/Create-Your-Own-Podcasts

PODCASTING PRODUCTS By Scott M. Britner Podcast Your Purpose with Million Dollar Mission

How To Use Free Tools To Create Unlimited Professional Quality Podcasts‌ And Easily Turn Each Into A Viral Traffic Solution Or A Product You Can Promote For Cash-In-The-Bank!

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What Is Podcasting?

Podcasting is a method of publishing audio broadcasts via the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed of new files (usually MP3s). It became popular in late 2004, largely to automate downloading of audio onto portable players or personal computers.

The word "podcasting" is a portmanteau that combines the words "broadcasting" and "iPod." The term can be misleading since neither podcasting nor listening to podcasts requires an iPod or any portable music player. For that reason, since September 2004 various writers have suggested reinterpreting the letters POD to create "backronyms" such as "Personal On-Demand." However, the word is rarely presented as "PODcasting."

Podcasting is distinct from other types of online media delivery because of its subscription model, which uses the RSS 2.0 XML (or RDF XML) format to deliver an enclosed file. Podcasting enables independent producers to create self-published, syndicated "radio shows," and gives broadcast radio programs a new distribution method. Listeners may subscribe to feeds using "podcatching" software (a type of aggregator), which periodically checks for and downloads new content automatically. Some podcatching software is PODCASTING PRODUCTS Podcast Your Purpose with Million Dollar Mission www.MillionDollarMission.com

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also able to synchronise (copy) podcasts to portable music players.

Any digital audio player or computer with audio-playing software can play podcasts. The same technique can deliver video files, and by 2005 some aggregators could play video as well as audio.

Initial development By 2003, web radio had existed for a decade, digital audio players had been on the market for several years, blogs and broadcasters frequently published MP3 audio online, and the RSS file format was widely used for summarizing or syndicating content. While RSS/RDF already supported media resources implicitly, applications rarely took advantage of this. In 2001 UserLand founder and RSS evangelist Dave Winer, partly inspired by users like Adam Curry and Tristan Louis, added support for a specific enclosure element to Userland's non-RDF branch of RSS, then to its Radio Userland feed-generator and aggregator.

In June 2003, Dion Mellor demonstrated aggregation and syndication of audio files using RSS in his Ed Radio application. Ed Radio scanned RSS feeds for MP3 files, collected them into a single feed, and made the result available as SMIL or WebJay audio feeds.

In September 2003, Winer created an RSS-with-enclosures feed for his Harvard Berkman Center colleague Christopher Lydon, a former newspaper and television journalist and NPR radio talk show host. For several months Lydon had been linking full-length MP3 interviews to his Berkman weblog, which focused on blogging and coverage of the 2004 U.S. presidential campaigns. Having Lydon's interviews as RSS enclosures helped inspire Adam Curry's pre-iPodder script, and related experiments leading to a variety of open source iPodder development.

Indeed, blogs would become an important factor in the popularization of podcasting before many professional radio broadcasters and entrepreneurs with business plans adopted the form.

Possibly the first use of the term podcasting was as a synonym for audioblogging or weblog-based amateur radio in an article by Ben Hammersley in The Guardian on February 12, 2004. In September of that year, Dannie Gregoire used the term to describe the automatic download and synchronization idea that Adam Curry had developed.

Gregoire had also registered multiple domain names associated with podcasting. That usage was discovered and reported on by Curry and Dave Slusher of the Evil Genius Chronicles website.

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By October 2004, detailed how-to podcast articles had begun to appear online. By July 2005, a Google search for "'how to' +podcast" returned 2,050,000 hits.

Independently of the development of Podcasting and its distribution via RSS, an idea that resembles Podcasting was developed at Compaq Research as early as 1999 or 2000. Called PocketDJ, it would have been launched as a service for the Personal Jukebox or a proposed successor, the first hard-disk based MP3-player, that Compaq's R&D department had started developing in 1998. See appropriate section in the Personal Jukebox article.

Popularization The word about podcasting rapidly spread through the already-popular weblogs of Winer, Curry and other early podcasters and podcastlisteners. Fellow blogger and technology columnist Doc Searls began keeping track of how many "hits" Google found for the word "podcasts" on September 28, 2004, when the result was 24 hits. "A year from now," he wrote, "it will pull up hundreds of thousands, or perhaps even millions."

Searls kept track of the search results in his blog through the next month. There were 526 hits for "podcasts" on September 30, then 2,750 three days later. The number doubled every few days, passing 100,000 by October 18. His prediction of "perhaps millions" in a year proved to be quite conservative. After only nine months, a search for "podcasts" produced more than 10 million hits.

The amateur podcasts themselves were harder to count, but there were enough to capture the attention of The New York Times on October 28, 2004. "There are podcasters in California, South Carolina and Connecticut," Times reporter Cyrus Farivar wrote, "with others as far afield as western Canada, Australia and Sweden. Though most podcasts tend to reflect their technologically oriented audience, newer shows are being created with topics like veganism and movie reviews.

Even conventional broadcasters are being drawn to the medium, which allows programs to be played at a listener's convenience."

When USA Today took on the subject of these "free amateur chatfests" with a pair of stories the following February, it profiled several podcasters, gave instructions for both sending and receiving podcasts, and included a "Top Ten" list from one of the many podcast directories that had sprung up in just six months. The newspaper quoted one directory as listing 3,300 podcast programs in February, 2005. At that PODCASTING PRODUCTS Podcast Your Purpose with Million Dollar Mission www.MillionDollarMission.com

PODCASTING PRODUCTS By Scott M. Britner Podcast Your Purpose with Million Dollar Mission

time, USA Today reported a circulation of 2.6 million, the largest of any paper in the United States. The story of podcasting was getting around.

The Top Ten programs mentioned at that time gave some indication of podcast topics: four were about technology (including Curry's "Daily Source Code," which also included music and personal chat), three were about music, one about movies, one about politics, and -- at the time No. 1 on the list -- "The Dawn and Drew Show," described as "married-couple banter," a program format that USA Today's Marco R. della Cava noted was quite popular on American broadcast radio in the 1940s.

While USA Today was good at recalling the past, its story was less successful about the near future: It predicted that Apple Computer was "in a prime position to make podcasting significantly easier — but probably won't." Della Cava said Apple had "ignored requests from Curry and other technologists to discuss the matter, and declined USA TODAY's interview requests for this story."

In June, 2005, Apple added podcasting to its iTunes music software, staking a claim to the new medium its iPod had helped inspire and name. (See Coping With Growth, below.)

Adoption by traditional broadcasters Traditional broadcasters were extremely quick to pick up on the podcasting format, especially those whose news or talk formats spared them the complications of music licensing. The American syndicated radio show Web Talk Radio became the first to adopt the format, in September 2004, followed within weeks by Seattle news radio station KOMO and by individual programs from KFI Los Angeles and Boston's WGBH. The BBC began a trial in October 2004 with BBC Radio Five Live's Fighting Talk. These trials were extended in January 2005 to BBC Radio 4's In Our Time. January 2005 also saw CBC begin a trial with its technology show /Nerd. United States National Public Radio affiliates WNYC and KCRW adopted the format for many of their productions. In April 2005 the BBC announced it was extending the trial to twenty more programmes, including music radio and in the same month Australia's ABC launched a podcasting trial across several of its national stations.

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PODCASTING PRODUCTS By Scott M. Britner Podcast Your Purpose with Million Dollar Mission

In May, 2005, the trend began to go the other way, with amateur podcasts becoming a source of content for broadcast radio programs

by Adam Curry, Christopher Lydon and others.

Coping with growth While podcasting's innovators took advantage of the sound-file synchronization feature of Apple Computer's iPod and iTunes software -- and included "pod" in the name -- the technology was always compatible with other players and programs. Apple was not actively involved until mid-2005, when it joined the market on three fronts: as a source of "podcatcher" software, as publisher of a podcast directory, and as provider of tutorials on how to create podcasts with Apple products GarageBand and Quicktime Pro. The podcasting selection views of iTunes 4.9 When it added a podcast-subscription feature to its June 28, 2005, release of iTunes 4.9, Apple also launched a directory of podcasts at the iTunes Music Store, starting with 3,000 entries. Apple's software enabled AAC encoded podcasts to use chapters, bookmarks, external links, and synchronized images displayed on iPod screens or in the iTunes artwork viewer. Two days after release of the program, Apple reported one million podcast subscriptions. iTunes Podcast directory lists top 100 podcasts based on the number of new subscriptions in a given 24-hour period, which explains the wild fluctuations in top-20 panel rankings, initially suspected to be an active count of total number of podcast subscribers.

