new podcast

[kingscast]

I'm in pre-production stages for a sports-related podcast. I have a Macbook with iWeb and Garageband. There are two people doing the podcast. What other hardware/software might I need to get going? Thanks in advance.

[kinkysex]

Welcome to a great hobby!

There are probably 100's of combinations of mics, mixers, compressors, blah, blah.

It might help if you told us your budget for this project.

$100, $200 - dead broke? There is a solution, don't worry.

[kingscast]

Thanks for the reply! Ideally, my budget for the first "season" would be under $200..

[saintmoz]

Ok so I geuss that budget is for hosting as well....

As far as hardware goes a couple of usb mics would be the go. Samson have both a Dynamic and a Condenser Mics that are usb(if you are recording in a noisey spot stick with a dynamic). Or even a Plantronics headset could do a good job. You can always add more gear when you budget can handle it.

As far as the software goes you have everything you need. Again when you have the budget you can start adding plugins or splurge and buy Adobe Audition.

[kingscast]

I have a .Mac account already but am unsure of it's enough. Apple has done a nice job bundling with iLife and there are some features that are specific to .Mac only. Ideally I'd use that to start.

So, with a program like Garageband, you can have two usb mics going at the same time?

You mentioned plug-ins. Can you point me to a few useful ones. As this thing is a hobby of sorts, I want to hit the ground sounding as professional as I can with such a limited budget.

Thanks again!

[WyethDigital]

I have a .Mac account already but am unsure of it's enough. Apple has done a nice job bundling with iLife and there are some features that are specific to .Mac only. Ideally I'd use that to start.

So, with a program like Garageband, you can have two usb mics going at the same time?

You mentioned plug-ins. Can you point me to a few useful ones. As this thing is a hobby of sorts, I want to hit the ground sounding as professional as I can with such a limited budget.

Thanks again!
How many shows are you planning to do a month, how long are they going to be, and what kind of audience are you shooting for?

We use iWeb for our podcast (links in the signature), but only use .Mac for a few of my back episodes. Depending on how long your shows are (which helps determine file size, along with whether or not they are stereo or mono and the encoded bitrate), the 1000 MB disk size and the 10 GB monthly transfer are going to be eaten up very quickly, especially if you want more than just family and friends to listen to your show. Also, keep in mind that .Mac tends to meter out your monthly bandwidth allotment in 15 day increments. In other words, if you have 10 GB of transfer per month, and you use 5 GB in the first 14 days, they may shut you off until you hit mid month (I know -- I've been warned :) ).

Just to give you an idea of how fast you can burn bandwidth, our shows usually average 30 MB per episode (about a 4 min video or a 40 minute audio podcast, depending on quality) which according to what I've seen is somewhere on the high side of average (at least according to the podcasts on my iPod). Let's say you have 10 GB of transfer: 10,000 MB/30 MB = 333 downloads. That's not a lot of headroom.

Just something to keep in mind! Good luck!

Eric

[kingscast]

We're planning four episodes per month from October-June and then one a month in the off-season. We want to keep the podcast under 30 minutes and expect to attract a mostly local audience and fans for a team.

Good tip on using iWeb on a different host. Do you have any suggestions on hosting? We have a format and we're getting together the technical aspects of the podcast. I'd love to grab a book on Garageband if anyone has any suggestions. These forums have been extremely helpful.

[WyethDigital]

We're planning four episodes per month from October-June and then one a month in the off-season. We want to keep the podcast under 30 minutes and expect to attract a mostly local audience and fans for a team.

Good tip on using iWeb on a different host. Do you have any suggestions on hosting? We have a format and we're getting together the technical aspects of the podcast. I'd love to grab a book on Garageband if anyone has any suggestions. These forums have been extremely helpful.

A lot of people are going to tell you to use Libsyn (https://www.libsyn.com/)because it has unlimited bandwidth (you pay for the disk space, not the pipes), but if you want to use iWeb you won't be able to with Libsyn. After having played around in their sample area (they call it "the sandbox"), it seems that they have a prebuilt blog template to use. You can modify it, but if you're not CSS or HTML coder that could prove problematical. You might be able to use WordPress, but I'm not entirey sure. Maybe someone with more firsthand knowledge could explain the pros and cons of Libsyn.

We use DreamHost (http://www.dreamhost.com/) right now. It's a TB of bandwidth per month, and a huge amount of storage (20 GB). Costs about $8.00 per month. The stats aren't the kind overly useful to podcasters, but there are services such as Feedburner (http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/home) that can help with that.

Eric

[saintmoz]

Ok as a user of libsyn I having nothing but good things to say about them. As far as I know if you can put an encloser tag in your rss you can use libsyn to host your mp3 file, so your iweb account would be fine. Yes libsyn give you a blog which you can use to produce a podcast feed, but there is no rule saying you have to use it. I for one don't use the libsyn blog, as it doesn't provide many of the plugins for wordpress I need.

My advice to you is have a look around, play with most of the services, see what works for you.

[WyethDigital]

Ok as a user of libsyn I having nothing but good things to say about them. As far as I know if you can put an encloser tag in your rss you can use libsyn to host your mp3 file, so your iweb account would be fine. Yes libsyn give you a blog which you can use to produce a podcast feed, but there is no rule saying you have to use it. I for one don't use the libsyn blog, as it doesn't provide many of the plugins for wordpress I need.

My advice to you is have a look around, play with most of the services, see what works for you.
iWeb's not a hosting account, it's a website building application. You can host it on .Mac servers or on your own server. The reason we didn't choose Libsyn this time around is because I didn't see how we could host the whole shebang at Libsyn, which would be easier. So you host the rest of your site off of the Libsyn servers and just put your podcast there?

