The Music of Brittany—my first podcast–seven steps to auditory bliss

I’ve just finished my first audio project. Audio editing can be amazingly fun and very time consuming. I chose the music of Brittany because it is the genre of music I’m presently playing. Here are seven simplified steps to creating a podcast.

1. Find a subject for which you are passionate. Research and write a narrative about this subject. Record this narrative using Audacity, preferably in a soft-walled room to muffle noises where you can pretend you are in a sound studio.

2. If you are musical, record yourself and some friends  on a separate track with appropriate music. If you are not, find some music in the Creative Commons and import it as a Wav file into your project.

4. Import a few other sound tracks like waves crashing or birds singing or toilets flushing.

5. Read all the Audacity tutorials and try everything. The nice thing about Audacity Aup files is that they save the project steps so you can undo going back and back, much like Photoshope files.

6. Make sure you export your files as you work to keep them safe as AUP  or WAV. In order to compress files into mp3, you may have to download a separate app like “Switch.” I had to convert them to Ogg Vorbis first, then using Switch, to mp3s.

7. Edit out coughs and breaths either manually  (drag and delete) or by using the noise reduction effect. Use the envelope tool to make louder and softer the various tracks so one can hear the important parts. Fade in and fade out phrases so they don’t come too suddenly. Move various tracks around where you went them. Be artistic. Try some compression and normalizing to get rid of  loud and soft sound so your file is easier to listen to. I discovered late in the game how to insert a missing word or replace a bad section: Just highlight and delete the bad section, split the track there, move the right section to the right a bit, go to a new track and re-record the replacement words, highlight them, control c, go to the space you left and hit control v., don’t forget to go down to the new track and delete the word you re-recorded or you will have a ghost effect.

And voila, you have just recorded your first podcast. If your file is still huge, you may have to purchase extra blog space to post it.