Some podcasters found that exposure to iTunes' huge number of downloaders threatened to make great demands on their bandwidth and related expenses. Possible solutions were proposed, including the addition of a content delivery system, such as Akamai; a peer-to-peer solution, BitTorrent; or use of free hosting services, such as those offered by Ourmedia, BlipMedia and the Internet Archive.

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Create Podcasts Using Your PC

by Jake Ludington This time around, I'm walking through the steps required to record and post your own podcast using tools virtually everyone has or can easily acquire on a tiny budget. Ultimately, if you decide to podcast on a regular basis, some equipment upgrades such as the podcast recording kit I recently detailed at JakeLudington.com will drastically improve the sound quality. To learn the process, though, you don't need anything fancy.

Depending on whether you already have one of those cheap microphones that the OEM dealers bundle with PCs, you can record a podcast without spending a dime. If you don't have a bundled microphone, the third-party equivalent costs between $8 and $15 at various electronics retailers.

The other piece of hardware you need is a set of headphones.

Headphones are important because although you need to monitor your recorded voice, you don't want the microphone to pick up sound coming from desktop speakers. Ideally, headphones that cover your ears do the best job of isolating your recording sound from other audio distractions. Earbuds make an affordable alternative.

I recommend starting out with Audacity, an open source audio recording application. I like it so much, I bought a T-shirt from the company to show my support. Audacity offers a solid complement of editing features with an interface simple enough for a novice. It outputs MP3-format audio for distributing your podcast once you download the Lame MP3 encoder. From here onward, I'll assume you have Audacity and Lame installed on your PC. Before You Record A few basic setup configurations are required in order to record a podcast. First, connect your microphone to the microphone-in connection on the PC. Connect headphones to the stereo line out or headphone jack (generally the green audio connection). Don't forget to put those headphones on. A laundry list of audio optimizations for your PODCASTING PRODUCTS Podcast Your Purpose with Million Dollar Mission www.MillionDollarMission.com

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PC are recommended to keep your system running smoothly during recording.

After you launch Audacity, make sure Microphone is selected as the recording source in the drop-down menu on the mixer toolbar.

Figure 1. Configure Microphone as your recording source Open the Audacity Preferences window from the File menu. On the Audio I/O tab, verify that your sound card is selected as the device for both playback and recording. In the Channels drop-down box under Recording, choose 1 (Mono). Unless you are using two microphones, the Stereo option simply duplicates the track, making the file size bigger without a resulting improvement to audio fidelity.

Figure 2. Set the audio recording Channels selection to Mono Switch to the Quality tab, and choose 44,100 Hz as the Default Sample Rate and 16-bit as the Default Sample Format. Audiophiles will argue that higher sample rates and formats are better, but for spoken word, 44,100 Hz and 16-bit sampling works admirably, especially considering PODCASTING PRODUCTS Podcast Your Purpose with Million Dollar Mission www.MillionDollarMission.com

PODCASTING PRODUCTS By Scott M. Britner Podcast Your Purpose with Million Dollar Mission

that the resulting output will be MP3. Ignore the rest of the settings on the Quality tab.

Figure 3. Set the sample rate and bit rate The File Formats tab configures output options. Choose WAV (Microsoft 16 bit PCM) as the Uncompressed Export Format. Leave the OGG Export Setup untouched. Then, find the location at which you extracted the Lame codec to add it to Audacity by clicking on the Find Library button and browsing to the file location. I generally unzip the Lame codec to C:\LAME so I can find it easily, but there's no "right" location. Once you've added Lame support, close the Audacity Preferences window by clicking on OK.

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Figure 4. Configure output options Ready to Record Click on the microphone icon in Audacity's Meter toolbar to turn on monitoring. You should see a red level indicator moving slightly as it picks up ambient room noise. Talk into the microphone and make adjustments to the volume until you get a level that rises close to the right edge of the meter without turning the far-right section solid red.

If you get a solid red bar at the far right, the audio is clipping, which means your finished file will sound distorted. Once you've adjusted the level, you're ready to record.

Figure 5. Activate volume-level monitoring With all the preparations out of the way, it's time to create your first podcast. Push the Record button and start talking. When you finish recording, press the yellow square Stop button and save the file in .wav format. Saving is an important step, in order to make sure you don't accidentally delete the file.

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Figure 6. Audacity recording controls It's time to edit the audio file or save it as an MP3 for distribution as your first podcast. Editing can be as simple as eliminating all the places you said "um" by highlighting them and deleting them, or as complex as adding a music bed and inserting other audio clips into the recorded file. To keep this simple, we'll assume you're a one-take wonder and you recited a golden monologue for your first podcast.

To save the file as an MP3, open the preferences again, choose the MP3 bit rate on the File Formats page. (Generally for voice audio, somewhere between 32 and 64 is good enough without making the file size too big.) The resulting audio file gets uploaded to a Web server, and you can link to it in your blog post.

Another important step is editing the ID3 tags for the file. You can easily accomplish this by opening the file in Windows Media Player, iTunes, or one of many other popular music players. In Windows Media Player, right-click on the file in the Now Playing list and choose Advanced Tag Editor. Fill in the Title and Artist fields at the very least, so the proper information about your podcast will display on iPods, Zen Micros, and other portable media players.

You need blogging software with support for enclosures to distribute the file via RSS, like Radio from UserLand, which is available for a $40 annual subscription. Movable Type is another alternative; it's free for personal use and has support for enclosures if you install a free plugin.

Several other alternatives also exist. Enclosures are essentially a method to let news aggregation clients like FeedDemon, Newsgator, or Doppler know there's a file attachment associated with an RSS feed entry. Assuming you are using a blogging tool with support for enclosures, you simply type a blog post as you normally would, and use a standard HREF link to the MP3 you uploaded to your server. The blogging software determines that the link should be an enclosure in RSS based on the file type, and it makes an appropriate addition to the RSS feed.

If your blogging tool doesn't support enclosures (Blogger, for instance, currently doesn't), you can generate an free RSS feed with a FeedBurner account, which will support enclosures. FeedBurner offers a straightforward wizard to walk you through the process. Once you have the FeedBurner feed created, you promote the link to the FeedBurner feed and encourage people to subscribe.

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In each of these cases, the publication process is fairly similar. Upload the MP3 to wherever you have Web space capable of storing files.

Make a blog entry just like you normally would, with a title, link, and description. Link to the MP3 in the blog description and post your entry.

If you want to keep your podcast separate from regular blog postings, or if you don't currently have a blog, the simplest way I've found to publish a podcast is to sign up for the $5 account at Liberated Syndication and follow its podcast publishing wizard. The service automatically uploads your MP3 file, and creates the RSS feed and blog post associated with the podcast, all in one easy step. I use Movable Type for all my regular podcasting and blogging, but am amazed at the simplicity of using Liberated Syndication. I created a very basic site at the service to demonstrate the output.

Jake Ludington is the author of the best-selling guide Converting VHS to DVD. He publishes audio and video tips at MediaBlab.com.

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Making a Podcast with Blogger and FeedBurner Blogger is not our first choice for weblog-based podcasting. Movable Type and Wordpress are better solutions for many podcasters, because they offer better support for podcasting, more power and greater flexibility.

Nevertheless, many podcasters are finding Blogger to be a good starting place to experiment with podcasting. Blogger is a free service, and getting started is as easy as filling out some forms on the web.

Here's a quick guide to building a podcast with Blogger. You should be able to set up a podcast using Blogger and FeedBurner in about the time it takes for all the images on this page to finish loading!

This how-to assumes that you already have created your podcast MP3 files, and have them stored on a web server. Note that some screens may look slightly different as Blogger updates their site.

Go to the Blogger home page (http://www.blogger.com/) and select Create Your Blog Now:

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If you haven't signed up for Blogger before, you'll need to do so:

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That's the hardest part. If the Terms of Service part wore you out, now is a good time to take a break.

Back already? OK - now it's time to name your podcast.

We called ours Snorkflum, because it sounds stupid and this is a bogus test podcast anyway:

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Next, select a template. We selected Minima, because it reminded us a little of The Matrix:

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Once you select continue, Blogger automagically creates your blog.

