This quick-start guide provides details on the materials and methods of podcasting with little to no budget, based on our own experience getting Library Table Talk up and running. It builds on the poster we presented at ACRL 2025, "Let's talk: Launching a polished podcast with no budget." Feel free to reach out with any questions or feedback.
Physical space
At minimum: an enclosed, relatively quiet space
Our preferred setup: a sound-absorbing recording room
Equipment
At minimum: a basic headset
Our preferred setup: Blue Yeti mics and over-ear headphones
Zoom or similar software: recording audio interviews and generating transcripts
Audacity: editing and producing audio
Google Sites or other website host: hosting your podcast's website
OSF, your institutional repository, etc.: hosting your files
At minimum: a website (like Google Sites) where you can embed mp3 audio files directly, which would enable listeners to access the podcast without needing an RSS feed.
Our current setup: institutional repository, such as the University Digital Conservancy at University of Minnesota to host mp3, mp4 and transcript files; create metadata; and provide permalinks to episode.
Office productivity software (i.e. Word/Docs, Excel/Sheets): planning, transcript editing, etc.
Conceptualize your purpose, audience, and scope.
Choose a format. Will your podcast be interview-style, with host(s) interviewing guest(s)? Will it be a conversation between multiple hosts? Will it be one person exploring the topic? Will you have multiple distinct segments in each episode?
Develop branding. You'll need a title, one-liner description, and visual branding (e.g. logo).
Record a basic intro & outro to reuse throughout your episodes.
Choose music. When you've got an intro with music, that's when you'll think, "Whoa, I have a podcast!" Blue Dot Sessions has free music you can use under a Creative Commons license for "for non-monetized projects that aren’t a central part of your job."
Gather your materials.
Set up the technicals: Develop your website, figure out where you'll host your files, set up your RSS feed.
Brainstorm ideas and schedule episodes ahead. It's good to have some recordings in your back pocket ahead of when you plan to release the episodes.
Engage with listeners.
Research the episode's topic and possible guests.
Invite guest(s).
Have back-up guests in mind. And if an invitee declines, you can still ask them if they have suggestions for someone else to invite. (In our experience, people who weren't interested in being guests suggested other names themselves.)
Optional: Schedule a pre-interview. It can be helpful to have a quick (unrecorded) chat with possible guests to learn more about how they might approach a topic in a full interview, and answer questions they have. Try to keep the pre-interview short so you don't spoil the full interview!
Schedule the interview and send info on how it’ll work, including discussion topics. You want your guest's responses to sound natural and not scripted, so avoid sending the exact questions ahead of time.
Develop your questions, including possible follow-up questions. We've found that 4-6 main questions are all we can get to in a 60-minute interview.
Conduct the interview and record it via Zoom.
Settings:
Under Audio, turn on "Original sound for musicians" for best sound quality. (You'll need to later edit out background noise like loud HVAC.)
Under Recording, select "Record a separate audio file of each participant," and when recording the interview, record to your computer rather than the cloud.
Organize and rename your files.
Import files into Audacity. (See tips on importing audio below.)
Edit interviews in Audacity, saving benchmark versions along the way. (See tips on editing audio below.)
Write the script for and record other segments.
Compile and edit together all segments into the full episode.
Export file as an mp3. (See tips below on exporting audio below.)
Listen through the episode in its entirety to make sure nothing sounds weird! Make changes as necessary.
If relevant, send the draft to guest(s) for approval; make changes as necessary.
Replay the episode in Zoom to generate a transcript. (Share screen, including computer audio, and record to the cloud.)
Download and edit the transcript.
Upload your files (audio and transcript), and create and publish the webpage for the episode.
Publicize and share your episode!
So far, Audacity has worked well for our purposes. Here we highlight the main things we've learned and features we use when editing. We don't walk you through the entire workflow, but perhaps that is an idea for a future tutorial.
It's free! And regularly updated.
You can find an abundance of training materials and video tutorials.
You only need to learn a handful of features to do the main things you might want to do.
It's a "destructive editor," which means that edits you make change the audio file itself. You can only undo changes in sequence using Edit > Undo, or Ctrl + Z.
It has a bit of a learning curve. But if you've ever edited audio or video before, that basic understanding helps.
Importing audio
Import your .m4a audio files from your Zoom (or other) recording.
If you get an error, you may need to install the FFmpeg library.
If your audio files import as stereo instead of mono, each file needs to be opened separately, converted, and saved, before putting multiple files/tracks into one project.
