Broadcast your own radio show - to friends, family or the entire internet. It's easy when you know how...
I
f you find yourself regularly phoning relatives to keep them informed, you might find it a bit of a bind. What you need is a radio show in which you can speak to everyone at once without having to repeat yourself. Of course, broadcasting over the airwaves isn't really practical or affordable, but your PC and the internet can give you an alternative: podcasting.
The internet offers the perfect medium for sharing audio recordings with a wider audience. You might want to share news about your family, for example, or feature an interview with a family member about a recent holiday or some other topic that will interest a wider audience. Whatever your needs, your PC can make the process enjoyable and hassle-free. All you need is a copy of your original recording or a microphone to speak into, and you'll find your computer - coupled with this month's cover disc - can do the rest.
You could burn your recordings to an audio CD, but if you want to provide regular news bulletins, you'll find podcasting is the way to go. Podcasts enable you to regularly upload new recordings to the internet so others - with the help of free software - can subscribe to. After they've subscribed, they're told when a new broadcast is ready to download with a single click, saving you the bother of having to inform everyone. In this project we'll show you how it's done.
Record your bulletin
The first thing to do is bring together the elements that will make up your podcast. The simplest thing to do is plan a monologue that you record in one take as a live recording. Alternatively, you might want to take some existing material - such as interviews or pieces of music, add some links you record yourself and edit them all together into a single continuous piece. It's a little more complicated than simply recording yourself for an hour, but it's still reasonably straightforward to do.
Whatever is going into your podcast, you'll find one free program handles both the recording and editing of your material. It's called Audacity, and you can download it from here.
When it comes to recording yourself, all you need to do is plug a standard microphone into your computer's mic socket and then use Audacity to record yourself directly into the computer. The annotation reveals how it can help you record your podcast.
POOR SOUND QUALITY
If you're unable to get any sound - or it comes out distorted - when you plug your microphone into the front mic port on your PC, try the rear port instead. This is usually directly connected to the PC's motherboard, which translates into a better connection and overall sound quality.
Annotation: Record yourself in Audacity
A. CONTROLS
All of the record and playback controls are listed here - alternatively press [R] to start and stop recording, or [Space] to control playback.
B. LEVEL MONITOR
As you speak into your microphone you should see these levels rise and fall - click the down-arrow next to the mic icon for more options.
C. SET VOLUME
Use the sliders to set both playback and record volume for the currently selected input device.
D. CHOOSE INPUT DEVICE
Select Microphone when you're recording your own voice, or choose Line In if you're transferring from an analogue source. Pick Stereo Mix to record from your soundcard.
E. RECORDING
As you record yourself or the analogue source you should see the waveform appear here, indicating the recording is being made.
Edit your recording
Once all of the recordings are in place on your hard drive, it's time to edit them into a single file that will form your podcast. Again, Audacity is the perfect tool for the job. By default, Audacity saves its recordings in an uncompressed format, which results in large files that are impractical for sharing online. What you need to do is install a free plug-in that enables you to export your finished podcast as a MP3 file, which compresses the file so it's much smaller.
You can obtain the plug-in by clicking here - click the link under ZIP OPTION, then save the zip file to your hard drive. Once complete, right-click the downloaded file (libmp3lame-win-3.98.2.zip or something similar) and choose Extract All. Click Next followed by Browse, locate C:\Program Files\Audacity\Plug-ins and click OK followed by Next and Finish.
Now launch Audacity and choose Edit > Preferences > File Formats tab. Click Find Library followed by OK. Select lame_enc.dll and click Open. Change the Bit Rate to 64 to keep the file size down before clicking OK. Now follow the step-by-step guide below to edit the different parts of your recording into one. When you've finished, click the drop-down arrow to the left of the recording (above the Solo button). Try to convert the file to mono if it's not already. Also change the Set Rate to 16,000KHz.
This reduces the quality of the recording to make the MP3 file even smaller, but you should still be able to hear voices. You're now ready to choose File > Export to MP3 to save it as the file you'll be uploading to your web space - ignore the invitation to edit the ID3 tags; this will be done automatically later. You should find the file size is still quite large - divide the length of the recording by two to get a rough estimate of its size in MB - but it'll take less time to upload and download over the Internet.
Q&A
I'm struggling a little bit with EasyPodcast - can you recommend any free alternatives?
If you find you don't get on with EasyPodcast, try Podifier from here instead. This adopts a similar wizard-based approach to preparing and uploading your podcast, and should work if EasyPodcast causes you problems with your PC. One word of warning - the front page reveals that the program may crash if you attempt to add files using the + button; instead, drag and drop the files on to the Podifier window as explained on the site's front page.