First it makes you wait, though:

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Don't you love their casual "warning - excitement ahead" sign?

As long as the Blogger servers don't crash, the Internets go down or anything bad like that, you should get a nice confirmation screen:

This is another good time for a break. You just created your podcast blog! How awesome is that?

Now you need to Start Posting...

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From the Dashboard page, click the New Post icon:

Add an entry. To add your MP3 file, create a text link, select it with the link tool, and enter the URL for your MP3 file:

PODCASTING PRODUCTS Podcast Your Purpose with Million Dollar Mission www.MillionDollarMission.com

PODCASTING PRODUCTS By Scott M. Britner Podcast Your Purpose with Million Dollar Mission

When you are done, select Publish Post, and you should get a confirmation page:

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PODCASTING PRODUCTS By Scott M. Britner Podcast Your Purpose with Million Dollar Mission

Now check out the podcast blog that you've created. Snorkflum is available at http://snorkflum.blogspot.com/:

PODCASTING PRODUCTS Podcast Your Purpose with Million Dollar Mission www.MillionDollarMission.com

PODCASTING PRODUCTS By Scott M. Britner Podcast Your Purpose with Million Dollar Mission

Now take a quick detour to Settings tab and select Basic. Give your site a description. Forgetting to fill out the description is one of the most common problems with Blogger feeds. Use the description field to explain what your podcast is, entice people to listen, and provide some keywords to make it easier for people to find. Save this and republish your podcast for the changes to take effect.

Now it's time to create your podcast feed. Blogger only provides a Atom newsfeed, and RSS 2.0 is the standard for podcasting. Your Atom feed will be at your blog's address, plus "atom.xml", like this: http://snorkflum.blogspot.com/atom.xml.

There is a free service, FeedBurner, that can be used to translate the Blogger Atom feed into a RSS 2.0 fee.

Go to http://www.feedburner.com/, and enter your Blogger Atom feed URL:

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Select Next. FeedBurner will retrieve your Blogger Atom feed and then provide you with an options screen.

Select the SmartCast option, and make sure that the Feed Title and FeedBurner URI (way down at the bottom of the page) are OK with you:

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Select Next. You'll be prompted for a user id and password. Next, you should get a confirmation/welcome page:

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Note your FeedBurner Burned URL. In this case, it's http://feeds.feedburner.com/Snorkflum.

That's it - the podcast is ready to test with a Feed Validator. Go to www.feedvalidator.org and paste in your FeedBurner URL:

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Your podcast should be ready to go. Test it your podcast feed with a podcasting client and get podcasting!

Submitting a Podcast it iTunes iTunes 4.9 Upgrade with Podcasting Suppport

by T. L. Pakii Pierce at 06:28PM (EDT) on June 28, 2005 | Permanent Link | Cosmos Via Micropersuasion, iTunes now has support for Podcasts. At the time of this writing, iTunes 4.8.x doesn't detect the new 4.9.x update yet if you go to the Check For iTunes Updates from the Help menu in iTunes.

You can go here to download this latest version of iTunes software.

What's new in iTunes 4.9 With iTunes 4.9, you can now browse and subscribe to podcasts from within the iTunes Music Store. Podcasts are frequently updated radiostyle shows downloadable over the Internet. You can also transfer podcasts to iPod, for listening on the go.

Getting Starting with iTunes Podcasts One of the first things you will notice after you PODCASTING PRODUCTS Podcast Your Purpose with Million Dollar Mission www.MillionDollarMission.com

PODCASTING PRODUCTS By Scott M. Britner Podcast Your Purpose with Million Dollar Mission

upgrade to iTunes 4.9 is that in the Sources list on the left side of the iTunes software (which manages and organizes your music) contains a new source for podcasts. These sources are like visual folders that identify where your audio files are, where they are sourced from and how you have them organized as playlists.

Very helpful for managing your must and very easy to use as well as being intuitive. For example, in the image to the right you will also see Radio and Music Store. This is and easy way that iTunes allows you to access thousands of audio files through the iTunes music store or access many Internet Radio stations for streaming radio broadcasts with iTunes.

How Podcasts with iTunes 4.9 Works To access Podcasts through iTunes you select the podcasts Source and you will see an empty playlist. At the bottom of iTunes, you will see the option Podcast Directory. Simply press that option with your mouse pointer and you will be taken to the iTunes Podcast Directory.

Figure 2. iTunes Podcast Directory From the iTunes Podcast Directory you have quick access to the most popular podcasts but you can drill down into categories for a wider selection as well. I like movies and movie reviews so I selected Movies & Television from the iTunes Podcast Directory and iTunes now PODCASTING PRODUCTS Podcast Your Purpose with Million Dollar Mission www.MillionDollarMission.com

PODCASTING PRODUCTS By Scott M. Britner Podcast Your Purpose with Million Dollar Mission

presents the full list of available podcasts within that category as seen in Figure 3 below.

Figure 3. iTunes Movies & Television Category I selected the Reel Reviews podcast (see Figure 4) and downloaded from iTunes this review Swimming With Sharks. Also, Micheal who publishes this blog and podcast has an excellent write up on setting up your own podcast. You should check that out.

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Figure 4. Selecting and Confirming Podcast Subscription

Figure 5. Downloading Podcast into iTunes PODCASTING PRODUCTS Podcast Your Purpose with Million Dollar Mission www.MillionDollarMission.com

PODCASTING PRODUCTS By Scott M. Britner Podcast Your Purpose with Million Dollar Mission

Publishing Your Podcast to iTunes Publishing your podcast to iTunes is as simple as submitting your podcast RSS feed link to the iTunes directory. You'll need to have a iTunes account (free) in order to do so as you will asked for your iTunes login credentials.

All you do is click the Publish A Podcast link from the main Podcast Directory page in iTunes located in the upper left of the page (see Figure 2 above) and you will be stepped through the process easily.

See the following figures 6 and 7 below.

Figure 6. Submit Your Podcast Feed URL

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Figure 7. Confirm Settings, then Publish Once you confirm settings you then click the publish button and you get a confirmation page informing you that your podcast will be reviewed before being available in the iTunes podcast directory.

The podcast settings in iTunes are pretty straight forward. You can set iTunes to check for newly published podcasts that you are subscribed to at "every hour", "every day", "every week", or "manually". You can then tell itunes how to handle your downloads when new podcasts are detected. You can "download all" new episodes, "download the most recent one", or have iTunes "do nothing". Lastly, there is a retention setting where you can tell iTunes to keep episodes based on "all", "all unplayed", "most recent" or "last (from last 2 to 10 episodes)".

This is another great leverage opportunity for publishers. Just like Yahoo going to an RSS centric directory with My Yahoo, publishers benefit from the marketing and education that Yahoo is doing to increase exposure and usage of RSS for custom news. With hundreds of thousands of My Yahoo users, you only have to place your RSS feed in My Yahoo and you enjoy the benefit of Yahoo's promo efforts.

ITunes presents a similar opportunity. ITunes is one of the top digital downloads stops on the Internet today if not the top download site.

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With their 4.9 release they are promoting podcasts to their active user base. That could result in exponential exposure for you and exponential grown in subscribers to your podcast by submitting your podcast feed to the iTunes directory while letting iTunes take care of the promo efforts for generating interest in their podcast directory.

Submitting your podcast is free by the way. iTunes, I think, is especially powerful to podcasters because as a user of iTunes and an iPod, I think iTunes is very good at promoting new features and generating interest in browsing and in buying downloads.

It isn't just the brand as much as I think that they provide a buying and user experience that is second to none. Once you start using iTunes for music downloads it really changes the way you purchase and consume music. Now that they have added podcasting and have a dedicated podcast directory, it will be interesting to see how podcast publishers benefit from being a part of the iTunes directory and how that exposure measures up against other podcast directories available in terms of increasing exposure and getting subscribers.

It is being projected that Apple will ship more than 35 million Apple iPods by the end of 2005. The iPod is driving significant business in other areas for Apple to include iTunes downloads and seamless integration between iTunes and iPods. The latest statisic I was able to find with a quick Google search was that iTunes had over 150 million downloads at some point in 2004. These numbers certainly present a compelling case for submitting your podcast feed to the iTunes directory.

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iTunes RSS Tags iTunes uses RSS 2.0 with some additional tags. When using the iTunes tags, you must add a namespace declaration in your feed xml, like this: <rss xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/DTDs/Podcast-1.0.dtd" version="2.0"> Please use UTF-8 encoding for your feed. Other encodings are not guaranteed to work in iTunes.

