Microphones, softwares and jury-rigging your room

This is part 2 of what I learnt starting a podcast. It covers the more techie stuff

What microphone should I use? What is the best way to edit, how do I distribute the content? Go to any podcasting forums and you will find flustered podcasting beginners asking these questions. I was a very lucky beginner because I know Raven Lim, who not only gave me the whole lowdown on the products to use, but also all the pros and cons of each option. This is a consolidation of the material Raven provided to get me started and my own experimentation along the way.

Recording

1. Where?

I don't have a recording studio that gives you that clear crisp sound quality. Many professional podcasters have been hiding inside their closets to do recording at the start of the pandemic. I found someone who gave this great tip to record inside your car, since it is already rather sound proof and padded. I guess if you are recording into a microphone in a solo cast, that works. But my format involves going on a call with a guest over the internet and so car recording is not feasible.

After a few tries recording in various parts of my house, I realised that I need to have an enclosed room (duh!) to reduce the echo-y background. So I settled on jury-rigging a room in my apartment with every soft, sound absorbent material I could find. I lined my walls with a spare mattress, a beach towel, a yoga mat. It improves the sound quality by a lot.

2. What to use?

The software helps too. I used Zencastr from the get go and when I compared it side by side with a couple of other different platforms, it performs noticeably better on reducing the background noise. Having said this, I think this is something that will probably evolve rather quickly as these services work to improve their sound quality. For example, as I was writing this, I found out that Descript has released “Studio Sound”, which is a mode you can turn on during editing that supposedly reduces echo and background noise. Here, you can listen for yourself, as I test Descript, Zoom, Zoom with Studio Sound and Zencastr (all other variables being equal) side by side:

TLDL (i.e. too long didn’t listen): Zencastr comes out on top, although just only compared to Zoom.

3. How?

When recording, I find it most useful to have the video on, so that your guest knows you're responding to them with nods or smiles etc. When I first recorded without video and listening silently to prevent my own audio insertion into the interview, I can feel the dynamics being rather unnatural, since most people expect to have some response when they say something. Zencastr actually produces two tracks by the end of the recording: your guests' side and your side. So technically, you can remove your own "uh huh" and "ok" during the editing, but if you inform your guests ahead of time, it reduces the editing work for you later on.

4. How long?

Given the scope of what I choose to cover, I always ask that the guests set aside two hours for the recording, but I'll also work within what they can accommodate time-wise if two hours is not possible.

Editing

Descript is a game changer for me. You upload the audio file, it transcribes (I'd say about 80% accuracy) the conversation, and you edit it the way you would a word document. If you want to move, say, two sentences to an earlier part of the conversation, to make it flow better, you simply copy and paste and every property in that period (say a laugh) will be copied as well. It is like word processing.

Editing is still a pain, but a software that reduces the pain by 80% is well worth paying for.

Music

I looked at a few platforms that offer royalty free music and found Pixabay and Free Music Archive (FMA) the most useful for my needs. For FMA, there are different types of licensing available. If you want royalty free music, it is useful to filter by CC 01. 02 and 03 licensing.

This is the format to do attribution.

Publishing

Exporting

#12323 on the list of things I never knew I needed to know before this: what format is ideal for a podcast? This writeup is great. TLDR: m4a is the format that is better quality but smaller size than mp3. DO NOT do what I did for my first episode and export to wav because that size is so big Anchor did not even allow me to upload.

Shownotes

I researched a few different formats of shownotes and I decided that I really liked what Tim Ferriss does with his (an example). I often tackle pretty complex topics and I have decided to include my research materials in the show notes too. Plus the book recommendations I always ask every guest to provide

List of the week:

I know I brandished microphones right from the get-go and yet have neglected actually talking about it in the whole post. That’s coz it’s all listed here:

Podcasting tools and resources

This list is not meant to be exhaustive, but they are the most for someone in my stage of the podcasting journey. Enjoy!

This is part one of what I’d learnt publishing my own podcast. Read part one where I covered content creation here.