Sonibyte Podcasting Blog

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.

More Improvements to Our Service

We shouldn't brag, but we can't help it!  We've made more improvements to our Sonibyte Podcasting voiceover service, and we want to tell you about them.

A lot of the changes are subtle and will only affect those who are currently using our product.  For instance:

• We now automatically stuff your text into your file's ID3 tags.  This means that search engines such as Google and Yahoo! who are trying to index your Podcast, can see and read the text in your script.  This gives them the full details of your story and allows them to generate appropriate keywords to reference it.
• We check the format and encoding of the audio files you upload and warn you if there are problems.  This will allow you to either fix the problems (e.g., convert your wav file to an MP3 format or your stereo file to mono) or ask one of our sound engineers to do it for you (we are happy to do custom sound engineering, when you need it).
• We made our autoconcatenation process even simpler.  You used to have to click twice to autoconcatenate your files.  You now only have to click once!  (Autoconcatenation is our proprietary system that allows you to automatically combine your audio content with an intro, outro, or other pre-loaded sound segments.)
• You can recover (and reset) your password, if you forget it.  This was a change requested by users who only visit us once per month (when they upload their text).  At the same time, we beefed up the security requirements for our passwords.  You now have to include a number or special character in your password and make it more than six characters long.
• If you have been hosting your feed outside of Sonibyte, you can now move onto our new high speed CDN (Panther Express) by making a single change in your RSS form.  We take care of notifying iTunes about the change, etc.

Our customers report that our move to Panther has improved download speeds for their feeds.  We have also had good results from the new dynamic ad insertion system that our friends at Volomedia now provide.  Both Panther and Volomedia have great tracking tools and reports, that are helping us better focus our customers' marketing and SEO efforts.

Those who are not yet using our service should also notice a difference--we have updated the content on the information parts of our site.  For instance:

• We now describe all of our services--including our custom audio ad products and custom sound engineering.
• We have added an FAQ page and a page of tools for Podcasters, that contain definitions of Podcasting terms and links to useful sites.
• If you want to try our service, you can register directly on the site.  We will then set you up to receive a free trial of our service.  (You can also request a free trial by emailing us at sales@sonibyte.com.)
• We upgraded our look and feel and moved to a modern content management system (we use the Liferay CMS, in case you wondered).
• This blog is now linked to the site, we have a site map, and we updated the "about us" stuff.

Please give us your feedback on these changes and tell us what else you would like us to add.  We are proud of what we accomplished and hope it will make it even easier to use our product.

Useful Sources of Podcasting Information--Part 1

We thought it might be helpful to offer a set of links to useful sources of information on Podcasting.  We have found similar lists to be helpful, when we find them on other sites.

 

This type of list always seems “random,” and is necessarily incomplete.  We invite our readers to add their suggestions.  We hope to offer updates and additions to the list, every few months.

 

Podcast Free America was created by Ryan Irelan to provide information on Podcasting for all levels of users.  It includes a guide on Podcast marketing, news and information on companies in the area, and a bunch of “how to” stuff.  All well written and thoughtful.

 

As the head of a successful Podcast production firm, Scott Whitney is well-positioned to give advice to business and corporate Podcasters.  His Podcasting for Business blog has a lot of great tips for the growing ranks of business Podcasters.  The only thing I don’t like is that he allows annoying self-promo pop overs on his site.

 

Awakened Voice from Robert Safuto, covers all types of technology and new media.  However, he has done a lot of posts about Podcasting, and does a great job of fitting audio feeds into the broader context of social and streaming media.

 

Podcast411 carries interesting interviews with the creators of a number of the most popular Podcasts.  The hosts of this site have added a bunch of useful tools and links, to make their site a hub of information for those interested in the area.

 

Rawvoice offers the Blubrry Podcasting hosting service (yes I spelled it right).  They also have a pretty useful blog.  They have some of the best info I’ve seen on Podcast statistics.

 

Feedburner’s blog is pretty much a must-read for anyone interested in feeds (and Podcasts are a type of RSS feed!).  Feeburner is now owned by Google…so it is natural to see this blog also as a way of monitoring Google’s activities in the feed area.

 

NMP (New Media Pro) has a whole set of Podcasts that discuss various aspects of creating Podcasts.  Interviews, commentary, polls and advice.

 

The Hopkinson Report has done two episodes on Podcasting that are pretty handy.  The first talks about setting up to do a Podcast and the second talks about Podcast marketing.  The blog is associated with Wired, one of our Conde Nast clients.

 

Kevin Davis has published three posts in his blog that describe how Podcasting can be used to boost the visibility of smaller businesses.  I was glad to see someone talking about this aspect of Podcasting.

 

The Podpiper blog has a lot of information on using Podcasting for educators.  Ted Lai makes a good case for Podcasting as an educational tool.  The Around Podcasting blog recently offered a related post on using Podcasting in Elearning.  This blog also has a lot of other useful info on Podcasting for businesses.

 

I thought I’d close by sharing two nice examples of people talking about our in-house Podcasts.  The first is from a site on Islam that links to our Daily Koran reading.  The second is from Gerald England, one of the artists who we featured on Poem of the Day.  Unfortunately, we neglected to get his permission before we read his poem (we apologized subsequently—and apologize again, here).  I thought his post on this would be interesting to those of you who either like to track the use of your work or those who are thinking about using the work of others without permission (don’t do it!).

 

Sonibyte Is Upgrading Its VoiceOver and Podcast Management Services

Sonibyte has been working on a major upgrade to its Voiceover and Podcasting management service. We are happy to tell you that we launched the first phase of this upgrade, earlier this week.

On Monday evening, we transferred our site to a set of new, higher speed servers. Thanks to this change, our site will respond more quickly to requests and it should be easier to upload and download files.  Over the next few weeks, we will move all of our existing podcast episodes onto the Panther Express high-speed Content Delivery Network (CDN). When users request our podcasts from this CDN, they should see dramatically faster download times.

Thanks to a third change, any content that we load onto Panther's system can now be ad-enabled. We have signed an agreement with Volomedia to provide dynamic ad-serving to our customers. This will allow our customers to either sell and place their own ads in their feeds, or to use the Volomedia salesforce to help monetize their content. Volomedia will also provide enhanced tracking information on our customer's downloads and subscribers. Of course, we will not include ads in any of

our customers' Podcasts, without their permission.  You can see an example of the dynamic Volomedia ad insertion, in our Poem of the Day feed.

This is the first of a series of improvements we will be making in Sonibyte's system--all aimed at making our service even more valuable and easy to use. Let us know if you have any questions or suggestions for other ways we can improve.