All values should be plain text (no markup or HTML). Values are limited to 255 characters, except for <itunes:summary> which can be up to 4000 characters. Whitespace in values is significant, i.e. it will show in iTunes, so donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t add leading or trailing whitespace to your values.

Here is a table showing which tags apply to the channel (podcast) as a whole and which tags apply to individual items (episodes), along with where the tag contents appear in iTunes: xml tag

channel item

<title>

Y

<link>

Y

<copyright> <pubDate> <itunes:author>

Y

<itunes:block>

Y

Y

<itunes:category>

Y

Y

Y Y

<itunes:duration> <itunes:explicit>

Y

Y Y

Y

where content appears in iTunes Name column website link and arrow in Name column in the iTunes Music Store Release Date column Artist column prevent an episode or podcast from appearing Category column and in iTunes Music Store Browse Time column parental advisory graphic in Name column

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<itunes:keywords> <itunes:owner> <itunes:subtitle>

Y Y Y

Y

<itunes:summary>

Y

Y

Y

not visible but can be searched not visible, used for contact only Description column when â&#x201C;&#x2DC; (circled i) in Description column is clicked

Details for tags used by iTunes <enclosure> The file extension of the url attribute of this tag is used to determine if an item should appear in the Podcast directory. Supported extensions include "m4a", "mp3", "mov", "mp4", and "pdf". <guid> Every <item> should have a globally unique identifier that never changes. When you add episodes to your feed, guids are compared in case sensitive fashion to determine which episodes are new. If you omit the guid for an episode, the episode url will be used instead. <itunes:author> The contents of this tag is shown in the Artist column in iTunes. <itunes:block> Use this inside an <item> element to prevent that episode from appearing in the iTunes Podcast directory. Use this inside a <channel> element to prevent the entire podcast from appearing in the iTunes Podcast directory. <itunes:category> When browsing Podcasts in the iTunes Music Store, Categories are shown in the 2nd column and Subcategories are shown in the 3rd column. Not all Categories have Subcategories.

Use a top level <itunes:category> to specify the browse category, and a nested <itunes:category> to specify the browse subcategory.

Choose from the existing categories and subcategories on the iTunes Music Store.

If a nested <itunes:category> is specified, iTunes will show it in the Category column, otherwise iTunes will show the top level <itunes:category> in the Category column. <itunes:duration> The contents of this tag is shown in the Time column in iTunes.

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The tag can be formatted HH:MM:SS, H:MM:SS, MM:SS, or M:SS (H = hours, M = minutes, S = seconds) <itunes:explicit> This tag should be used to indicate whether or not your podcast contains explicit material.

The two values for this tag are “yes” and “no”.

If you populate this tag with "yes", a parental advisory graphic will appear next to your podcast artwork on the iTunes Music Store, and in the Name column in iTunes. <itunes:keywords> This tag allows users to search on text keywords.

Use spaces to separate keywords. <itunes:image> This tag specifies the artwork for your podcast. Put the url to the image in the href attribute. iTunes prefers square images that are at least 300 x 300 pixels, which is different than what is specified for the standard RSS image tag.

Hence we have a custom tag. iTunes supports images in JPEG and PNG formats. The url must end in “.jpg” or “.png”. <itunes:owner> This tag contains information that will be used to contact the owner of the podcast for communication specifically about their podcast. It will not be publicly displayed.

Put the email address of the owner in a nested <itunes:email> element.

Put the name of the owner in a nested <itunes:name> element. <itunes:subtitle> The contents of this tag is shown in the Description column in iTunes, as such it looks best if it is only a few words long. <itunes:summary> The contents of this tag is shown in a separate window that appears when the ⓘ (circled i) in the Description column is clicked. It also PODCASTING PRODUCTS Podcast Your Purpose with Million Dollar Mission www.MillionDollarMission.com

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appears on the iTunes Music Store page for your podcast. This field can be up to 4000 characters.

Sample RSS 2.0 feed that includes the iTunes tags <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!-- must include xmlns:itunes tag --> <rss xmlns:itunes="http://example.com/DTDs/Podcast-1.0.dtd" version="2.0"> <channel> <title>All About Everything</title> <itunes:author>John Doe</itunes:author> <link>http://example.com/podcasts/everything/index.html</link> <itunes:subtitle>A show about everything</itunes:subtitle> <itunes:summary>All About Everything is a show about everything.

Each week we dive into any subject known to man and talk about it as much as we can. Look for our Podcast in the iTunes Music Store</itunes:summary> <language>en-us</language> <copyright>&#x2117; &amp; &#xA9; 2005 John Doe &amp; Family</copyright> <itunes:owner> <itunes:name>John Doe</itunes:name> <itunes:email>john.doe@example.com</itunes:email> </itunes:owner> <!-- iTunes prefers square images 300x300 pixels or larger --> <itunes:image href="http://example.com/podcasts/everything/AllAboutEverything.jp g" /> <!-- iTunes Browse Podcasts Category --> <itunes:category text="Technology"> <!-- iTunes Browse Podcasts Subcategory --> <itunes:category text="Gadgets"/> </itunes:category> <item> <title>Shake Shake Shake Your Spices</title> <itunes:author>John Doe</itunes:author> <itunes:subtitle>A short primer on table spices</itunes:subtitle>

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<itunes:summary>This week we talk about salt and pepper shakers, comparing and contrasting pour rates, construction materials, and overall aesthetics. Come and join the party!</itunes:summary> <enclosure url="http://example.com/podcasts/everything/AllAboutEverythingEpis ode3.m4a" length="8727310" type="audio/x-m4a" /> <guid>http://example.com/podcasts/archive/aae20050615.m4a</gui d> <pubDate>Wed, 15 Jun 2005 19:00:00 GMT</pubDate> <itunes:category text="Food"> <itunes:duration>7:04</itunes:duration> <itunes:keywords>salt pepper shaker exciting</itunes:keywords> </item> <item> <title>Socket Wrench Shootout</title> <itunes:author>Jane Doe</itunes:author> <itunes:subtitle>Comparing socket wrenches is fun! </itunes:subtitle> <itunes:summary>This week we talk about metric vs. old english socket wrenches. Which one is better? Do you really need both? Get all of your answers here.</itunes:summary> <enclosure url="http://example.com/podcasts/everything/AllAboutEverythingEpis ode2.mp3" length="5650889" type="audio/mpeg" /> <guid>http://example.com/podcasts/archive/aae20050608.mp3</gui d> <pubDate>Wed, 8 Jun 2005 19:00:00 GMT</pubDate> <itunes:category text="Technology"> <itunes:category text="Gadgets"/> </itunes:category> <itunes:duration>4:34</itunes:duration> <itunes:keywords>metric socket wrenches tool</itunes:keywords> </item> <item> <title>Red, Whine, &amp; Blue</title> <itunes:author>Various</itunes:author> <itunes:subtitle>Red + Blue != Purple</itunes:subtitle> <itunes:summary>This week we talk about surviving in a Red state if you're a Blue person. Or vice versa.</itunes:summary> PODCASTING PRODUCTS Podcast Your Purpose with Million Dollar Mission www.MillionDollarMission.com

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<enclosure url="http://example.com/podcasts/everything/AllAboutEverythingEpis ode1.mp3" length="4989537" type="audio/mpeg" /> <guid>http://example.com/podcasts/archive/aae20050601.mp3</gui d> <pubDate>Wed, 1 Jun 2005 19:00:00 GMT</pubDate> <itunes:category text="Politics"> <itunes:duration>3:59</itunes:duration> <itunes:keywords>politics red blue state</itunes:keywords> </item> </channel> </rss> Common Mistakes • Using a date or time format for <pubDate> that doesn't conform to RFC 2822 The date must be "day-of-week, day month year".

