Making a podcast is relatively easy, technically speaking, and below Tinaseamonster will walk you through how to do it. This is her second installment in our Podcasting series.

We’re excited for other, related goings-on. Later today (Wednesday, February 27, 2008) brepettis — the resident New Media person here at Etsy — will be holding an Online Workshop in the Virtual Labs all about RSS. You can read Tina’s previous post in this series which tells you how to listen to podcasts, and we’ll also hear from studiobijou  and Ilysaart on how their Etsy Team uses podcasting to promote the appreciation and awareness about their art form. Public radio producers and community and youth radio organizers will be chiming in too. And we’re feeling so pumped because the Etsy podcast was just featured on iTunes. Be a part of this revolution in sound, DIYers!

Of Headphones and Microphones: Podcasting, Part Two
I stumbled into podcasting on a cold February night in 2005. I was newly pregnant with twins and just wanted to sleep, but my husband brought the laptop to me and said, “Let’s start a podcast.” That night, we recorded our first show in which I told a story about how I didn’t know what falafel was and I was hooked. Since then, we have produced nearly 50 episodes of 3 different shows from our small apartment. And I have totally fallen in love with the medium, which is like a cross between the old days of radio and the new days of blogging and can be completely DIY and engaging to both the listener and the creator.

So you wanna podcast?
My first advice to anyone who wants to start their own show is to have a topic. Shows about nothing tend to go nowhere fast, so have a plan! Second is to have a cast. Some shows can work with just one person with interviewees, but adding a few more regular voices can increase your fan base. Having a few differing opinions or a few personalities is always fun. Our current show, Television Zombies, has a 4 member cast. Three of us in the “studio” which is actually our kitchen table and one phoning in via Skype, a voice communication service that lets you have voice conversations with people over the Internet for free. Skype is an awesome service that let’s you create “conference calls,” sort of a voice chat room, where you can patch in everyone on your show. This essentially makes it so that you can have guests or regulars on your show who live a block away or an ocean away.

Once you have your topic and your cast, you need to think about how consistent you think you can be. The number one thing that makes podcasts successful and gather up listeners is consistency. The way I see it, the world is full of people who are bored at work, sitting in their little rooms all alone. These folks need to count on friends who will be there regularly! Decide how often you are going to record and also how long it will take you to produce and post the show. This determines how often you will realistically be able to post. Make this information clear to your listeners. Our TVZ podcast records every Sunday night. We just do it, it is part of our week. Our listeners know that our show is weekly and know where and when to find it. Building this consistent relationship makes it so that your listeners make you part of their day or week or month and this is important!

Now to the technical stuff. Our first podcast was literally recorded on an old iBook using free software and a built in microphone. The sound quality was so sad! But it gave us the opportunity to get used to being recorded and editing a show. It was a perfect way to start and learn. You can also spring for a $20 microphone to attach to this kind of set up. For the shows that we currently produce from our dining room, we bought a mixer, professional mics for live participants in the studio and use a laptop to patch in people on Skype, while recording the whole thing on our PC. Spending only about $300 (not including computers) for the new equipment. I think our new shows sound great!

At the bare minimum, you should have the following for your show:

• A mixer — although your cast can crowd around a single microphone, it’s not ideal. Everyone needs their own microphone, and the audio levels for each person needs to be adjusted so that they are all more or less the same. A mixer enables you to take sound from different microphones and the audio output on a laptop and “mix” them all together with good, professional quality sound. We use a cheap Behringer 802 8-Input Mixer ($60 from Amazon). It’s not the best in the world, but it does the job. It will also allow you to monitor your recording with headphones – it’s very important that you hear what your voice sounds like while you record. Monitoring your sound recording with headphones while rolling also saved you the anguish of recording a whole session and then finding out the mic was turned off.
• Professional microphones — these are essential for getting the best audio quality possible. They don’t have to be super expensive, but they should be designed for voice, such as the affordable karaoke microphones you can get from Radioshack. We purchased a couple Shure C606WD mics ($30 each). The desk stands ($12.00 each) are also very important — you don’t want to be holding your mics the whole time you do your show (and don’t forget to buy the clips ($3) that actually attach your mics to the stands, most mics and stands don’t come with them out of the box)!
• Good headphones — any pair old of headphones will do. You’ll also need a headphone splitter so that multiple people can monitor the sound at once – we use a cheap three-way splitter we picked up from Radioshack.
• A laptop for patching in a theme song, music, Skype calls, sound effects, etc. This is not the computer you will be using to do your recording. We use an old G4 iBook – it’s a little slow, but it does the job. Most older laptops can run Skype and sound playback software such as iTunes reasonably well.
• Cables — you’ll need a special cable, Stereo Mini Male to 1/4″ Phono Y-Cable, to output the analog sound from your mixer to your PC, Mac of other dedicated recording device. You’ll also need a standard Stereo Male to Dual RCA Male Y-Cable to plug the laptop you’re using for Skype into the mixer (most music fans probably have some of these laying around). Also, you can’t go wrong with having a few spare 1/8″ mini – to – 1/4″ adapters laying around. Many, if not all of these cables, can be found at very affordable prices at your local Radio Shack.
• A recording device of some sort to capture the sound from your mixer — We use a Windows PC with Sony Soundforge to capture the audio. You could use any computer with a line-in or mic jack, and any digital recording software. Audacity is a free solution and extremely popular among podcasters. If you’re feeling like going the completely professional route, most sound engineers swear by Pro Tools. You can also use a dedicated digital recorder, such as the excellent solid state or hard drive records made by Marantz. They can be expensive, however.
• A Website and online storage space for your files — There are many, many excellent and affordable hosting options available on the Web. Most hosting companies will even install Word Press, Movable Type and other blog software for free, so you don’t have to be too technical to set up your site. This kind of website can run you about $50 a year to start. Once you get a fan base and lots of people downloading shows, you will need to upgrade this. If you don’t think you are ready to put up your own web site for your show, there are also online services that will help you to publish and distribute your content. LibSyn (their tag line is “Podcasting Made Easy”) and Blip are two examples.
• An RSS feed so you can publish your podcast to iTunes and other podcatchers — You can either write the RSS yourself based on the iTunes published specifications, or you can go to a free site like Feedburner, that does the RSS feed for you.

Finally, Tutorials about encoding, editing and preparing your MP3 files for the web are a quick Google search away. We recommend using 64kbps mono, 44.100 kHz MP3 files, as they offer a good balance of file size and audio quality. But this part of the job takes some trial and error to learn so save a copy of your first show in case you mess up! Over all, I would say that we spend about 8 hours a week on our podcast. Recording takes about 1-2 hours, editing and posting takes about 3 hours, preparing takes 1 hour and marketing and blogging another 2 hours. Spread some of this work among 3 or 4 people and it is totally doable.

Perhaps this all sounds scary and technical, but once you get it set up, a podcast can be a really rewarding way to reach a large audience of people. Have fun!

Tina Seamonster blogs her life and craft at www.ilikeseamonsters.com and podcasts at Television Zombies. Jeff Barrus helped with this part of the series.

Comment below and let us know if you have more questions!  Let us know where to hear your podcast! And stay tuned for more tutorials in this series.