Geoff’s EFL Blog

In case it could help others, below is my podcasting setup. [I should emphasise that I've only done a couple of podcasts so far, so I'm far from an expert!!!]

FOR RECORDING

My laptop has a built-in microphone, but there’s a lot of noise so I really needed an external microphone.

I’m using a Labtec Desktop Mic 534, a very cheap (only £5.63 GBP at Amazon.co.uk) mono microphone with mini connector (3.5 mm) connected to my laptop, and I’m really happy with it. It was incredibly cheap, and light to carry around (though made of plastic and so rather fragile probably).

This microphone connects to my laptop via an external sound card – needed because my laptop doesn’t have a microphone socket per se, just an audio line-in socket. I’m using the Griffin iMic universal audio adapter, which plugs into a USB port.

For mobile recording, I’m also (tentatively, nervously) offering my students use of my 4th generation iPod with a Griffin iTalk microphone attachment (£30 GBP from Amazon.co.uk). I have used this recently in a different context and it works pretty well, though there may be issues with hard drive noise. After recording onto the iPod, I just connect it to my computer in the normal way, and the files transfer automatically to iTunes, from where they can be exported to the podcast audio track.

Notes to speak from:

For preparation, and for prompting during recording, on the advice of Adam Christianson, I believe, of MacCast fame, I’ve been using an outlining program, OmniOutliner, onscreen at the side of the Garageband recording window.

This is a good way to work, I think, because you can duplicate the file from the previous podcast, and adapt it for the current podcast – various bits of info are probably going to repeat pretty much from show to show. I’m basically saying that if you have a rough template to operate from that may help save time organising and sequencing content.

EDITING

Hardware:

I have an 18-month old PowerBook running the latest version of Mac OSX.

Software:

I’ve been using Apple’s Garageband, part of its iLife ‘05 suite (now ‘06 suite). It is really pretty good: very easy to use, very full featured (voice effects, multi-track, fades in/out, can easily create short musical bits, etc).
[Have purchased the '06 upgrade, which has an inbuilt Podcast studio, with enhanced features, but haven't had a chance to use it yet.]

For each person recorded in Garageband, I used a new “Real Instrument” track: Vocals > No effects. Further configuration: No echo, no reverb. Increased gate and compressor to about 15 or 20 out 100. [I have got no clear idea what all that means. I was just trying to make a clean sound, with no background hum, echo or reverberation.]

Musical transition bits (the same 10 second bit repeated) also had one track to themselves. These musical bits were created in Garageband, very easily.

So, I had 8 tracks (1 teacher, 7 students) plus one sound/music effects track.

PUBLISHING

The audio track created in Garageband is exported in AIFF format to Apple’s iTunes, a free audio player for Mac and Windows, and then, within iTunes, the audio track is converted to MP3 format (there’s a command to do this under the Advanced menu in iTunes).

The file is then ready to upload to the Bardwell Road Centre Podcast at Podomatic.