change our details. Make sure the latest podcast comes first in the RSS, and that date formats conform to the ISO standard. Each time you create a new podcast, you simply need to add a new 'item' section within the RSS file, and you're ready to go.