The time must be in 24 hour format (no AM or PM) and must include the time zone offset. <!-- date and time not in RFC 2822 format --> <pubDate>7/6/2005 1:00:00 PM</pubDate> <!-- valid date and time format --> <pubDate>Wed, 6 Jul 2005 13:00:00 PDT</pubDate> <pubDate>Wed, 6 Jul 2005 13:00:00 -0700</pubDate> • Forgetting to escape ampersands <!-- illegal xml --> <title>Food & Wine</title> <!-- valid xml --> <title>Food &amp; Wine</title> • Using HTML named character entities <!-- illegal xml --> <copyright>&copy; 2005 John Doe</copyright> PODCASTING PRODUCTS Podcast Your Purpose with Million Dollar Mission www.MillionDollarMission.com

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<!-- valid xml --> <copyright>&#xA9; 2005 John Doe</copyright> Unlike HTML, XML supports only five "named character entities": character & < > ' "

name ampersand less-than sign greater-than sign apostrophe quotation

xml &amp; &lt; &gt; &apos; &quot;

The five characters above are the only characters that require escaping in XML. All other characters can be entered directly in an editor that supports UTF-8. You can also use numeric character references that specify the Unicode for the character, for example character © ℗ ™

name copyright sign sound recording copyright

xml &#xA9; &#x2117;

trade mark sign

&#x2122;

For further reference see XML Character and Entity References

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SF author uses podcast as novel publishing method

By Peter Cohen pcohen@maccentral.com Author Scott Sigler is using podcasting as a novel approach (pardon the pun) to get people to know about his new book, EarthCore. There's no charge to download the podcasts, and Sigler plans to release the entire book in serial form on a weekly basis.

Described as "a cross between episodic modern-action fare like '24' and classic sci-fi movies like Predator and Starship Troopers," "EarthCore" tells the story of brash young executive Connell Kirkland, on a mission to make his company (the EarthCore of the book's title) billions by unearthing the largest platinum deposit ever discovered.

"But at three miles below the surface, where the rocks are so hot they burn bare skin, something has been waiting for centuries. Waiting ... and guarding. Kirkland and EarthCore are about to find out first-hand why this treasure has never been unearthed," reads a synopsis posted to the novel's Web site. The podcasts have been performed by Sigler himself.

Podcasting is a term coined to describe making audio files available for download through RSS feeds. Podcasting is being used as a way to distribute weblogs, radio broadcasts and other content. You can read more about it in our feature Podcasting: Hear What the Buzz is About.

This is not EarthCore's first attempt at publication. In 2001, AOL/Time Warner's iPublish imprint offered it as an e-book, where it hit the top spot on Barnes & Noble's Web site. It was due out for a paperback release in 2002, but iPublish folded before that could happen. Sigler eventually regained the rights to his novel but has been unable to get it published again, and is using podcasting as a means of getting into the hands of more readers -- or more specifically, listeners.

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Sigler hopes that he can attract 5,000 subscribers to the book. That will, he hopes, "... demonstrate the power of Podcasting and generate attention from publishers."

Sigler kicked off the release of EarthCore with a prologue, which you can download from the EarthCore Web site now. He will release further chapters as weekly podcasts.

He advises potential listeners that EarthCore isn't for tender ears -- it "runs the gammut (sic) of politically incorrect topics, from language to sex to raw violence."

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MARKETING BRAINSTORM What business models can you use with your new podcast recording?

1.)

2.)

3.)

4.)

5.)

6.)

7.)

8.)

Audio CD (user pays shipping) Audio CD (sell CD) Audio CD (package with transcripts and/or workbook) Audio CD (bundle with existing product Podcast (giveaway) Podcast (giveaway part – promote full version) Podcast (create membership site) Podcast (use to enhance blog or website copy)

How can you create a podcast?

1.)Just talk about a subject (at least prepare an outline first) 2.)Read your articles 3.)Read your e-books (audio – by chapters) 4.)Read your blog post 5.)Read your sales copy 6.)Read other people’s articles 7.)Record/edit interviews with experts What can you package with your podcast to enhance the perceived value?

1.)Create transcripts of your recording 2.)Create a ‘workbook’ to go with your recording 3.)Collect articles on the subject of your recording and publish a report NOTE: Be sure to create a ‘resource’ page and mention it at the beginning and end of your recording (just like you would with an article, ebook, etc.)

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APPENDIX: AUDACITY USER MANUAL Tutorial - I.Basics Part 1 - Digital Audio - Part 1 What is sound?

Sounds are pressure waves of air. If there wasn't any air, we wouldn't be able to hear sounds. There's no sound in space.

We hear sounds because our ears are sensitive to these pressure waves. Perhaps the easiest type of sound wave to understand is a short, sudden event like a clap. When you clap your hands, the air that was between your hands is pushed aside. This increases the air pressure in the space near your hands, because more air molecules are temporarily compressed into less space. The high pressure pushes the air molecules outwards in all directions at the speed of sound, which is about 340 meters per second. When the pressure wave reaches your ear, it pushes on your eardrum slightly, causing you to hear the clap.

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A hand clap is a short event that causes a single pressure wave that quickly dies out. The image above shows the waveform for a typical hand clap. In the waveform, the horizontal axis represents time, and the vertical axis is for pressure. The initial high pressure is followed by low pressure, but the oscillation quickly dies out.

The other common type of sound wave is a periodic wave. When you ring a bell, after the initial strike (which is a little like a hand clap), the sound comes from the vibration of the bell. While the bell is still ringing, it vibrates at a particular frequency, depending on the size and shape of the bell, and this causes the nearby air to vibrate with the same frequency. This causes pressure waves of air to travel outwards from the bell, again at the speed of sound. Pressure waves from continuous vibration look more like this:

How is sound recorded?

A microphone consists of a small membrane that is free to vibrate, along with a mechanism that translates movements of the membrane into electrical signals. (The exact electrical mechanism varies depending on the type of microphone.) So acoustical waves are translated into electrical waves by the microphone. Typically, higher pressure corresponds to higher voltage, and vice versa.

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A tape recorder translates the waveform yet again - this time from an electrical signal on a wire, to a magnetic signal on a tape. When you play a tape, the process gets performed in reverse, with the magnetic signal transforming into an electrical signal, and the electrical signal causing a speaker to vibrate, usually using an electromagnet.

How is sound recorded digitally ?

Recording onto a tape is an example of analog recording. Audacity deals with digital recordings - recordings that have been sampled so that they can be used by a digital computer, like the one you're using now. Digital recording has a lot of benefits over analog recording. Digital files can be copied as many times as you want, with no loss in quality, and they can be burned to an audio CD or shared via the Internet. Digital audio files can also be edited much more easily than analog tapes.

The main device used in digital recording is a Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC). The ADC captures a snapshot of the electric voltage on an audio line and represents it as a digital number that can be sent to a computer. By capturing the voltage thousands of times per second, you can get a very good approximation to the original audio signal:

Each dot in the figure above represents one audio sample. There are two factors that determine the quality of a digital recording: â&#x20AC;˘

Sample rate: The rate at which the samples are captured or played back, measured in Hertz (Hz), or samples per second. An audio CD has a sample rate of 44,100 Hz, often written as 44 KHz for short. This is also the default sample rate that Audacity uses, because audio CDs are so prevalent.

â&#x20AC;˘

Sample format or sample size: Essentially this is the number of digits in the digital representation of each sample. Think of the sample rate as the horizontal precision of the digital waveform, and the sample format as the vertical precision. An PODCASTING PRODUCTS Podcast Your Purpose with Million Dollar Mission www.MillionDollarMission.com

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audio CD has a precision of 16 bits, which corresponds to about 5 decimal digits.

Higher sampling rates allow a digital recording to accurately record higher frequencies of sound. The sampling rate should be at least twice the highest frequency you want to represent. Humans can't hear frequencies above about 20,000 Hz, so 44,100 Hz was chosen as the rate for audio CDs to just include all human frequencies.

Sample rates of 96 and 192 KHz are starting to become more common, particularly in DVD-Audio, but many people honestly can't hear the difference.

Higher sample sizes allow for more dynamic range - louder louds and softer softs. If you are familiar with the decibel (dB) scale, the dynamic range on an audio CD is theoretically about 90 dB, but realistically signals that are -24 dB or more in volume are greatly reduced in quality. Audacity supports two additional sample sizes: 24-bit, which is commonly used in digital recording, and 32-bit float, which has almost infinite dynamic range, and only takes up twice as much storage as 16-bit samples.

Playback of digital audio uses a Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC).

This takes the sample and sets a certain voltage on the analog outputs to recreate the signal, that the Analog-to-Digital Converter originally took to create the sample. The DAC does this as faithfully as possible and the first CD players did only that, which didn't sound good at all. Nowadays DACs use Oversampling to smooth out the audio signal. The quality of the filters in the DAC also contribute to the quality of the recreated analog audio signal. The filter is part of a multitude of stages that make up a DAC. How does audio get digitized on your computer?

