Beginner's Guide to Authoring Podcasts

This is a brief introduction to authoring podcasts. While not a complete instruction manual, it is enough to get someone that is familiar with the basics of audio and web authoring.

Software Needed

• CDEX for extracting audio files from audio CDs (ripping software).
• Cool Edit Pro, Adobe Audition, or Audacity for audio editing.
• ID3-TagIt for adding ID3 identifying tags to MP3 files.
• Macromedia Dreamweaver for creating and uploading web pages.
• Windows Media Player, Real Audio, or other media playing software to listen to MP3 files before posting.
• Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer, or other web browser.
• iTunes to check podcasts. I advise checking with a second podcast subscription program such as Juice.

Most of these items have at least one free option. The exception is Dreamweaver, an outstanding web authoring program. The best free alternative may be n|vu, but we have not tested this.

I do not give extensive instructions on the use of each of these. Here I specify what to do. Please read each program's documentation or online tutorials to find out how to do it. Often doing a search on the name of the program and the term I have used in my description will pull up a good tutorial on how to do that operation.

Get the audio

The original audio can be caputured digitally in several ways.

• Record directly to your computer using Audacity.
• Record using a cassette recorder, and then use a patch cable to transfer this to your computer using Audacity.
• Use a stand-alone CD recorder to create an audio CD. (See next section.)
• Use solid state recorders to create MP3 files directly.

Extract Audio from CD

If you record to a CD, the CD audio is extracted to an MP3 file using the free CDEX.

Settings:

• 64 kbps MP3 for modest size files. Choose WAV for highest quality files.
• Mono.
• Use F10 to extract a "section" of the CD. This lets you extract the entire CD into one MP3 file.

Levelator?

Your recording is likely to have uneven audio levels between different persons speaking. You can correct this as described in the next section. However, there is a wonderful free program called Levelator (from Gigavox) that does a great job of establishing a uniform audio level with no effort on your part. I strongly encourage trying Levelator. Levelator accepts a WAV file as input, and creates a new WAV file with more uniform audio levels. If your original is not in WAV format, Audacity or Adobe Audition can convert.

Edit Audio

The primary editor I used is Cool Edit Pro v. 2, now available as Adobe Audition. Similar capability is found in the free Audacity. These provide visual representations of the waveform and the ability to amplify selected portions.

1. If you have not used Levelator, then
   • The MP3 file from the previous procedure is imported into one track.
   • Each section of the file (each speaker, each musical selection) is examined. Any spikes, usually due to sibilants, should be zoomed in on, highlighted, then reduced by 8 dB.
   • Each section (each speaker, etc.) should now be highlighted. Then expand the selection to the nearest zero crossings of the waveform. (This eliminates distortion that would otherwise be caused by introduction of discontinuities in the waveform on amplification.
   • Amplify the section. If speech, amplify to maximum volume. If music. amplify to 3dB below maximum volume.
2. Edit out any sections of the recording that you wish to omit by highlight, expanding to zero crossings, and deleting.
3. Move the recording later in the track to leave room for an introduction.
4. Record an introduction to a second track.
5. Background for introduction:
• Insert background music for the intro in a third track before the beginning of the recording of the worship service.
• Pull down the volume appropriate for background music. I typically lower background music by 9dB.
• At an appropriate transition following the introduction, reduce the volume to zero.
6. Align start of service with end of introduction and background music.
7. Insert to a fourth track a recording of the closing, or record a new closing.
8. Save as an MP3 file at 32 kbps. File should be saved in a directory of the web site.

Alternative to steps 2 - 4: for automatic volume adjustment, use the free "levelator" from gigavox.com. This requires that you extract audio from CD as a wav file, rather than as an mp3.

Insert ID3 tags

1. Use the free ID3-TagIt to add Artist, Title, album, and optionally a photo to the Mp3 file.
2. Select Save.
3. Select "play" within ID3Tagit. This should bring up Windows Media player. Look for correct artist, title, and photo displayed with the player.

Create web page and other files

Our standard web authoring program is Dreamweaver. It is essential that a web authoring program be used that:

• generates non-proprietary html.
• generates clean html that can be reasonably edited by hand (in other words, no FrontPage).
• supports SFTP file transfers.

Using this web authoring program,

1. Create a file with the extension ".ram" pointing to the MP3 of the service. This will be the link for pseudostreaming RealAudio.
2. Create a file with the extension ".m3u" pointing to the MP3 of the service. This will be the link for pseudostreaming through the default media player (such as Windows Media Player).
3. Create a web page for the service, with links to the bulletin, the m3u file, the ram file, and a link to download the mp3 file.
4. Upload to web site using SFTP secure file transfer.
5. Create links from the home page and from http://www.collegeparkbaptist.org/service/services.shtml to the web page of the service.
6. Create a link to the page describing our podcasts and how to subscribe to them.

Test web page

In your browser, check links from home page, services page, and all links from within the newly created web page for the service.

Create Podcast

1. In your web authoring program, create (if it does not exist) and edit the RSS file. This is the file that contains the information that allows people to subscribe to and get automatic downloads of your podcasts. This is not needed if you only want people to manually download the MP3 file from your web page. I generally use the extension "*.rss" for the file name. I suggest placing it in the site root directory, so that you will have a simple URL to share with those wishing to subscribe.
2. Follow the format described by Apple at their page http://www.apple.com/itunes/store/podcaststechspecs.html. The page contains a nice example.
3. Save and upload your rss file.
4. Run iTunes to confirm that iTunes fetches the new podcast. (You will need to have subscribed to our podcasts first.)
5. In your web browser, visit the page "https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/pingPodcast?feedURL=http://MySiteURL" to tell iTunes to update its index to include this podcast. Here MySiteURL is the URL of your rss file.

Example site

To see an example of what I have done with this for my church, see

• See http://www.collegeparkbaptist.org/service/services.shtml for a directory of web pages with audio podcasts.
• See http://www.collegeparkbaptist.org/service.rss for an example rss file.
• See http://www.collegeparkbaptist.org/misc/20/06/podcasts/intro.html for instructions I provide to new listeners to subscribe to our podcasts.

• Miscellaneous tips and info
• Rick Matthews' home page