Start a Podcast
You can start making your own media now as you prepare to start your own radio station. Podcasts are a great way to get your feet wet in the world of radio production. They can help you work on your interviewing skills, audio editing skills, and start to build your audience. Here are some resources on how you can get your own podcasts up and running on the internet.
Basics
How-to-podcast-tutorial.com has a nice guide on the basics of creating your first podcast, from software to getting online.
There are many resources on how to create a Podcast, Apple offers their own FAQs and tutorials on how to setup your first Podcast. It might be worth the effort to get your podcasts to show up on iTunes, as it may greatly increase the size of your audience.
This guide is a good resource on how to get your Podcasts to appear within iTunes.
It should be noted that iTunes is not the only way for your audience to receive your programming. They can utilize software embedded into your website to stream the content directly from their browser, or they can use free software that automatically syncs up with your RSS feed.
Recording Audio
One of the most important factors in radio – be it transmitted or podcasted – is the quality of the audio. The best way to get high-quality audio is to use a high-quality microphone. This is not the area to skimp out on, so shoot for the highest quality microphone that you can afford. You may be able to cut some corners when considering editing software or portable recording devices, but a studio quality microphone will ensure that your voices are heard naturally, without scratches, pops, and background noise. Any microphone is better than no microphone.
Transom.org offers some good advice on how to choose a good microphone for your needs. If you plan on being out in the field and recording audio for your podcasts, then they also offer an article on hand-held microphones, as well as reviews on the best portable recording devices for the lowest amount of money. If you know you won't be recording in the field, then you can simply record directly to a computer using recording/editing software.
Transom also offers a collection of how-to articles for editing and mixing and the physical act of recording and interviewing that you should familiarize yourself with before venturing out into the world of podcasting.
Setting Up a Small Recording Studio: Here is a guide on how to set up a small recording studio, including computer and software selection, necessary hardware, and equipment recommendations.
Editing your own Audio
Using one of these programs will allow you to both record and edit your audio all in one place. It's recommened to use these kinds of software to do your recording because they will allow you more control of how the audio is recorded; rather than using a small program built into your computer's operating system and copying it into your editing software. Using the latter may result in your audio being recorded in mono (sound only comes out of one speaker.) Using good software to record will result in higher quality audio, which affects the end product.
There's free audio editing software available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX called Audacity. This software will do most of what the others can do as far as recording, mixing, editing, inserting clips etc. goes. To learn how to use the software, try looking at the Audacity Manual or check out how-to-podcast-tutorial which provides tutorials on how to use Audacity specifically for making podcasts.
If you're working with a Mac computer, you can use Garageband to easily create your Podcasts. Garageband includes the means to record your audio using a microphone, add jingles, stingers, and sound effects, show the podcast track, import other media files, and publisher tools like creating marker regions, chapter titles, marker region artwork, and weblinks. Apple's website offers tutorials on how to use Garageband to edit your audio for podcasts: Apple Garageband help for Podcasts.
If you have more of a budget to work with then it is worth buying professional software like Adobe Audition (previously known as Cool Edit Pro.) This software is very advanced and may require special training in order to learn its functionality if you are not familiar with audio editing. The tradeoff of price is that it is much more reliable than Audacity and offers a significantly higher amount of tools. There are great support communities for this kind of software, and many tutorials available online on how to use it. Adobe offers discounted licenses for their products for registered nonprofits, check out their website to get some more information.
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Getting your Podcasts Online
There are websites out there that offer you a means to create podcasts using their technology, but they tend to charge you for their best tools. The website PodOmatic offers a free account for creators and users alike, however, if you plan to release lots of podcasts, then it might be worthwhile to pay for the pro account. Or you can try the services provided by Hipcast, which allows for "cloud-based" podcasts. This service allows your podcasts to be posted on your website/blog, sent to iTunes and to mobile devices, but it is not free.
Stations can also host their podcasts on their on website, which is most likely going to be your preferred method of delivery. This involves embedding some sort of audio player, like Quicktime or a Flash-based player (similar to what Youtube uses) to play the audio files. This blog offers a simple overview on how to embed your .mp3 podcast files using basic HTML coding to your website. All you have to do is upload your .mp3 podcasts to your website and insert the code provided.
Sweetwater.com has a tutorial on how to setup an RSS feed for your podcasts manually, but also offers some resources that can make your RSS files for you.
It's highly worthwhile to have a multimedia station to be as versatile as possible to reach out to the largest audience as possible. Utilizing social media websites like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter etc. will allow you to notify your subscribers and listeners easily and effectively about new episodes. Sherrie Tennessee Consulting has some basic tips for using social media.
There's some nice open source receiver software out there that you can direct your listeners to. Software like Juice is available for Mac OSX, Windows, and Linux. It's a simple receiver program that allows users to capture and listen to podcasts anytime, anywhere, for free.
Extra Resources
Here are some extra resources to help you get your feet off the ground and onto the airwaves:
MuSE is a free application to make your own radio in an easy and direct way, ported both on GNU/Linux and Apple/OSX. This software does NOT work on any Windows operating systems.
"MuSE provides the free software community with a user friendly but powerful tool for network audio streaming, making life easier for independent free speech online radios.
MuSE is an application for the mixing, encoding, and network streaming of sound: it can mix up to 6 encoded audio bitstreams (from files or network, mp3 or ogg) plus a sound card input signal, the resulting stream can be played locally on the sound card and/or encoded at different bitrates, recorded to hard disk and/or streamed to the net."
Click here to read more or download the software
MuSE documentation:
- Muse tutorial
- http://en.flossmanuals.net/
muse/ - muse.dyne.org/?info=
documentation - electro-music.com/forum/topic-
31799.html
Recursos en español:
https://we.riseup.net/amc-
https://we.riseup.net/amc-
https://we.riseup.net/amc-
For Windows Winamp y Edcast. El tutorial explica paso x paso como instalar el sistema. (Spanish)
lordastaroth.com/configurar-
Un link en espanol, no tienen que leer toda la parte de instalacion, solo la parte de como usar MuSE
rubensa.wordpress.com/2006/05/
Aqui hay un articulo muy completo,
www.linux-magazine.es/issue/
