Audacity is a free sound-editing program that we highly recommend for podcasters. It will record your audio, edit it, and create an MP3 file. And did we mention, it’s free?

Once you get comfortable using Audacity to create your podcasts, you might want to learn some of the special tricks in this series.

Tip #3: Easing Transitions with Fade In and Fade Out

If you add a musical intro, or music bumpers, to your podcast, you’ll get a much more professional sound by fading them in and out to blend them with your voice recording.

Fade In gradually brings an audio track from silence up to full volume.

Fade Out gradually brings an audio track from full volume down to silence.

To use Fade In, follow these steps:

1. Select the first 2-3 seconds of your music track.

2. Select “Fade In” from the “Effect” menu.

To bring a vocal track in over your music, you’ll want to apply a Fade Out to your music track.

To use Fade Out, follow these steps:

1. Select the last 2-3 seconds of your music track.

2. Select “Fade Out” from the “Effect” menu.

For a really professional effect, move the starting point of your vocal track so that it overlaps the last half-second or so of the fade-out.

Audacity is a free sound-editing program that we highly recommend for podcasters. It will record your audio, edit it, and create an MP3 file. And did we mention, it’s free?

Once you get comfortable using Audacity to create your podcasts, you might want to learn some of the special tricks in this series.

Tip#2: High Pass Filter, to Reduce Background Hiss

If you don’t have access to professional studio recording equipment, you can still make clean-sounding podcasts with simple settings in Audacity. For example:

High Pass Filter: You can find the High Pass Filter in the “Effects” menu. It’s very helpful for reducing that hissing background noise you can get when you record over the phone, or in a room with a noisy air-conditioner or computers.

How does it work? Those background hissing-sounds are low-frequency sounds. (By contrast, a train whistle would be a high-frequency sound.) The sound of a human voice -- even a deep human voice -- is a much higher frequency. When you apply a High Pass Filter to your recording, it’s like a net that catches all the low-frequency sound, but lets the higher-frequency sounds pass through. You end up with cleaner-sounding audio.

To use the High Pass Filter, follow these steps:

1. Select the part of your recording you want to filter.

2. Select “High Pass Filter” from the “Effect” menu.

3. A dialog box will appear. The default setting is not usually good for a voice recording. So, click on the slider, and drag it to the left until the Cutoff Frequency setting is somewhere between 155 and 332.

4. Click OK.

Note: Audacity does have a Noise Removal tool, which is also found in the Effects menu. However, we find that it tends to leave the audio sounding very tinny, so we much prefer the High Pass Filter.

Audacity is a free sound-editing program that we highly recommend for podcasters. It will record your audio, edit it, and create an MP3 file. And did we mention, it’s free?

Once you get comfortable using Audacity to create your podcasts, you might want to learn some of the special tricks in this series.

Tip#1: Compressor, for Better Sound Quality

If you don’t have access to professional studio recording equipment, you can still make clean-sounding podcasts with simple settings in Audacity. For example:

Compressor: You can find the Compressor tool in the “Effects” menu. It’s the single most effective way to improve the sound of your podcast.

How does it work? Well, in any sound recording, there will be portions that are too loud and portions that are too quiet. The Compressor tool evens these out, toning down the louder bits and bringing up the quieter ones. You end up with a much fuller, richer sound.

To use the Compressor, just follow these steps:

1. Select all of your recording. You can highlight it by clicking and dragging, or you can choose the “Select” option from the “Edit” menu, and then choosing “All.”

2. In the “Effects” menu, select “Compressor.”

3. A dialog box will appear. The default settings will be fine for 99% of all podcasts. So just click OK.

Here are links to some great blogs related to podcasting.

Jake Ludington's MediaBlab: 12 Ways to Promote Your Podcast This piece has is a nice distillation of the current conventional wisdom on podcast promotions. It also contains a good list of pocast directories where you can list your show.

O'Reilly Digital Media: Ten Tips for Improving your Podcasts Jack Herrington offers some great, and some surprising suggestions for making better podcasts.

Podonomics: 31 Days to a Better Podcast Leesa Barnes spent an entire month blogging about specific tips for podcasters. There's a wealth of information to be found here.

by Diane Gilleland

Podcasting is an exciting tool for learning. It makes education portable, digestible, and readily accessible. However, as new as the medium is, very few educational podcasts are using it to full advantage.

To make good, memorable audio, you need more than a script and a microphone. You need to understand some things about how audio-learning works.

In fact, let’s back up even a little further, and consider the three channels we humans use to process information: Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic. Each of us favors one channel more than the others, but most of us learn best when we can use a combination of all three. We might read a textbook about, say, scuba diving, and then listen to a scuba instructor, and then take that first dive. Using all three channels, we learn very effectively.

Back to Podcasting. Given that it’s a strictly audio medium (podcasts do not have pictures), we have to consider the fact that we’re losing two communications channels. But this doesn’t have to mean that podcasting is a less-effective way to learn. It just means that you need to structure your audio so that it stimulates the Visual and Kinesthetic responses in your listeners.