Your computer has a soundcard - it could be a separate card, like a SoundBlaster, or it could be built-in to your computer. Either way, your soundcard comes with an Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) for recording, and a Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC) for playing audio.

Your operating system (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, etc.) talks to the sound card to actually handle the recording and playback, and Audacity talks to your operating system so that you can capture sounds to a file, edit them, and mix multiple tracks while playing.

Standard file formats for PCM audio There are two main types of audio files on a computer: PODCASTING PRODUCTS Podcast Your Purpose with Million Dollar Mission www.MillionDollarMission.com

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PCM stands for Pulse Code Modulation. This is just a fancy name for the technique described above, where each number in the digital audio file represents exactly one sample in the waveform.

Common examples of PCM files are WAV files, AIFF files, and Sound Designer II files. Audacity supports WAV, AIFF, and many other PCM files.

â&#x20AC;˘

The other type is compressed files. Earlier formats used logarithmic encodings to squeeze more dynamic range out of fewer bits for each sample, like the u-law or a-law encoding in the Sun AU format. Modern compressed audio files use sophisticated psychoacoustics algorithms to represent the essential frequencies of the audio signal in far less space.

Examples include MP3 (MPEG I, layer 3), Ogg Vorbis, and WMA (Windows Media Audio). Audacity supports MP3 and Ogg Vorbis, but not the proprietary WMA format.

For details on the audio formats Audacity can import from and export to, please check out the Fileformats page of this documentation.

Please remember that MP3 does not store uncompressed PCM audio data. When you create an MP3 file, you are deliberately losing some quality in order to use less disk space.

Tutorial - I.Basics Part 2 - Rules of Audacity - Part 2 If you'd like to get straight playing an imported file or recording something, you can skip this section and come back later.

Whenever you work with Audacity, there are some rules you should remember: 1. One clip per track A clip is simply a piece of audio material. Imported, recorded, split or duplicated from another track, one track can only carry one piece of audio at a time. You can extend it by pasting material or inserting silence in to it, or cut a piece away, but it will always be one continuous piece of audio.

2. Audacity always records to a new track This new track is opened at the bottom. You'll have to zoom out and then resize the track view of the bottom most track to see what is recorded. You can actually use the window sliders at the bottom and PODCASTING PRODUCTS Podcast Your Purpose with Million Dollar Mission www.MillionDollarMission.com

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right to do this after starting to record, but this way no performance will be lost to the windowing system.

I suggest hitting CTRL+F to get an overview of the entire project as well. This only affects the horizontal zoom by the way(left-right zoom). There is no way to zoom out vertically without using the mouse yet.

3. Edit/Duplicate will not create a new audio file This may not seem a big deal, but it is if you're editing a large live recording.

What Audacity does is reference the original audio material until you actually perform some kind of edit on it, such as cutting a piece away, or using any effect on it. One thing to remember is the UNDO function. You can undo/redo stuff as many times as you like, and yes, even after you have saved your project.

You may ask what happens if you do, for example, cut away a piece or mark off a 30 minute piece and split it to a new track. It only writes changed data to disk. Since Audacity works with chunk of audio data of around one megabyte in size, this happens quite fast.

Rest assured that the only big waiting period might be the importing of large audio files.

Tutorial - I.Basics Part 3 - Setup, Audio Import and Playback - Part 3 1. Create a new project This is very important!

Audacity writes all the changed and recorded audio to a directory called Projectname_data, which is located right where you saved the project file itself.

Thus, select filename for your project.

and choose a location and

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Please note that when you startup Audacity fresh, only the "Save As..." menu option is available.

To save your project later on, you can also use the keyboard shortcut : CTRL+S 2. Check the Preferences Again, this is very important!

Press CTRL+P or go to ...

...then check if the right output is selected

...set the sample rate of your choice... (44.1 kHz is the default)

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...and here's a crucial scree

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The File Formats settings need discussing at this point.

When importing uncompressed audio, there are two ways to do it. "Make a copy of the original before editing" means, that Audacity actually copies the entire audio file that you imported in to its project data directory and in the process sets up the little overview graphics, whose descriptions get stored in the project data directory too.

The second way is to use the original imported audio. You may think we're actually editing this file, but no we aren't. In fact, Audacity will now read the imported file once and simply create the graphics overviews for them in to the data directory, and subsequently write to disk all the audio data that you change. The original file is only used for playback. All audio that remains unchanged will be played from the original file.

The advantage of choosing to make a copy of the original is that you avoid trouble, should anything in the original file change.

For example, should you accidentally delete the original file, you're lost.

You have to make up your mind before you start a project. Choose to make a copy of all imported files, and you'll use more space on your harddisk(s), but it will be easier to back up the project too, because all files that have anything to do with your project will be in the project data directory.

The Uncompressed Export Format can be set to WAV or AIFF for now. Please check the fileformats page for further information on export formats.

We'll ignore the Spectrogram settings for now. The Directories setting can be ignored as well for now, because all it sets is the directory to use for recordings, undo data and other stuff, if you haven't yet saved your project. Since we already saved our project, this setting is of no importance to us, though you may want to set it properly later on.

3. Import an audio file There are three ways to do this: 1. Simply drag and drop the audio file in to the Audacity window. (If you're using Mac OS 9 or X, drag the audio file to the Audacity icon instead...)

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2. Select Import Audio ... in the Project menu.

3. Use the keyboard shortcut : CTRL+I Audacity can import WAV, AIFF, AU, IRCAM, MP3 and OGG files.

Please refer to the fileformats page for further reference on these audio formats.

4. Playback The imported file should now be displayed in an audio track. The track will look a little like this, depending on what you imported :

Trackpanel and Waveform Overview of the imported Track If you're not sure where to find audio material, simply rip some off a CD, or in Windows, check the Media folder in the directory of your Windows installation.

Now click on the green Play button hear the file you have just imported.

at the top and you should

Tutorial - I.Basics Part 4 - Recording with Audacity - Part 4 1. Create a new project Save an empty project. Or simply use the one from the previous part. Remember, that if you don't save your project before you start recording or importing, that all recordings, edit and other files will be written to directory set in the Directories preferences.

2. Check the preferences Make sure your playback and recording device are set. If you're going to record a stereo signal, check the "Record in stereo" checkbox in the Audio I/O preferences.

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When picking a device to record from, make sure you've set up all the connections properly, such as plugging a microphone in to the Mic Input, and any other device in to the Line In of your sound card. Then check that the gain level knob(the amount by how much the input should be amplified) of the mixer of your soundcard is set right.

Since most soundcards can mix the inputs back in to the outputs, the easiest way to test your microphone is to speak in to it while playing with your soundcard mixer. The soundcard mixer is a software either provided by the soundcard maker, or by the operating system you're using. The Windows mixer is pretty straight forward, though some soundcards bring their own along. The Mac's mixer is controlled via the Sound Control Panel, and the Linux users probably have heaploads of mixer applications at their disposal. Just make sure they work before yelling at your screen that nothing works.

3. Hit Record Click on the red Record button

to begin recording.

Click on the blue Pause button

to pause the recording. Press it again to continue.

Click on the yellow Stop button

to cease recording. The cursor will return to its previous position, before the recording was started.

That's it. You can now play around with your recording and explore the editing capabilities of Audacity. Remember that you can use the Undo function almost without limits.

II.Editing for Beginners Part 1 - Introduction - Part 1 Sound Editing in the "real world" Sound editors clean up dialogue tracks, cut layers of special effects, place sounds at certain times, create ambiance tracks by cutting out unwanted stuff and mixing in interesting or necessary sounds. Music production engineers may cut pieces of vocals away or shift them to a another spot in a song.

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Editing is about cutting, placing, fading, cross-fading, shifting, duplicating and adjusting the volume (also referred to as level) of audio material. Mixing is a form of editing too of course.

Here is an example of what is done in sound editing during the production of a television show or film. In the next part we will run you through a few of those techniques in Audacity.

The Path of Sound in Film and TV Postproduction Film and TV crews have at least two people present that take care of recording sound during principal photography of a show. Principal photography is usually shooting the scenes with actual live actors or real backgrounds by the way.

Sound in Principal Photography The first person is the boom pole operator. The boom pole is an extendible stick with a microphone attached to it. This is used to capture dialogue either during filming or not. When not filming, it might be capturing off-scene dialogue or retakes of lines that the actors flunked during actual film takes. The more expensive the show is and the more time there is to do the work, the more people will resort to looping those takes, which is recording those lines in a sound studio environment instead of a film studio or location.

