Dear Libsyn,

I had an account. I kept it open for a while, just in case I ever needed it again and to keep the shows posted somewhere in case anyone ever wanted it again. Then the spam came. And it came and came. Hundreds of messages notifying me that there has been a “New comment to your post”. We all know this is bull crap, and the only person ever seeing these comments is the Google robot. I’m pretty sure that he’s unlikely to purchase WoW gold. Eventually, I sadly cancelled my account hoping that would stop it. It didn’t, and now I can’t even log in to change my settings.

Please… make it stop. I just got 32 email notifications of comments on posts on a blog that hasn’t been active in more than 2 years… in 4 mins. I need you to make it stop. Unhook my email address, delete the posts, nuke the whole thing from orbit, I don’t care, but please for the love of God and small furry creatures, I beg you to make it stop.

Please.

Brian

Lately, it’s become unbearable:

(there are 2 more pages like that one…)

The above email is what I sent them.

So here goes:

Content, Content, Content

First thing to know is that it’s all about content. You need to have something to say. Even if you’re going to be a “personality” show (and the best ones are) you still need SOMETHING to talk about. So are you going to cover current events? Tech? Gaming? Entertainment? Pick a subject. Understand that in this day and age, you probably don’t actually have news that no one has heard before, so you should consider commenting or providing personal experience or opinion.

Format

Once you have a topic, decide on a format. Are you going to have news, then music, then a discussion? How are you going to lay it out.

Solo vs. Discussion

The most important thing to decide is are you doing a solo show or working with others? Personally, I think most of the best shows are discussions, and from personal experience they are about 954,000 times easier to produce than solo monologues. Solo shows can take a very long time to prepare and are generally harder to record. Discussion prep can be as simple as “We’re gonna talk about this…” then turn on the recording and go for it.

If you’re going with a discussion, how many will there be? Who will you be working with? Etc.

Local vs. Remote

Next, you need to know if the participants in your show will be local (in the same room) or remote (usually over the internet). This is really important, because it drastically changes your set up. If you need more than one local microphone, you most likely need an external audio interface. More than two and you need a fancier one, and so on.

Remote means you need to make sure everyone has Skype and a decent mic on their end.

Hardware

Mics

A good rule of thumb is that if you’ve never thought about it before, your mic isn’t good enough. If you have ever bought a mic with quality in mind, it’s probably good enough to start with.

Better USB headsets are decent, but cheap ones are not. Here’s a test: Fire up a recording program (Sound Recorder comes with Windows and is easy). Talk normally into the mic, then breath heavily, laugh and shake your head from side to side. Play back the audio. If you can hear the breathing or head lots of noise when you move your head, but a new one. We just bought a Plantronics GameCom 777 USB which is a decent headset.

If you really want a “real” mic, you should look for a speech mic. If you go to Guitar Center or a music shop and ask for a vocal mic, they’ll sell you one designed for singing. These are good, but not the best. You can spend less money and buy a better mic. Tell them you want a mic for speech or spoken word. You also want (especially if you’re a male) a large diaphragm mic. These have a larger element (usually 1” or more) and the bigger diaphragm captures the nice warm low tones in male voices.
The thing to think about here is is the mic “Dynamic” or “Condenser”. A condenser mic requires what’s called “phantom power” or power on the cable in order to run, so your interface needs to be able to supply that power. A Dynamic mic does not require that and so theoretically could be plugged in to any input that accepts “Mic Level” signal.

Finally, if you buy an external “real” mic, it will most likely come with an XLR connection, which is a “Mic Cable” with three pins. You can’t just plug that into your PC, you need some sort of interface. M-Audio makes some inexpensive, so does Presonus. They connect over Firewire or USB and often come with editing software.

Software

Skype

If you’re working remotely, everyone should have downloaded and installed and tested Skype. This is a pretty good VoIP software that many podcasters use. Some even use it for video podcasting.

Recording

You also need recording software. On the free side, you have Audacity or Garageband (Mac only). You also might have gotten editing software with the interface you bought. Cubase is a common one.

The actual process you use will depend on how you’re recording.

It’s important to note that there are a couple of ways to record Skype, and this might be the most complicated part of the setup. The easiest is to simply find one of the bazillion programs that will record Skype conversations. The problem is that most of them will record BOTH SIDES of the conversation into one file. This can be an issue because normally you want separation of your speakers. In case one person coughs while another is speaking, you can mute the cough and not change the other person at all. If you won’t care about editing it later, use what you like.
Some people run Skype on a second computer and pipe the output into their audio interface on a second channel. That works well also.

Finally, there are programs that can route audio internally and let you send Skype to a recording program. There’s one for PC called (I think) “Virtual Audio Cables”. Personally, on the Mac I use a combination of Audio Hijack Pro (from Rogue Amoeba) and Soundflower (free). I do this so I can get a little fancy and inject audio from iTunes, a web browser, even a soundboard into the audio stream which I send both to the recording as well as the people on the other side of the Skype Audio.

Before I explain the next bit, you need to know that installing Soundflower basically creates two “Fake” audio devices on your computer. SF2 is a 2 channel device and SF16 is a 16 chan device. You can send audio to them like you would any device and they output just like other devices.

Audio Hijack Pro (AHP) lets me create a path for the audio to follow (and record from) and I have 2 of them:

Podcast Local: Starts off with getting the audio from my interface, which is basically just my microphone. It then uses Audio Hijack Pro’s effects rack to bring in sound from iTunes, SoundByte, and Safari into the stream. Now we have my voice and the other local Audio sources. Then I use the channel tweaker effect in AHP make the stereo signal there a mono signal (merge the left and right) and I run it through an amplifier and a simple voice EQ effect. Finally, I send the stream to the SF2 virtual device and back to the Presonus (so I can hear the stream in my headphones for monitoring.)
Podcast Remote: Starts with the SF16 device as an input, and sends the audio stream to the Presonus so I can hear it. It’s a pretty simple chain compared to Podcast Local.

Lastly, I have Skype setup with the input device of SF2 (which is, if you recall, the Podcast Local audio) and the output as SF16 (which starts the Podcast Remote chain).

AHP records both Podcast Local and Podcast Remote, which I then mix together in Cubase. All I have to do is align the audio and it’s good to go.

Editing

I like to try to NOT edit my shows. A perfectionist can always find something to fix, and honestly, editing is the part I like least, so unless there is a HUGE problem, we go in one take with no edits. What you hear on TechChatter and Friendly Fire is what we recorded in real time.

As I said, I use Cubase. I used to use Garageband, which is free with Macs. Audacity is free and multiplatform from SourceForge, but I’ve had stability problems in the past so I’m gun shy.

My absolute favorite software for audio editing is actually Adobe Audition, which isn’t available for the Mac, and this annoys me no end.

Mix Down

Once you’ve edited the show, including putting your bumper music in etc, you will need to mix it down. Most audio programs will let you export mp3. I don’t have the time to go into concepts like audio compression (which is different from file compression) here, but you might consider mixing down to a .wav file and dropping that into a program called Levelator, which you can get online for free (google it). This will even out the “loudness” between people and sounds and make it more listenable.

That’s the production side of things. There’s plenty more I can go into specifically if you have questions… just let me know!