Step-by-step:
Edit your recordings together
1. OPEN RECORDING
Launch Audacity and select File > Open to load the first recording you'll be using. Listen to the recording to see what needs to be trimmed. Use the magnifying glass to zoom into the recording to help you see the beginning and end of the unwanted sequence.
2. SELECT AND DELETE
When deleting unwanted portions of your recording such as coughs, long silences or mistakes, it pays to play through the section you wish to delete to confirm that's what needs to be removed. Click the mouse on the beginning of the unwanted passage, then drag it over to the end of the unwanted sequence, which should now be clearly highlighted. Choose Edit > Delete to remove it and join the section before and after together - if you make a mistake, select Edit > Undo Delete to retrieve the missing section and try again.
3. ADD SECOND RECORDING
If you have more than one recording to combine in your podcast, select Project > Import Audio to add the second recording to the existing one. Open your second recording and it'll appear beneath your first. Click to the left of the recording's Mute button to select the entire track.
4. COMBINE RECORDINGS
Choose Edit > Find Zero Crossing - this ensures there isn't an audible "click" when you go from one recording to the next. Now select Edit > Cut. Place the cursor at the end of the first track and select Edit > Paste to add the new recording to it.
Sharing your broadcast
If you want to convert your recording into a bona fide podcast, you'll need some web space to upload it to. Most Internet Service Providers give their users some free space to play with, but in most cases this is around 50MB or less, which isn't really practical for large files like podcasts.
Thankfully there are many free options out there, including Lycos Tripod (click here), which offers 1GB of space - the equivalent of around 30 hours of podcasting, which should be enough for most people!
Sign up for a free account, and note you need to access the site twice within the first ten days, and then at least once every 90 days thereafter to prevent your account being suspended and your files removed.
After registering, wait for the activation email to arrive, then double-click the link. You'll be asked to confirm the site name, plus provide a FTP password (which should be different to your login password). Make a careful note of these - you'll need them shortly.
Once your free web space is set up, it's time to upload your first recording to it and create the podcast itself. The tool for the job is EasyPodCast, which you can download from here. If you're a Windows Vista user, click here for details of making both this and Juice (see below) compatible with your PC.
Once installed, launch EasyPodCast and choose Tools > Options, then switch to the Upload settings tab. Type ftp.members.lycos.co.uk into the FTP host: box, your screen name into the User: box and your FTP password into the Password box. Type http://members.lycos.co.uk/name/ where 'name' is your screen name into the URL for HTTP access to uploaded files box. Now you're ready to set up your podcast proper - simply follow the step-by-step guide below to place your podcast online.
When you produce your next podcast, you should follow the same steps again - existing podcasts should be automatically added to the XML file generated on the "RSS feed publication" tab, but when you switch to the "File uploading" tab only the new file and the updated XML file should be present as your earlier podcasts are already online.
Accessing your broadcast
Once your first podcast has been uploaded, you need to pass on two things to your friends and family: first, they need a program that enables them to subscribe to your podcast - download a free copy of Juice from here. Juice works with Macs and Linux as well as Windows, although Windows 7 and Vista users should click here for a guide to making the program compatible.
Your audience will also need the web address of your rss.xml file, which includes all the details about your podcast. This should be http://members.lycos.co.uk/name/rss.xml (replace 'name' with your Lycos Tripod screen name).
Your family then need to run Juice and click the green + button to add a new feed. They should then enter the web address you provided in the URL box and click OK. After a short pause, your podcast should be visible. Click the Check for new subscriptions button and it'll will be automatically downloaded to their hard drive. All that's left for them to do is right-click the downloaded podcast and choose Play episode in media player to listen to it in Windows Media Player - select File > Preferences > Player tab to change to a different player.
Step-by-step:
Upload your podcast
1. TAG YOUR PODCAST
Select Tools > Options > Mp3 tagging tab. Fill in the Artist and Album boxes (use the Macros on the right to automatically enter certain information like date), then click ... under "Source mp3 directory" to point the program to the folder containing your recording. Click Save and exit.
2. PICK MP3 FILE
Click the ... box on the Mp3 file tagging tab. Select your recording and click Open. Now click Generate tuned mp3 and wait for all the tags to be filled based on your earlier settings (if you don't like them, change them and generate a new MP3).
3. SET UP RSS FEED
Switch to the RSS feed publication tab and click Create RSS. Finally, switch to the File uploading tab and click Send - if your firewall throws up a prompt, give EasyPodcast access to the internet so it's able to upload your file and RSS feed.
4. SIT BACK AND WAIT
Wait for the file to upload (if you get an error message, check your FTP settings - did you enter your FTP password or logon password? It should be the former) - it may take some time, so be patient. Once complete, your podcast is online and ready to share!