The second person is the sound mixer, who usually sits in a place farther off from the shooting and records the sound captures by the boom pole operator, either via cable or wireless devices to tape,optical disks or hard drive.

This is the raw sound material of a show. It is called production sound and the only desirable parts it usually contains are dialogue and body sounds. In post production, depending on the complexity, budget size and time, almost everything you hear except for the dialogue and some body sounds, are added later during ...

Post Production This is where most of the stuff we'll be describing for Audacity will happen. You've got the recording. Now what ?

After the visual part of the show is cut, the first of which usually isn't the final one, it is handed to the sound editor. In TV shows, you'll usually have one or two people for this, for major film productions a whole bunch more, for which tasks will be subdivided on a finer level.

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Raw sound - Cleanup time No shows do without film edits and many have plenty of them.

Scenes may be shot with with one or more cameras and mics. Actors might have flunked their lines and picking up shooting prior to the mistake might be chosen or the entire sequence reshot. The film editor may have chosen parts from different takes for the cut of the scene. The action might be moving along at the wrong pace and the film editor shortened or stretched parts of a scene.

The sound editor makes sure transitions between cuts are smooth.

He or she removes undesired sounds, such as breathers of the same person that overlap from one film edit to the next.

Material is cut away that contains unwanted sounds, such as creaking chair legs and sharp impacts of objects on tables and floors.

Some of these may require looping of dialogue in the studio, because the noise may have been intolerable. Also, material may sometimes be denoised. The most sophisticated methods remove the whirring of the camera motors from takes. It is used as sparingly as possible though.

It's always desirable to get the best possible sound from the start, which is the recording stage.

Adding stuff - the really big deal After this cleanup is complete, sounds are added.

The first is ambiance. Just close your eyes and listen the sound around you. That's ambiance. Sophistication of ambiances rises with budgets. From premixed to over a dozen tracks, you'll find it all in TV shows and feature films. In any indoor scene with a lot of people in the background, nobody except for the actors being filmed will actually talk. That flurry of conversation is added later on.

Next comes foley. These are clothes rustling(body sounds), foot steps and objects being handled. People that have the ultimate edition of Terminator 2 will know that all of Arnold Schwarzenegger's footsteps and rustle of his leather clothing were created by a five foot woman. These people are usually called foley walkers or foley artists.

The foley editor then cleans those sound, chooses the most fitting takes and makes sure they all sync to the picture properly. The foley mixer then does his/her thing.

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Next come effects. Foley are effects too, but they are a special category and can best be described as live created studio effects.

Effects are usually more heavily edited and recorded from all kinds of places. A lot of effects are created by layering sounds on top of each other, changing their pitch and loudness, editing bits out and adding others.

Many effects you'll hear are phone and door bells ringing, mobile phone beeps, doors of houses and cars opening and closing, weapon shots, slaps, car skids, machines of any kind, space ships flying around, explosions, to name a few.

For example, a friend of mine and I created the sound of a small wooden rowing boat hitting a larger wooden sailing ship and scraping along its side by pitching down a knock on a large wooden door for the impact of the rowing boat and ship, and pitching down the sound of a skateboard rolling and scraping along a halfpipe.

The techniques required to properly handle sounds like these are used in all kinds of productions. Audio books, music production, sound effects creation ... you name it.

For more on this subject, read the Audio Post FAQ at www.filmsound.org.

So let's jump in to the fray and look at how you can handle your sounds in Audacity.

II.Editing for Beginners Part 2 - Cut, Copy and Paste - Part 2 From here on you may encounter funny letter combinations in boxes like this.

These are keyboard shortcuts to the functions presented to you in the text. These can be either single keys (e.g. SPACE) or combinations that need to be held down at the same time(e.g.CTRL+C). You can usually create your own. Check out the this page for more details.

The most basic editing step is cut and paste. It's what people did with tape and it's easy with data in computers, so take a look at these basic operations, referred to as Cut, Copy and Paste. The next page will handle Silence, Duplicate and Split. You may also want to check out the reference section, so you'll know where to find all the tools and how to resize tracks for example.

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It is assumed that you have a project open and that at least one track of audio material is present.

Let's take a look at this example of an Audacity window: The View The Audacity Window

As you can see by the graphics above, the time shift tool is selected. It is used to move the entire audio clip around inside its track.

The cursor (little blinking line across a track and the timeline) will remain at its position, so effectively you'll be sliding your audio material underneath the cursor.

Let's say we want to cut out that bit in the middle then. First we've got to select it.

Making a selection To select the part you wish to cut, copy or paste to, use the selection tool . If it's not activated, do so now by clicking on it in the toolbar.

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Now press and hold the left mouse button while you drag the mouse to mark an area.

This area is darker than the surrounding area of the clip. Note, that even though you can mark an area larger than or extending beyond the actual audio clip in the track, the operations will only work on the actual clip. Playback however will work outside the clip.

Press the space bar to listen to the audio in the marked area.

To extend or contract your selection, hold down the SHIFT button and click on the area you wish your selection to extend or contract to.

If you click at a spot that is on the right hand side from the middle of the current selection, you will set the right hand boundary of your new selection.

Cutting the selection Cut the selection by selecting "Cut" from the Edit menu ...

Before the cut

or press CTRL+X.

After the cut

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Copy will copy the selection to the clipboard.

You can then paste that data back in to any track by clicking where you want this audio to be inserted and select Paste in the Edit menu, or press CTRL+V. Thus pasting is the opposite of cutting. You can also copy material, make another selection with the mouse and then paste. This will replace the selected material with the contents of the clipboard, no matter how short or long either of them are.

During all operations of this kind, the bottom row of the screen will display two things, namely the start time and the end time of your selection. The display to the left if that called "Project rate:" and its value, defaulting to 44100, can be changed by clicking on that number and selecting another from the drop-down menu.

All files, no matter which will be played at that rate. Should the sample rate of a track be different from the Project Rate, these tracks will stutter at track sample rates set lower than the Project Rate. Audacity will warn you , if an audio file is of a sample rate different from the current Project Rate. Audacity will not change the sample rate of any imported audio though.

II.Editing for Beginners Part 3 - Silence, Duplicate and Split - Part 3 Silencing unwanted sources This operation flattens the selection. It essentially is a cut operation without deleting the selection completely. After all, if you cut a second away, nothing remains. Using the Silence operation will still leave you with a flatlined area.

When silencing parts between vocal lines, please keep in mind that a sudden drop in background ambiance can have an bad effect, so at the very least fade the area around the silenced part, to minimize that effect. Rules to start with are, fade in quickly and fade out slowly.

Alternately, use the envelope tool to lower the volume in that area.

That way, you can comfortably change it later.

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Duplicate The selected area gets copied, a new track is created and the copied material is pasted in to that new track at the same point in the timeline.

To illustrate, here's the image from the menu reference:

The benefits of a duplicate are many. One of these is experimentation with effects.

Some of you may say "I can do that with the original track too". But you can't change the volume of your effect and original audio separately. If you put some Reverb on to your audio, you can only lower that processed audio in volume later on. If you duplicate the audio first and use the reverb on that(with 100% reverb and 0% original signal), you can freely change the volume for both the original and reverb signal.

Also, you can do weird and wonderful things to your duplicates to create special effects. You'll have two pieces of the same audio to work with. Silence parts, reverb another, phase a third, filter another and see how that sounds. It is so easy to duplicate a piece of audio and do weird things to it, so try it. Combining sounds produces magic.

A special note on performance : The new piece of audio isn't actually copied on the hard disk.

Audacity will still play from the original audio file(s) until you change a piece of it.

Keyboard Shortcut : CTRL+D Split This performs the same as Duplicate, but it also silences the selected material, after copying it to a new track. Again, here's the illustration from the menu reference:

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There are plenty of good uses for this function, but I'm not going to tell you about them here. You'll have to go to the next part for the meat of this tutorial.

Keyboard Shortcut : CTRL+Y

II.Editing for Beginners Part 4 - Splitting and Submixes - Part 4 Moving bits of an Audio track In all projects you'll be pushing your audio around at some point.

Otherwise, what are you doing here ?

There are techniques, easily achievable with Audacity, to cover almost any kind shifting you'd want to do. In our example, we have a small sentence of speech, where the speaker made a pause after the first word. We'd like to eliminate that pause.

