How We Produce the Show
With a lot of consternation! Being novices to podcasting, we pretty much trudged through and reinvinted the wheel of course. Actually, our biggest challenge was figuring out how to do with for under $300. And that was no easy task. As mentioned in Ep. 2, in the end we discovered the Samson Q1U USB microphone and picked a couple of those up for around $60/ea online.
We plug those directly into my Lenovo T61p laptop and record using some software called Mixcraft. For the phone interviews I used my Microsoft Office Communicator Phone Experience device and a JK Audio QuickTap and route the sound back into my laptop just using the 3.5mm Mic jack. The sound quality there is as good as the device the person on the other end and usually no better than a POTS call. However, once I get an interview with an internal person, you should hear a difference as both endpoints will be leveraging the wideband capabilities of Microsoft's software powered voice.
After capture, I do some editing/post production in NCH's Wavepad. This is a straightforward tool that I like for removing background noise and editing out unnecessary pauses, ums and ahs. Yes, I cut that stuff out and sometimes it sounds a bit choppy, but I'd rather have a tight show with some rough transitions than keep garbage.
Distribution takes some work, but it's all free. And that is the right price for me. First I mix the raw wav files down to MP3 and WMA. The MP3 gets posted to Windows Live Skydrive and then appears as the attachment for the actual blog entry. I use MP3 because I want the broadest compatibility and I know some folks out there use a certain device from which the term podcasting is derived. The WMA file is passed on to Microsoft Expression Media Encoder 2 and I use that to publish the WMA directly to Silverlight Streaming, which is another FREE service from Windows Live that gives you a whopping 4GB of space that you can stream media from with Silverlight. That results in a bit of code or iFrame that I place in the post giving the embedded player.
I think that's about it. Took a while to work all this out but I'm getting it down to a science. The cost is low and I am happy with the product so far, given that we have no professional equipment nor a sound room to record. Let us know what you think.