On the audio track, click the three dots to get the menu.
Select "Split Stereo to Mono."
Delete one of the tracks by clicking the "X" in the corner.
Go to File > Export Audio > Export to computer, to export the new file to .mp3 format, ensuring that "Mono" the selection for Channels under "Audio options."
Note: If your podcast has multiple segments like ours, you may want to edit them in separate projects before combining them. For example, because interviews take more in-depth editing the the scripted parts, Hannah edits each interview in its own project before compiling it with the intro, outro, and other segments.
Reducing background noise
Audacity does a good job at reducing background noise like loud HVAC.
Highlight a section of a track that has the noise you want to reduce, such as a pause between speaking. (When recording, you can purposely record a chunk of just "ambient noise" to make sure you have a sample.)
Go to Effect > Noise Removal and Repair > Noise Reduction.
Click "Get Noise Profile."
Select entire audio track by double-clicking.
Go back to Effect > Noise Removal and Repair > Noise Reduction.
Adjust the settings under Step 2. You can preview the track before committing.
Click OK.
See this YouTube tutorial, "How To Remove Background Noise In Audacity" from Insider Tech, for more information.
Loudness normalization
If one speaker or track is a lot louder than the others, you want to adjust it down so listeners aren't jarred or need to adjust their volume while listening.
Highlight the relevant track or portion of a track.
Go to Effect > Loudness and Compression > Loudness Normalization.
Play around with the LUFS to even out the volume. (It is a negative number, and the closer the negative number is to zero, the louder it is. The farther the negative number is from zero, the quieter it is.)
Auto ducking
Use this to automatically "duck" music under a vocal track.
The music track must be above the vocal track, and it only works for the one audio track directly below it.
You may need to increase the maximum pause so the volume of the music doesn't increase between pauses in the vocal track.
If you have multiple voices below in different tracks, and you want the music to auto duck under both of them, you will need to either:
Increase the maximum pause, or,
Edit together the multiple voices into one track for the duration you want to auto duck.
Editing audio tracks
Make sure you keep an original copy of each audio file, since Audacity is a destructive editor.
To make basic edits to your audio tracks (e.g. deleting, rearranging), highlight the relevant portion. Then delete, copy, or paste as relevant.
Do not right click and split the track. While it is less "destructive," this essentially duplicates the audio file, and if you split enough tracks you will end up with a gigantic overall file size. (Hannah learned this the hard way when my hard drive was suddenly too full to save the project.)
Save benchmark versions along the way in case you make changes you can't undo and want to revert to a previous version.
Exporting audio
When you're ready to publish, go to File > Export Audio > Export to computer.
We use these settings:
Format: MP3
Channels: Mono
Sample Rate: 44100 Hz
Bit Rate Mode: Preset
Quality: Medium, 145-185 kbps
In the Export Audio window, click the "Edit Metadata" button.
Edit your metadata and keep it consistent across episodes, like the library professional you are!
From the early stages of podcast planning, we agreed on the values guiding our process:
Create a podcast on a $0.00 budget
Create a workflow that could be reproduced by others interested in starting a podcast with little-to-no funding
And avoid, at all costs, signing away our project and personal data to Podcasting Overlords such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts, etc.
A quick internet search of “free podcast hosting” displays a seemingly endless list of options promising “free podcast hosting software” or “user-friendly all-in-one” or “non-techy friendly”. Upon even slight investigation, it becomes apparent that there most certainly is a cost involved. A platform advertises a Free solution, but limit how many episodes you can host for free (e.g 8 hours of podcasts), or whether you can share your content by RSS, or in the process of setting up your show, you sign away your rights to the tech company running the software giving the corporation the right to remove your content at will, share your content, or use for advertising etc.
We investigated many options and tested a few out before determining it won’t work for our project. In a previous job, Stephanie worked with RSS files, content ingestion, and file hosting. While far from an expert, Stephanie felt like she had enough basic experience that they could try and figure out a solution. Even if it takes time, asking lots of questions to more knowledgeable folks, and trial and error.
File hosting is what makes your mp3 file available on the internet for other users to access and listen to.
Through investigation and trial-and-error, we decided that the University of Minnesota’s institutional repository, the Digital Conservancy (UDC), is a great place for us to publish our podcast episodes! With help from our colleague Sarah Barsness, the digital records archivist at the UDC, we established a Library Table Talk Podcast collection where we can publish our podcast episodes!