The part after the pause is selected

Select Then the split function is used to pop the selected audio to a new track

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Split The Time Shift Tool moved left.

is selected and the audio on the lower track is

Move Audio and select for fading Now, it's a good idea to listen to the two tracks individually for breathing sounds for example.

Use the solo button of the tracks for this. Then listen them both in the mix. Again, you can use the solo buttons for this.

If you have a lot of other tracks

Two thirds, and not the whole overlapping audio, are chosen to keep the level of audio constant.

If the whole overlapping parts were faded, you would get a level drop of 3dB in the middle of those fades.

You can check this out by taking a piece of music, duplicating it,

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playing at the same time, press the solo buttons on both tracks.

There should be no over lapping or cut-off breathing sounds.

When you're satisfied, fade out the last two thirds of the overlapping upper part of the track, and fade in the first two thirds of the lower overlapping audio.

and then fading the tracks, one fading out, the second fading in.

In the middle of those fades, the level of the mix will drop audibly.

Do a fade over last two thirds for the fade out and first two thirds for the fade in, and you probably won't notice any change in level.

Two thirds is a guideline, but not the law, so you may have to experiment a little.

Mixing it back together again !!!Remember!!!

The final mix is done with the Export as WAV function in the File Menu. Here we'll be looking at creating submixes with the Quick Mix function.

You've done a lot of edits and now have dozens of little tracks with little bits and pieces here and there. It might look like this:

Bits and Pieces spread all over the screen First four tracks selected for quick mixing We can use the Quick Mix function in the Project menu to bring down the number of tracks. However, you don't need to mix everything in to one new track.

Select the tracks you want to mix together by SHIFT+click 'ing on the track panels. In the graphics above, the first four tracks are selected.

Then select Quick Mix. In this example I have quick mixed everything down to two tracks : PODCASTING PRODUCTS Podcast Your Purpose with Million Dollar Mission www.MillionDollarMission.com

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Bits and Pieces, quick mixed down to two tracks And thus, two submixes were created. Remember though, that we did this for convenience of not having to organize a large number or tracks.

If you still want to shift bits around later on, you should make sure that the parts being mixed to a track do not overlap, so you can split it away and edit it again later.

Tutorial - III.Common Editing Tasks Part 1 - Quickies - Part 1 This page will give you an idea of some of the possible things you can do with Audacity and walk you through the process.

Splitting an MP3 into two separate Recording harmonies with yourself files • Open the Preferences, click (Before you try to export MP3 on the Audio I/O tab, and files, read the section on check the box marked "Play Exporting MP3 Files for some other tracks while recording important information on steps new one". you need to do first.)

• Click the Record button.

• Open the MP3 file.

Record yourself singing. Click Stop.

• Select the part of it that you want to be the first file.

• Click the Record button Listen to it by clicking the again. The first track you Play button. recorded will play, but Audacity will also record a • While this part is selected, new track at the same time, choose Export Selection as allowing you to sing harmony MP3... from the File menu. with yourself.

•

Now select the part you want to be the other song and

•

When you play the two tracks

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Export again.

you recorded together, they probably won't be synchronized. This is normal and is not the fault of Audacity. To fix it, you will need to grab the Time Shift tool and slide one of the tracks around until it sounds right.

Mixing background music with a voiceover Audacity makes it very easy to mix two different sounds together.

•

Open one sound (for example, the background music).

•

Select Import Audio... from the Project menu and open the other sound (for example, the voiceover).

•

Listen to your sound using the Play button. Audacity automatically mixes them together.

•

Choose the Time Shift tool and adjust the position of one track or the other until they're synchronized the way you want them. You can even move tracks around while they're playing.

•

•

If you hear clipping which wasn't present in either of the original files, it means that the combined volume of the two tracks is too loud.

Select one or both of the tracks and then use the Amplify... effect to reduce the volumes until you don't hear clipping anymore.

Export as a WAV or MP3 file.

Recording two sound sources on separate tracks •

Open the Preferences, click on the Audio I/O tab, and make sure "Record in Stereo" is checked.

•

Connect one sound source to the left channel of your soundcard and the other on the right. If you don't have an external mixer with a pan control, use a stereo/mono splitter cable.

•

Record your stereo track.

•

On the button with the track name is a drop-down menu.

Select "Split Stereo Track" from this menu.

•

Use the drop down menu again to change each track to mono.

•

To make a panned stereo track out of each new mono track, select one track and choose Duplicate from the Edit menu. Reduce the level of one channel (using a negative value under Amplify in the Effect menu.) Then choose Make Stereo Track

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from the drop-down menu on the first track.

•

Repeat as necessary for further tracks (see Recording harmonies with yourself above). If mastering from tape, a click recorded across all tracks will help you synchronize them in Audacity.

Tutorial - III.Common Editing Tasks Part 2 - Editing Vocal Tracks - Part 2 The Situation You have: Vocals, Speech or Wallas (fx made with voices) You want to: •

remove inappropriate breathers, coughing, bad takes, parts you didn't like and bad noises

•

use only the good parts of takes

•

construct sequences from parts of different takes

You can combine three ways of handling this: 1.

Silence stuff you don't want.

2.

Substitute it with,

3.

o

a piece of ambiance to prevent a sudden hole in the sound texture

o

more fitting breather, that works better, if you're cutting a breather away.

Use the envelope tool to create volume automation to pull down those parts, so they won't sound as loud in the end.

When do I use what ?

The first option is a tool, but is rarely used by itself.

Continuous sound is the key in those cases and having the ambiance, even if it's just a bit of

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In audio books, radio interviews and sometimes in dialog for a film, the vocal tracks will stand alone in many parts of your project.

Therefore the second option is general practice. Many times, the third option is used as well(envelope tool). The holes you create with it are easier to control and change at later times, but still need to be filled up with replacement material.

When using the envelope tool, replacement material is usually overlayed by placing the filler material on another track right at the area in the timeline as the hole is. For this reason only silence unwanted audio if it's too obtrusive.

Bad takes are of course not usable, so usually you'll have to cut that stuff away.

Just remember, that cut and delete(cut without copying to the clipboard) work like cutting tape away and sticking the remaining pieces together. If you're doing things that require critical timing, you need to keep this in mind. Use the Silence function instead.

quiet dark noise, drop away in many parts by silencing them isn't going to sound as good as keeping a steady sound texture.

Therefore filling those holes with material on another track and fading the edges to make it all sound continuous is the preferred way to do it.

There are situations, such as vocals in a song, that you'd like to sound as clean as possible.

The best way is to have a very quiet recording room or location.

The second best way is to use volume automation to get rid of any unwanted stuff. It allows you to change or take back what you did after you have made those changes to the volume curve with the envelope tool.

With volume automation you can mute sections of the audio without actually making any edits to the audio data.

The Three Options - a quick How To Silencing o

Select an unwanted piece of audio.

o

Listen to it a couple of times, adjust your selection if necessary, and listen again.

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Select Silence from the edit menu or hit CTRL+L on your keyboard.

o

Fade the edges of the audio beyond your selection to smooth it out.

o

Listen to it. If it doesn't sound good, hit Undo or press CTRL+Z on your keyboard, and try again fading those edges.

o

Repeat this procedure for every part you don't want in your audio.

Substitution 1.)

Silence all unwanted bits as described in the section above.

Substitution expands and improves that option. Be sure to only silence the bits you don't want and don't forget to fade the edges around the silenced material. Then come back here.

2.)

Now that you've silenced all unwanted, create a new audio track.

3.)

Now find a piece of audio that'll work as a substitute for those deleted parts. This is usually a piece of ambiance somewhere else in the audio track. The speaker might have made a longer pause, so look in those areas first. Select that bit and duplicate it.

4.)

Using the time shift tool, move the duplicated ambiance directly beneath the first silenced part in your vocal track.

5.)

Now select the entire track by clicking on track panel just beneath the Solo buttons, and duplicate it. Mute that new track.

This will be our filler for the next gap in the original track.

6.)

Turn your attention back to the first bit of ambience, that is now right underneath the bit that we silenced in our vocal track.

Using the Envelope Tool o

Switch to the envelope tool

o

Left-Click in to an area to create a new automation point or leftclick on an existing automation point and drag to change the location of the point.

o

The automation you have written remains bolted to the audio, so it will move along with the audio when you use the timeshift tool.

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An example:

Using the envelope tool - an example

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