I’ve never podcasted but a person mentioned you can use Audacity to record your podcast.
Has anyone used Audacity podcast?
If so, could you please share your steps?
Thank you!
It can be simple or very complicated…
You can also make a podcast with little or no editing (obviously live radio or TV news doesn’t have editing) or you can easily spend a day, or a week editing. I usually figure 3X real-time MINIMUM (3 hours for a 1 hour show). That’s an hour for listening-through before editing, an hour editing, and listening-through after editing. You can spend more time, but if you’re going to edit it’s hard to do it any faster.
You generally at-least want a good [u]USB podcast microphone[/u] or a [u]studio microphone[/u] and an [u]audio interface[/u]. You’ll also need a quiet space to use as a studio. Background noise is often the difference between a pro recording and an amateur recording.
Audacity has noise reduction but noise reduction works best when you have a quiet-constant background noise… When you don’t really need it… If the noise is bad you can get artifacts (side effects) and, the cure can be worse than the disease.
You can only use 1 USB mic at a time so if you’ want mics for one or more guests you’ll need an audio interface or a mixer. (There are USB mixers that double as interfaces,) With a mixer you can mix and adjust microphone levels in real-time while recoding (less editing) but then you need someomone to “run” the mixer.
A good microphone will usually cost $100 or more, and stage/studio microphones are not interchangeable with 'computer mics". Audio interfaces also start at about $100 but with a USB podcast mic the interface is built into the microphone at almost no extra cost.
A lot of podcasts (most?) have video and Audacity doesn’t support video. You CAN record the audio separately but then you have to make sure the audio & video are synchronized. You can record the audio & video together and then edit the audio separately as long as you don’t cut or splice the audio separately, putting them out-of-sync. For the best audio quality you need a camcorder with a microphone input (an XLR input for a “good” studio mic) so you can get the mic close to the talent.
Most video editors can also edit audio so if you’'re editing video you may not need Audacity.
use Audacity to record your podcast.
What kind of podcast? As above, you can produce a simple spoken word 13-minute show with minimum editing and production efforts. The instant you get more complicated than that, the editing and production time and effort skyrockets.
And even before that, you need the quiet room and reasonable microphone. Ordinary voice recordings aren’t dead simple. Talk to any one setting up to record an audiobook.
So give us a push. What’s the show?
“Everybody Knows” you need to go out and buy a nice microphone, but you can get going perfectly well by recording on your phone.
And to bring this around, Yes people use Audacity for audio production all the time. There’s some tricks to it, but it’s a perfectly serviceable editor.
Koz
I endorse this figure. My factor is 4x, but then it was measured when recording an audiobook, 50+ hours of audio for 474,000 words in English, Latin and Greek. “A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive by John Stuart Mill”
I used Notepad’s timestamp feature to record accurate data.
If your podcast is technical in nature, your listeners might appreciate transcripts or notes, and so you must factor in either (a) time to write your script or (b) time to summarize your off-the-cuff remarks, which will probably consume another 1x or 2x of your podcast time.
best wishes
Chris
There is where you tell us what your podcast is so we can stop guessing at it.
Another possibility is pointing us to a show you like. We can tell you how that show was likely done.
Theatrical production is always a shock. The microphone makers don’t make it any easier. They insist you can set up on your kitchen table, record your show, become famous, and retire to a comfortable life.
It may be a little more involved than that.
Koz