How to Create a Podcast

This is a basic overview of the components of creating a podcast. Please contact your Digital Learning Coach with questions.

A podcast is a series of audio recordings that you can subscribe to via music vendor, like iTunes. To create a podcast, you need a website to host your recordings and give you an RSS feed, which you will share with the music vendor to update your podcast for subscribers. To build your podcast, you'll need a device to record and edit your audio. In addition, we have a website that holds our show notes. We use Zencastr to record (free web tool), GarageBand, and Google Sites. Our recordings are hosted by WordPress.

Hosting

Most websites will charge you to provide you with an RSS feed that enables subscription. There are companies that will host for free, but storage is limited. If you don't plan on having a lot of people subscribing, you could download your audio recordings in Google Drive, build your podcast on Google Sites, and email notifications to an email list when you update. Note that when many people are accessing the same file in Drive, it can take time to upload for each person.

Recording

We use Zencastr, a free online tool that records audio from up to 2 different sources (free) or more with a paid subscription. Zencastr allows the host to set up the call, call in the interviewee, and records them all as separate lines of audio. The benefit of the separate lines is found in editing, if you need to edit sound out of just one file.

Editing

GarageBand comes standard on any Apple product. On a Mac, you can edit audio files with ease using GarageBand. There are many tutorials out there, but it is fairly intuitive. After recording, you'll want to download the audio to your computer and add the files to a new audio file in GarageBand. You may want to consider a short musical introduction and close (ours was created and recorded by Jackson Rhodes). I keep a folder on my desktop with all the components of our podcast, numbered for ease. After adding all the components, the mp4 is exported to Drive, where the link is posted in WordPress, and the RSS feed is submitted to iTunes.

Watch this video for a quick overview of using GarageBand.

Using GarageBand for Podcasts.webm

Sharing

For each vendor you want to post on, you'll need to create an account for a podcast to post your updates (for example, iTunes). Once you create an account for a podcast and have it verified, you'll upload your recordings to your host, then add the RSS feed from your host to your vendor (like iTunes).

We email our updates, and also post them on Twitter. Hopefully, you'll have subscribers, so they'll get notified when an update to their subscription is available. In addition, we post our updates, as well as show notes, and examples of what was discussed on our website, which is hosted on Google Sites.

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