How do you do this? Here are some ideas:

Create sound pictures.
Why do we love to read a great novel or adventure story? Because when we read, our brains create a picture version of the story. Pictures stimulate our Visual channel. So, present your audio in ways that trigger visual images in the minds of your listeners. Use sensory, descriptive language -- talk about color, smells, flavors, textures, temperature, and so on. Whatever your podcast subject is, consider what it looks, smells, and feels like, and bring these elements into your audio.

You can also insert “soundscapes” into your podcast to help set a scene. In a podcast about the history of railroads, for example, you can use related sounds like train whistles, the clicking of the tracks, and conductors calling “All Aboard!” The more you can get your listeners to make their own pictures while listening to your podcast, the better they will retain the material.

Use storytelling.
We humans are story magnets, and we’ve created entire industries of publishing, film, radio, and theater to support our story habit. How many times have you been in a learning environment where the instructor said, “Let me illustrate that point with a little story. . .” ?

When we’re involved in listening to a story, two things are happening: we’re using our Visual channel to (again) create pictures of the events in the narrative. We’re also activating our Kinesthetic channel a little, by placing ourselves into the story and vicariously participating the events, as if they’d really happened to us.

Storytelling is a very powerful tool for podcast learning. Why deliver a dry lecture on the legal implications of poor communication in constuction contracts when you can instead tell the story: this architect, despite good intentions, missed one crucial detail in a field report to his client. Then he found himself in the middle of a lawsuit two years later, when the building’s foundation crumbled.

Simplify.
You can facilitate audio learning by keeping your language simple. This doesn’t mean that you need to talk down to your audience. It just means that the way you use language in an audio setting is different than the way you use it in writing.

Case in point: when you’re reading a text, if you don’t understand a point, you can easily read it again. If you need a moment to process what you just read, you can look up from the page, and when you return, it will still be there.

When you listen to audio, however, it’s always moving. You can pause it, of course, or reverse it to hear something again, but that’s a bit more work than it is for written material.

So, when you’re presenting material for audio-learning, you need to make sure your audience can grasp the concepts easily. This is not the time to practice your most complex sentence structures, or use all your two-dollar words. Instead, keep sentences short. Use direct, clear language. Deliver one idea at a time, or find ways to repeat the ideas.

And, paradoxically, you need to incorporate some silences in your audio so that your listeners can have that experience of “looking up from the page for a moment.” After you present a key idea, pause for several seconds to give it a chance to sink in.

Learn to Read Aloud.
It’s a fascinating phenomenon . . . when most people read any text aloud, their voices fall into a kind of sing-song monotone, and they read very fast.

Unfortunately, that kind of vocal delivery is almost impossible for the human brain to pay attention to for long. If you’re going to deliver good audio-learning, you’ll likely be using written scripts, and if you’re reading them aloud, you have to break yourself out of the monotone.

It may help to think of the sound of your voice as a kind of landscape. If you’re speaking in a monotone, with few pauses, then that landscape looks rather, well, flat. Contrast that to how your voice sounds when you’re speaking excitedly about something very meaningful to you: your voice has lots of high tones and low tones, and speeding up and slowing down, and energy, and pauses. In short, a much more interesting vocal landscape. In essence, an interesting vocal performance helps stimulate the brain’s Kinestetic channel. The brain has to stay “in motion” in order to follow the sound of an animated voice.

The best way to combat the read-aloud monotone is through practice. Rehearse your material enough times that you can deliver it without needing to read it aloud. And focus on adding energy and excitement to your vocal landscape.

Bring Visual and Kinesthetic experiences to your educational audio material, and it will become a very more effective, well-rounded teaching tool.

Check out this Wiki. When we last looked, it had a main table of contents that included:

1. Presentation Slides by David Warlick
2. Podcast Resources
3. Podcast Safe Music
4. Podcast Directories
5. Prominent Education Podcast Blogs
6. Listening to Existing Podcast Programs
7. Producing a Podcast Program
8. Some Podcast Links

The RSS icon symbol

Podcasting is made possible by RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Because RSS is new and works differently than previous technologies, and because techies toss around the acronyms like juggling balls, the term can appear mysterious.

RSS Explained in Plain English is an article that keeps it simple and yet cues you into all the ramifications.

In ABC of Podcasting, Ryan Irelan of Podcast Free America fame tells in 26 short essays the various aspects, details and tips of podcasting. From hardware to software to recording and editing, he touches on it all.

Keep in mind when you visit this blog-posted set of tutorials, the essays will come up in reverse order, so 'A' will come up last.

by Diane Gilleland
Producer of CraftyPod, SpinterSpin podcast, and the Harper-Perennial Life with Books podcast. Creative Producer at MyPodcastDept.com.

This article provides a beginner's overview to Podcasting from a hobbiest point of view, explaining the origins of podcasting, which are very home-spun. when placed into a professional arena, there are a few characteristics that change. For example, we want the production to be clean and easy to hear so listeners will focus on the content rather than be distracted by noises or poor sound quality. Also, the resources cited in this article are not always appropriate for professional podcasts (for example, all material uploaded to ourmedia.com must be open and usable by others via the Creative Commons License).