Sonibyte Podcasting Blog

We are adding another Podcast directory

We help our clients by automatically uploading all of their Podcast episodes to a variety of Podcast directories.  These include the well-known ones like Apple's iTunes and Microsoft's Zune, plus several others we believe add value through their indexing approach or who have interesting and unusual feeds.

Our friends over at Tomorrow Will Be Televised recently found a new directory site that we had not heard of before, Syndic8.com.  As with most of the other sites we list on, Syndic8.com hosts many types of feeds other than audio Podcasts.  In fact, we didn't see many Podcasts yet on their site (only 70 or 80?).  Unlike some other sites, Syndic8.com seems to rely on crowd-sourced/user-generated input.  The two founders of the site have tech backgrounds--and that is reflected in the site's look and feel.

For instance, their tag page practically SHOUTS its tags at you and their stats page is awfully data heavy.  Things work a bit randomly...but the Podcast marketplace is pretty randomly organized, so maybe that's the way it should be?

Anyway, we are glad to know about these guys and happy that they are helping people find interesting Podcasts to listen to.  Our Tommorw Will Be Televised Podcast feed is up there, now.  Got another directory we should consider working with?  Please let us know and we'll consider integrating it into our system.

Tomorrow Will Be Televised Joins Sonibyte

Sonibyte just added a new customer who takes our service in a new direction.  Tomorrow Will Be Televised is an interview program that has been produced for several years by a well-known media journalist--Simon Appelbaum.  The program has been broadcast as a live feed over the Web, and is currently hosted on BlogTalkRadio (http://www.blogtalkradio.com/simonapple04).

We were impressed with the high-level guests that Simon has attracted and enjoyed listening to the give and take his interviews generate.  For instance, his June 1 show featured Kelly Goode, programming chief for GSN.  Other recent shows have featured guests such as FX President John Landgraf and Rescue Me co-creator/executive producer Peter Tolan.  It seemed a shame to tie a good program like this to a one-time, weekly distribution cycle.  A lot of the material in the shows will remain interesting and relevant for many months and perhaps even years.

We discussed our ideas with Simon and he welcomed the opportunity to repurpose his show to produce a parallel podcast feed.  We did not feel that his standard one-hour show length fit the typical podcast format.  (As we have discussed in an earlier post, the average podcast runs around nine minutes.)  However, Simon tends to have two or three guests each week, so we felt we could break his shows into two or three distinct podcasts.

Our trusty sound engineers went to work.  We added a new intro and outro (including a bit of music we created specially for the show).  We both began processing Simon's current shows and also went back and reprocessed eight of his best old shows.  The result is a pretty cool podcast feed that already contains more than 20 episodes.

We have only been working with Tomorrow Will Be Televised for a few weeks, and we can't be sure how quickly this feed will get traction.  However, we feel certain that our podcast format will both broaden the impact of the show and bring in new listeners for the live broadcasts.  We expect soon to add sponsorship and other ad opportunities to the feed.  (Please feel free to contact Simon directly--he announces his email address of simonapple04@yahoo.com during each episode--if you have any interest in participating as an advertiser.)  The show is now listed on iTunes, Microsoft Zune, and several other directories, and we hope many people will subscribe to it and listen "asynchronously."

Our automated podcast creation tool kit and low sound engineer and voiceover support costs make it easy for us to provide this type of content conversion service.  We hope that other content creators will give us the chance to help them soon, in similar ways.

Tools for Creating Your Own Audio Files--Audio Capture Software

In our last post, we gave some suggestions for (cheap) microphone/headset combos that you could use for recording and listening to your audio files.  Now, we will offer some ideas on what software to use, to capture your input.

One widely-used software program for audio capture is Audacity.  Two things put it at the top of this list:

1. Audacity works on both the Mac and PC.  (It also works on Linux.)
2. It is free (based on an open source architecture).

The community that works on Audacity is justly proud of the many features they have incorporated into the base product and the many plug ins that can be added.  However, if you are a Mac user, you probably won't bother to use Audacity because you already have Garageband.  This highly-popular product ships with the Mac and does a great job of capturing audio.  It also includes some pretty good editing features.

If you want to get fancy and feel like spending money, you could buy Logic Studio for $499 (only available on the Mac) or ProTools from Digidesign.  At a price of only $300, the latter is the gold standard for audio capture and engineering--the PhotoShop of sound.  Unfortunately, you should expect a pretty steep learning curve when you use software like this.

As with microphones and headsets, there are plenty of other options in sound capture.  pcMusicStuff has a nice list of programs--most of which is are in the $30 to $50 price range.

One additional software tool you might consider is a speech to text converter.  Why would you want this?  Well, Sonibyte has a built in feature that automatically inserts a transcription of your episode into your audio file.  We put this text into what are called the ID3 tags.  These tags are read by search engines like Google and Yahoo!  Once these engines can parse your text, they can know what is in your episode.  They can then send people to your site who want to listen to you.  Getting the major search engines on board can boost your traffic and downloads by between three and ten times.

Unfortunately, speech to text software doesn't work very well on discussions (it is hard for them to handle several different voices) or when there is a lot of ambient noise.  That makes it hard to find a tool that can automatically transcribe an interview, for instance.  The best tool currently available seems to be Dragon Naturally Speaking, which you can buy from sources such as Nuance.

