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.

Comments

[iPod Accessories]

since long time i have been serching for this type of tutorial to make my audio file after follow your step I think that the quality of my audio file is not up to the mark means it does not matches with the original so how can i overcome this problem?