A Newbie Looks at Podcasting Tools: Garageband, Audacity, and Levelator

The idea of creating brief regular (weekly or bi-weekly) podcast has appealed to me very since I first heard Adam Curry's Daily Source Code and Adam Christianson's Maccast in the early days of podcasting. The problem was I was just too lazy to really spend time with the tools available (many of them free) to be able to create podcasts quickly and minimal pain. However, my day job ended on Monday (June 30). So, I decided to spend Tuesday learning more about a few tools and create my first formal podcast (I've created a bunch of test-casts in the past).

I really want to make podcast creation painless for myself. So, here's the criteria I've adopted:

1. The tools must be free, inexpensive, or already in my toolkit
2. I don't want to spend a lot of time fiddling with controls and tweaking things
3. The audio recording and audio assembly process must be simple and reasonably fast
4. Be able to use audio recorded from a variety of recording devices including my smartphone
5. The process should NOT feel like work
6. The process should be reasonably enjoyable

The first thing I tried was Garageband '08 which came with my iMac (I also updated my older Macbook to iLife '08). Garageband has a podcast project type which I tried. But, it didn't seem to do much more than set up the initial tracks using a couple of presets. It does have a couple of nice podcast friendly features like ducking background music (reducing the track's volume) when you speak. But, I didn't feel really comfortable with its interface from a podcasting perspective.

I was, however, comfortable enough to use Garageband to create the brief intro section with a bit of music. A friend of mine had just mentioned that he got a kick whenever he heard a familar Garageband loop in a podcast. I noticed this myself over the past few months and decided to create something simple instead of using a loop. However, I was too lazy to get my M-Audio keyboard out of its box, set it up somewhere, and plug it into the iMac to play just a few notes. So, I brought up the Musical Typing keyboard instead to peck out those few notes. You can bring up this tool either by bringing down the Windows menu and selecting the Musical Typing option or pressing Shift-CMD-K. I exported my little ditty with a voiceover to an MP3 audio file and shifted my work to Audacity.

Audacity 1.3.5 beta is an Open Source audio editor. The project provides a pre-built installer that you can download and use to quickly install the applicaction. The first thing I needed to do was bring in the two WAV audio files I created with my Windows Mobile smartphone and Pocket PC devices. I snipped segments from each recording and spliced them in a single track to demostrate the volume recording difference between the two. I saved this track out to an AIF format file so I could use it with...

...the freeware Levelator utility from The Conversations Network to level the volume differences between the audio recordings from the two Windows Mobile devices. This process is really simple: I simply dragged the AIF file created by Audacity and plotted it on top of the Levelator windows. That's it. No button to press, no menu to drop down, no options to set. This created a volume leveled output file that I imported in to Audacity.

At this point I needed to learn how to move these bits and pices of audio files I had together. After spending a few minutes wandering around the menus and not finding what I wanted. I checked the online Audacity documentation and read about the Time Shift Tool which had eluded me while looking at the UI. This was all I needed to move audio segments around and arrange them quickly and easily.

The end result was an Audacity project with 9 audio tracks. I created a separate audio track for each segment between the pre-recorded audio sections recorded on the Windows Mobile device as well as the individual topic sections. This let me edit audio in bits and pieces and didn't force me to say everything in a single recording session. I exported this to a final MP3 audio file and uploaded it to the free Blogr web service...

OgasaWalrus Podcast 20080701 on Blogr.com

If you go to the web page linked above, you can listen to the short (less than 8 minutes) podcast using Blogr's web embedded podcast player. You can find the podcast's show notes on my personal website at...

OgasaWalrus Podcast July 1, 2008 Show Notes