Instead of using software to turn your audio into text, you could use a transcription service.  There are a lot of these.  Most use overseas workers or a cloud approach (similar to how we do our text to speech voiceover!).  Scribebot charges by the minute.  iDictate charges by the word.  These services would raise the total cost of an average episode by between $10 and $30.

Want to go with cheap headphones, free software, and no transcription?  You may spend less than $50 up front and cut your cost to publish a podcast episode to less than $20.  Want more expensive headphones and higher end software?  You will get better quality sound, but you'll have to pay another few hundred dollars, up front.  Plus, you'll probably spend more time messing with your audio file--and not save that much on our fees (we'll still want to check things out before we publish your file).  A transcription service may help get your podcast noticed--at a modest additional cost.

Remember, we now have the capability to place dynamic ads in podcasts.  That means you can make enough money from your downloads to cover these costs--and more.  Even with a few dollars up front for a good microphone and headphones, podcasting remains a pretty cheap way to extend your brand and attract thousands of new customers.

Tools for Creating Your Own Audio Files--Microphones and Headsets

As promised, we are now going to offer advice on what tools to buy if you want to create your own audio files for your podcast.  Please note these two caveats:

1. Personal taste matters.  The human ear is a strange, picky, idiosyncratic device.  Wine experts will argue for years over the merits of a certain vintage--audio experts do the same about audio equipment.
2. This is a technology area, so everything changes, all the time.  New products come along every five minutes and a certain model of equipment can disappear from the shelves, overnight.

Because this area is so plastic, we hope you will chime in with your comments and ideas. Our goal is to help people start producing audio files that will be cleaned up and distributed using a tool such as Sonibyte.

If you were planning to become a professional voiceover artist, you would buy a high-quality condenser microphone.  You would then work in a sound-proof room and feed your signal into a high quality pre-amplifier.  You would do things like put filters into the system to adjust the sound, use different microphones for different jobs, and would worry about little things like keeping things that have fans (like your computer) outside the room.  If you are in this mode, you'd visit sites such as Recording Hacks and its "How to use a microphone database" or Nurple.com's great post on microphones.

In contrast, we will assume that you just want to record a telephone interview with a guest who works from home.  There will be an ocassional door slam, some dog barks, and a few long moments of silence when one of you is trying to figure out what to say.  (Hopefully no crying babies and neither of you will have a cold!)  A basic choice that our staff likes is the MXL 990.  It will cost you about $60.  You can find more good suggestions for less expensive microphones on the Musician's Friend Web site.

Once you've recorded your sound, you need use a good set of headphones to listen to what you've done, so you can check and be sure it is OK.  Our staff likes headphones from AKG (the AKG K240 is good), AudioTechnica (such as the ATH M20) and Sony (such as the MDRV250V).  They haven't tried Sennheiser's headphones (such as the HD 201), but suspect they will be pretty good, based on how well Sennheiser's other microphones perform.  You can also buy a combo headset and microphone.  Our staff suggest you look at the Yamaha CM500.  They cost only about $50.

We've linked above to Amazon for each microphone and headphone we mention above.  You'll see that the prices for these components range from $16 to $90.  You may be able to get better deals, newer (or older) models, or other headsets that work just fine.  These headsets should all work OK with either Macs or PCs, but take a good look at the jacks on your computer to be sure they are standard minijacks.

Podcasting continues to look pretty inexpensive, doesn't it?  In the next post, we'll look at audio capture software, some of which is even cheaper (free!).

Tools for Creating Your Own Audio Files--An Overview

You don't need any tools or special knowledge to create a podcast, if you use our Sonibyte toolkit.  We'll help set up your feed and take care of distributing it to iTunes, Zunes, etc.  You don't need an audio file--our voiceover artists can convert any text into great-sounding audio.  You don't need a sound engineer--our engineers will put everything together into a professional package.

However, some of our customers like to do some or all of their audio production, themselves.  Their reasons for doing this include:

• They want to use their own voice for their episodes.  This is most often true when the feed is about the personal experiences or views of the author OR when the author already has some experience with acting, radio-hosting, or voiceover.
• The episode is centered around an interview or other type of audio content.  Interviews and discussions make great material for podcasts.  However, it may help to have the "intro" and "outro" done by one of our professional voice artists.
• To save a small amount of money.  Our voiceover and sound engineer fees are modest.  Still, by doing your own voiceover and/or sound engineering, you can cut the cost to do a podcast episode with our service from $50 to under $20.

To create your own audio, you need two things:

1. A good quality microphone and headset.  You need the microphone to be able to capture sound properly and then you need to be able to hear your sound well enough to detect any problems.
2. Some kind of software to capture your sound.  Podcasts are distributed with relatively low quality sound (mono at 44 KHz is typical), so you can capture your sound directly into a file on your computer.

Once you have your audio on your computer, you will need sound manipulation tools if you want to do your own sound engineering.  You'll want to take out pops and hiss, trim "ums" and "uhs" from the conversation, and make sure the "level" of the sound is constant.  This stuff is tricky to do well, and you need to know what you are doing!

The basic stuff--microphone and capture software--is cheap.  You can get a good microphone and headset combo for as little as $50 and some of the available capture software is free.  Higher end sound engineering software costs $300 and up.  But, whether you do none or all of the production work, podcasting remains a pretty inexpensive and effective way to distribute your content.  In our next post, we will offer some advice and info on how to select these tools.