Podcasting on a Shoestring Budget

Fifteen years ago, anyone who wanted to be anything, had to have his own website. It was just the cool thing to do. All you needed was a PC and dial-up internet access, and a WYSIWIG HTML editor, you know that fancy addition that came with Netscape, that let you build your own website? Now it seems that, in order to be counted among the cool, you need to have a podcast, as well. Hey, somewhere someone can't wait to hear what you have to say about war and taxes. You'll get an audience of 5 or 5,000,000, but you'll have fans, whether you're a ham or a half wit

As long as you have a broadband connection, a PC (or Mac), and a microphone, there isn't a darn thing anyone can do to keep you from podcasting. When the word podcast was coined, some three years ago, no one had any idea to explain the concept in any terms the average Joe could understand. It was the next generation of internet radio, but, nooooo, it wasn't anything like webcasting. Podcasting requires RSS. Well, what the heck is RSS, the average Joe would ask. And the explanation would leave him wonder just how many swirlies Mr. RSS had received in high school.

It's really much less complicated than it sounds. Most people already know what a blog is. A podcast is, simply put, an audio blog. Those profound insights and drunken rants you post on myspace and livejournal, those are blogs. If you apply the same principle to audio files, you have a podcast.

If you subscribe to a blog, a file called an RSS feed, will tell you when the blog has been updated. And RSS feed is a separate file, usually written in a scripting language called XML. If you understand how HTML tags work, learning XML is not very hard. But if you don't want to go through the trouble of writing your XML files from scratch, the Firefox web browser comes with a built in RSS editor. There are also free RSS services and RSS editors available for download.

If you have a no-name PC, like I do, a broadband internet connection, and that free stick mike they threw in your computer box, you have you basic podcast setup. In fact that's all many podcasters ever invest in their podcast studio. That setup works well for a one person show who doesn't expect to interview studio guests.

You can spice up your podcast by mixing music into your podcast. A word of caution: If you clip in, say, your favorite Metallica or Britney Spears track, you can find yourself in a vat full of hot water. There is an evil organization, the RIAA, that has lately taken upon itself to sue 14 year-old girls and 80 year-old grandmothers into debtors prison. They're the same guys who killed Grokster. The good news is that there many independent artist who see podcasting as a way to build a fan base, a door to getting heard they would never get from the big record labels. The better news is: they're really talented. The day I discovered garageband.com and podsafeaudio.net was the day I stopped listening to FM radio, I can't wait till Blue Sound Traffic and True Tribe begin touring the USA. By the way, who the heck is Dave Matthews?

Your built in .wav recorder won't be much help when you actually want to mix your podcast. There is a lot of wonderful sound editing software on the market: for hundreds of dollars to thousands of dollars! The good news is that you don't have to spend a dime to legally get your hands on one of the sweetest sound editing suites ever created: Audacity. You can download it here. The graphic interface may be a bit vanilla, but it is very easy to use, it has many features you can find in professional grade software packages, and it is darn near impossible to crash. So you want to mix 60 tracks together? No problem. Audacity is a reliable workhorse that will rarely let you down. And did I mention it's free?

Your computer should have a decent sound card. The sound card that came with my PC just wasn't up to the job Soundblaster sells very good sound cards for as little as $30. If you have a steady hand, if you know how to use a screwdriver, and if you're not too macho to read the directions, you can easily install it yourself.

That's your basic podcast setup.

If you plan on having more than one person in your podcast studio, things will become more spendy. In order to share a mike and still have decent sound, two people practically need to sit on each other's lap. Passing the microphone from person to person will create an annoying swoosh sound. And if a microphone is placed between two or more people sitting around a table, it will sound like everyone is speaking into tin cans.

Having more than one person in the studio requires a sound mixer and some decent microphones. For my purposes, an eight channel Radioshack DJ board did just the trick. Radio stations tend to have much bigger sound boards. That's because radio shows are generally live, not time shifted, like podcasts. My own studio accommodates up to four persons in the studio. The sound mixer cost me about $160, and each of the microphones cost about $60.

Podcasting is the perfect medium for beginning journalist to put together some very impressive resume CDs. All one has to do is pick up the phone and speak to any celebrity, Iraq war veteran, or local CEO and, once they have a greed to the interview, press the record button. Some podcasters will hold their mike to a speaker phone, but the results sound less than professional. I myself have had some very bad experiences with analog and digital phone recorders, which provided results that were completely unusable. Podcasters wanting to do phone interviews really need to bite the bullet and invest in a digital hybrid, a box that converts telephone signals into recordable and usable sound. I purchased a JK Audio brand digital hybrid, which produces excellent results, but set me back some $500.

There are many popular podcasts whose only studio equipment consists of a laptop and a built in PC. It's really what a person wants to do with the podcast that makes it more expensive. However, the most valuable podcast resource, talent, requires no money at all.