Podcasting Resources Part 2

Podcasting Resources
Recapping the steps to creating a podcast:

1. create a media account on ourmedia and archive.org, and make sure to activate the application from the link sent to you via email.
2. create your audio via Audacity (ensuring your have the LAMElib framework on your machine as well)
3. move the audio file up to ourmedia when completed
4. use the feed URL to add to iPodder, add a feed URL link to the side of your blog (eg, Podcast feed) or add a link to the mp3 file in your future blog posts.

Capturing Audio Through your Computer
For podcasting, the simplest way to create/edit audio through your computer is to download the open source tool called Audacity, which is both a PC and a MAC tool. To save your audio files to mp3, you will also need to download LAME, which is an mp3 encoder. When you download LAME, please note where you downloaded it to, because when you create audio in Audacity and attempt to convert it to mp3, it will ask you for the location of LAME. MAC OSX users can put it in their Applications folder; PC users can put it in their Programs folder. If you have problems locating LAME when you try to convert the audio to mp3, you can always resort to putting it on your desktop.

Documentation on Audacity is available as well. This open source documentation contains all of the material for learning how to use Audacity. Audacity can be used to not only create audio direct from your machine, but edit existing audio and convert WAV files (another audio format) into mp3. To do the latter, you will need to open the preexisting audio in Audacity and export to mp3 from the File menu.

For storage of your media files (applicable to both audio and video), you will need to create user accounts on both ourmedia and archive.org. On registering with ourmedia, there will be an email authentication sent with a username and password, which you will need to upload the media. In the future when you try to upload your media to ourmedia, you will need to log into both archive.org and ourmedia, so please remember the new assigned password to ourmedia which you get in your email (and you can change the password in ourmedia when you first log in) and your archive.org password.

Linking to your Podcast from iPodder and a Preexisting Blog
To link to the podcast, you can login to ourmedia, click on "your page" (left hand side), and then scroll down the page (pass the missing icon for your photo, if you did not upload one) to the mRSS icon. Right clicking (PC) or control+clicking (MAC) gives you the feed URL, which you can plug into your iPodder application. Also, you can create a link on your blogger blog on the left hand/right hand side called "Podcast Feed" and link to the mRSS feed from ourmedia. That way, people can subscribe to your podcasts. Finally, you can also directly link to the media file in ourmedia through clicking on the audio/video file link and then using that URL (which should end in .mp3 if it is audio, or .mov if it is a video) and adding it to one of your blog postings.

For those interested in using GarageBand (MAC) to create podcasts, read this tutorial.

Capturing Audio Outside of Your Computer
You will need additional devices if you want to record audio outside of your computer. For those with standard size iPods, there are two gadgets, the Belkin Voice Recorder or the Griffin iTalk. Please note these devices DO NOT WORK with an iPod MINI. You can also use headsets for your computer, for better sound, once they are USB headsets. Check out Logitech headsets from BestBuy, or any cheap USB headset. Some sites that talk about the hardware requirements such as microphones and headsets include Gizmodo and Engadget.

Creating a Podcast-Only Blog
We will cover this next week Wednesday in class. Please be sure to practice some of this stuff here before you come to class next week. It will help to demystify the process to you. Since everything builds on what came before, I can also address any questions you have concerning podcasting next week. We will also do some stuff on vlogging next Wednesday (FireAnt and creating a v-log-only Blog). The process is essentially the same for video as it is for audio, so once you understand how to do audio, doing a vlog will be an easy process.

Add any questions you have to this post. I also encourage you to share any tips/tricks/resources you have here, or on your blog (and alerting us to your post on the class blog). We can contribute to a true user community of knowledge and ideas if we all share what we learn with each other.

Have fun podcasting!