Eric

[saintmoz]

I just host the mp3's at libsyn, I use another host for the site(not sure waht you mean by podcast rss feed or mp3).

If you want to use blog software there are a number of chooses. I use wordpress which a number of hosts provide free of charge as part of the fantastico package, which means you can set wordpress up in 2 clicks of a mouse. Of course your blog doesn't have to be the entire website, but it is easier than building an rss feed by hand.

[WyethDigital]

I just host the mp3's at libsyn, I use another host for the site(not sure waht you mean by podcast rss feed or mp3).
Well, from what I gathered from Libsyn, you had to put your podcast (the media file) on their site, and then I thought Libsyn generated the RSS feed, which is how they can track your stats for you.

iWeb (http://www.apple.com/ilife/iweb/) and Garageband (http://www.apple.com/ilife/garageband/), both of which he's talking about using to produce his podcast, can also build your RSS feed, and can submit it to iTunes with just a couple button clicks.

But you're saying that you're paying for two hosting services -- one for your website and one to host and distribute the media files?

Eric

[saintmoz]

Well, from what I gathered from Libsyn, you had to put your podcast (the media file) on their site, and then I thought Libsyn generated the RSS feed, which is how they can track your stats for you.
The stats come from the downloads of the raw mp3, not from the rss feed.

But you're saying that you're paying for two hosting services -- one for your website and one to host and distribute the media files?
Yes this way of doing things is not for everyone, but it's what I do. The cost for both hosting plans is very small, well under $10 month.

[WyethDigital]

But you're saying that you're paying for two hosting services -- one for your website and one to host and distribute the media files?
Yes this way of doing things is not for everyone, but it's what I do. The cost for both hosting plans is very small, well under $10 month.
No, don't get me wrong. It's not a criticism of what Libsyn or of what you're doing -- we thought of doing the same thing, and may end up doing that ourselves should our numbers grow anymore. I just wanted to be sure I understood what you were saying.

So basically, in short, if you want to use Libsyn for your media files, but you don't want to use their templates, you pretty much need to have a secondary host that can serve the rest of your website. Fair enough!

Eric

[WyethDigital]

The stats come from the downloads of the raw mp3, not from the rss feed.
I'm not a customer, so I don't know this for sure, but if Libsyn tries to determine the number of subscribers, etc, I think they do need to reference your feed at some point. Podtrac has you append an address in the enclosure tag, Feedburner takes your feed info and then hands you a feedburner feed to use... Libsyn must make use of your feed in some way in order to generate the stats that they give you.

Eric

[saintmoz]

So basically, in short, if you want to use Libsyn for your media files, but you don't want to use their templates, you pretty much need to have a secondary host that can serve the rest of your website. Fair enough!

Spot on.

As far as the rss feed for stats goes, as far as i can see the numbers they come up are based on the raw mp3 data. Libsyn give me how times the file was download and what type of download it was(website or podcatcher and what type of podcatcher). It also gives the same break down for unquie ip addresses. You can however use a service like feedburner which more information is used before you get the number of subscribers.

[kingscast]

Any idea on a good forum/bbs to use for talkbacks after the podcast? I'd love to get a little community into this.

Also, is the built-in blog in iWeb good enough? So far I'm impressed. I want to gradually evolve the site. It seems iWeb (with a little tweeking) will do the job. Any ideas?

Thanks for all the help and suggestions thus far!

[WyethDigital]

Any idea on a good forum/bbs to use for talkbacks after the podcast? I'd love to get a little community into this.

Also, is the built-in blog in iWeb good enough? So far I'm impressed. I want to gradually evolve the site. It seems iWeb (with a little tweeking) will do the job. Any ideas?

Thanks for all the help and suggestions thus far!
I don't know about the blog in iWeb because I publish to a seperate server from .Mac, and iWeb for some reason still unknown to me does not support comments on sites other than .Mac.

As for server software, there are plenty out there. If you like this site's forum, then click on the "powered by" link at the bottom of the forum window. Should take you to the folks who develop this software.

Eric

[kingscast]

Now looking at the hardware side of things and I'm seeing people with crazy mixers and soundboards and things of that nature. Granted, I don't want to sound like I'm in a cave. I'm curious as to what I need. I was looking at the snowball mic since there are two hosts on this podcast. Then I was at Apple the other day and they're starting to sell podcast related hardware. Can someone point me to a cost-effective solution that will at least help us sound a little professional but not break the bank?

Thanks again!

[ElNacho]

really, with a bit of post production (amplifying, limiting, compressing, and noise reduction, not in that order), any old usb headset would sound fine

[ourmanintokyo]

I wish I'd read something like this thread before I started podcasting!

I already had a blog which I use mostly for my photography. To podcast, I went with Libsyn and chose to use their templates, albeit with some modifications. The thing to remember is that you'll be able to change the templates, add new files to your static folder and generally change things as you go.

The only real downside with Libsyn (at present) is their stats, which are receiving a complete overhaul.

Later, I added a forum (http://ddtw.ourmanintokyo.net/forum/index.php) for the podcast, but back at my old host (all free as part of the fantastico package). I tried to intergrate everything by matching the color schemes etc, and am fairly happy with the results. That said, I still haven't worked out how to create a back button on the forum to make movement between my podcast page and the forum easier.

Best of luck with the show!

[WyethDigital]

...That said, I still haven't worked out how to create a back button on the forum to make movement between my podcast page and the forum easier.

Best of luck with the show!
Had the same problem as you. We added a frame (http://www.howtogirl.com/forum_frame.htm) to ours to fix that issue. Maybe not the prettiest solution, but it is pink!

Eric