Pros:
Published and preserved for long-term access
Permalinks are available, so no need to worry about broken URLs
Makes work available Open Access (Yay, OA! One of our values!)
Content in the UDC is crawled by GoogleScholar and Open Access crawlers that index in Web of Science
The UDC’s underlying system, DSpace, makes media playable directly in the record so our very own built-in media player!
Basic data analytics available to track page visits and file downloads over time
Accepts multiple file types for the same record, including mp3 and OCR PDFs for transcripts, plus image files for our logo
Con:
While the UDC does offer an RSS feed for items in the repository, it is in Dublin Core metadata standards which is not an accepted metadata standard for podcasts
RSS is what makes podcasts available through your listening apps. RSS files for podcasts are XML files using RSS 2.0 metadata standards. How can you tell? The header/declaration of your RSS feed looks something like:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><rss version="2.0" xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/">
(note: we use a free text-editing software for the RSS/XML files, specifically BBEdit because it works on Mac OS and we had prior experience with it)
Podcasting hosting platforms are typically all-in-one and will generate and maintain RSS feeds and push your podcast to listening apps, but since we decided to avoid those platforms, that means we are responsible for creating an RSS feed for our podcast. Creating (and updating!) an RSS feed is not the final step to listen to your podcast on your listening app! You will need access to a server where you can upload your RSS file. A server allows other computers on other networks to access and download files (which is how podcast listening apps are able to play mp3 files). We hit another wall...we don't have access to a server (and once again, don't want to pay)!
BUT! Our web application developer colleague, ander kiereg, came through when we were stuck! They were very helpful, and shared some options that could work for us! Which led us to our Work In Progress....
We are currently setting up a Hugo static website with a podcast-oriented theme, Castanet. Hugo is an open source, free, static website generator. While the tool itself offers lots of customization, there are already some themes ready to go for your podcast. Castanet is one, and is available for download on GitHub. AKA, exactly the kind of solution we were looking for!
Pros:
Could be an all-in-one website for you podcast, can host and play your episodes directly, and also generates and updates a podcast-formatted RSS feed
Free
Extensive documentation (once again, thank you anders for pointing us in the direction of some)
Hugo Quick Start guide is great
There is a ton of third-party resources available, including video tutorials
Can host your site via GitHub Pages or Netlify
Can customize your site, in addition to the many different themes you can use
there are many example Castanet sites that are used by podcasts, like Arrested DevOps and Quiche-Anon
Cons:
Must be comfortable/familiar with/willing to learn command line (or know someone who is who can help)
We have begun setting up our Library Table Talk Hugo site, where we will be able to not only publish podcast episodes directly, but also have RSS feeds generated in podcasting metadata standards that can be used for podcast listening applications. WOO!
Unfortunately since podcasting is not our full time job, we have not had the time needed to complete setting up our RSS feed and get Library Table Talk into Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, etc. You best believe, you will know as soon as it is all worked out and up and running. As we finish setting up Hugo with Castanet for Library Table Talk, we will also be documenting our own process to share out as well!
For more details about the many tools, softwares and sites we tested that did not end up working for us, check out our more substantial File Hosting and RSS-ing Quick Start Guide.
Beyond RSS 2.0, Apple Podcasts is the primary standard for podcast RSS feeds
This is how you set up a profile for your podcast that, once the RSS feed is accepted, will be viewable in Apple podcast apps.
We have set up our Podcast Channel, but cannot proceed until we have a valid RSS URL
Example Podcast RSS feeds:
Used to ‘check work’ and see how other podcasts structure their RSS feed. Find an RSS feed to one of your favorite podcasts, for example
Listen Notes - if you make an account (free) you can download RSS files of podcasts. I use this as a way to see how podcast RSS files are formatted, and to use as template.
RSS file validators to check your work and see if there are formatting errors
WC3 Feed Validation (the one we use)
There are many other RSS Feed Validators. FYI many are run by the same Podcasting Platforms that we are avoiding (due to cost, advertisements, and data policies)
UMN Libraries Podcasting Guide (or your favorite local podcasting LibGuide)
NPR training:
Weldon, G. (2021). NPR’s podcast start up guide: Create, launch, and grow a podcast that people listen to -- on any budget. Ten Speed Press.
Note: This guide is a very readable, in-depth introduction to podcast and audio production. While not strictly necessary to get your podcast up and running, if you want to learn more (and get to know your favorite NPR hosts better), this is an informative and delightful read.