A trial run of podcasting using crappy equipment (a $10 mic from Radio Shack plugged into the stock sound card in my two-year-old Dell) and free software (Audacity for Windows). Added the ‘album art’ to the MP3 file through iTunes. And WordPress 1.5 helpfully handled the upload and feed wrapping.
This five-minute experiment was cobbled together late one Wednesday night after my family went to bed. I expect future shows will feature a lot of whispering.
First thoughts? I need to practice speaking (I dabbled in radio before, honest). And clearly, white noise is going to be a problem. A better mic would help, but PC noise is hard to hide. Also, featuring music would be great, but licensing is a big issue. This podcast just uses music by people I know, more to test crossfading than anything else, but if I do this, I guess I’ll have to get to know some of the podcast-friendly music libraries out there. Finally, I don’ t think a five-minute podcast should make a 4MB file. I need to get up to speed on bitrates and compression.
 
3.9MB MP3