Podcasting...

...the amateur way

I've created my first podcasts, and they are indeed pretty amateur at the moment. All the same it's quite fun to do, especially once you've set up the hosting for the MP3 files and the RSS feed for the blog. With that lot done all that's needed to post is to record, edit and upload the MP3 then post the link in the blog.

The problem I've got at the moment is that the mike I'm using is just not sensitive at all. I think it's actually defective but in any case, even with the recording volume set to maximum and the mike so close that every 'P' and 'B' sounds like I'm thumping the mike with a fist, the recorded sound is way too quiet. To get the voice track volume up to something reasonable I have to amplify it by 9dB or more, and that has the effect of amplifying background hiss. I'll have to get a new mike at some point but I'm fairly sure even something pretty cheap will do a much better job.

At the moment the podcast is on the subject of computers and the Internet - short episodes to try to help people who have problems using computers. I'm aiming at producing one episode about every two weeks, and I have subjects for about seven episodes planned to start with. I'll probably add more subjects as I go along, and maybe if I get some feedback that'll give me ideas for more.

As for the format, I've kind of combined the things I like from two of my favourite podcasts. Brian Dunning keeps the episodes of the Skeptoid.com podcast down to around ten minutes by covering one subject and keeping it to the point, and not adding opening and closing music and very little background music. Lord Garthog of Logically Critical posts much longer episodes (or rather, he did - sadly, LC is no longer being produced), adds some theme music and also humourous sound effects. My podcast is short like Skeptoid (shorter, actually, at least for the first couple of posts) but I have the theme music and the sound effects (a few, anyway) which I hope add a bit of interest.

I've added links to the blog and the feed to the sidebar. I don't expect many downloads, at least at first, but the feed has already been scoped by Google and the way I understand it the feed will probably show up in the iTunes Store and the Zune Marketplace once I have five or six episodes up - if that's true I may see a bit of a download explosion. Hopefully I'll be able to fix the sound quality problems before anything like that happens.