How I Do My Podcast

This post is part of a series that I’m doing to respond directly to reader questions.

Today’s question is “What are all of the tools you use to put your podcast together?”

In this post, you’ll get the following:

  • What equipment I bought
  • How I record my interviews
  • Where I got my bump music and effects
  • How I put the show together
  • How long it takes me to put a show together
  • How I syndicate the show
  • And Much More! (not really)

Let’s get rolling.

Equipment

My setup is really simple.

  • Rode Podcaster microphone with boom arm and shock mount (around $350 new on Amazon)
  • Pop screen (required so you don’t get loud POPs when you say your P’s and such). You can get a different one that fits the mic stand better (and I probably would if I did it over again), but this one was super cheap and took care of the problem.

The mic is a straight USB connection so no cables required to go XLR to USB and such.

How I Record

This is dead simple. I use Call Recorder for Skype. Not only does it record the call, but it gives you nifty little utilities for breaking the audio apart into separate tracks (which is required if you want to do any meaningful editing).

I’ve been testing an app called RINGR that has serious potential. It records each part of the audio on the device and then stitches all of it together in the cloud at the end of the call. You get full HD audio without some of Skype’s audio weirdness when connections get bad.

Call Recorder is a one-time purchase of $30, whereas RINGR is a monthly charge, so even if you want to use RINGR, start with Skype until you know what you’re doing.

Bump Music

A good friend of mine recommended Garrett Vandenberg, who’s an audio engineer out of Canada. He’s really, really great and charges a fraction of what you’d pay elsewhere. He works incredibly fast, has great ideas and doesn’t mess around. He’ll give you bump music, transitions, the whole nine.

If you use anyone else, you’re paying too much (unless you do it yourself, and even then remember time is money). You can contact Garrett at garrett at garrettvandenberg dot com.

Putting the Show Together

I’ve tried Garage Band, but I ended up using Adobe Audition. It’s really powerful, but not too hard to learn how to use. There are a TON of tutorials on how to use it available online as well.

After the first four or five episodes, I created a template in Audition for my project that has all of my bump music, transitions and project structure the way I want it. Every time I start working on a new episode, I clone that template and put it into a new folder on my machine. Every episode has its own folder, and all of the artifacts for the show go into that folder.

It takes me about 1-1.5 hours per show to put the whole thing together in Audition. I listen to the whole thing and do all of the required edits to each of the tracks. It can be somewhat tedious at times, but for the most part it’s about 1.5 hours of work to put an hour show together.

I’m constantly working on editing the show better, tweaking how I get levels right and fixing nits. It’s a never-ending search for the optimal sound, within a reasonable time constraint.

Syndicating the Show

You can do all of this manually, but I use Libsyn. They have all of the required hooks into iTunes, Stitcher, Soundcloud and other distribution platforms. They make syndication so easy, and then provide you with all of the stats on plays by episode, etc. Depending on how many shows you do, it’s $10-20 a month, but for sheer headache prevention it’s well worth it. If your show goes crazy, they’ll be able to handle it. They host Tim Ferriss’ podcast, which is one of the top shows in the world with something like 7 million downloads per show.

I also distribute my show through my website, but you don’t have to do this part. You can use Libsyn as your hosting platform as well.

That’s pretty much it. If you’ve got any follow up questions, comments or concerns, you know where I live.