As I wrote in a previous post, I have recently created a podcast page on my blog. I have now started adding podcasts from the audio recordings of the monthly workshops on various aspects of yoga philosophy that I have been offering for about two years now.
When I started researching on the net as to how to create podcasts, many different approaches came to surface. Since I use the WordPress platform for my blog, I decided to narrow down the approaches that are applicable for wordpress. The whole process seemed a little bit daunting in the beginning. However, I was able to devote a little more time to my investigations when I had to cancel all my engagements during the "snow days" in January. I was able to use that time to research the net, try out a few approaches and finally settle on the one that I am using now.
I am giving below the process involved in creating the podcasts:
Recording equipment
For my audio recordings, I have been using a small DVR (digital voice recorder) by Olympus, model WS-700M. It is small enough to fit conveniently in my pocket. That way, I can walk around the room while giving the talk and continue to do the recording. I use a lapel clip microphone connected to the DVR to capture the audio. It is obviously not a professional quality recording system, but has proved quite adequate for my purposes.
This DVR has options for recording high, medium or low quality audio. Since I am only recording speech (not music), I use a bit rate of 128 kb/s for recording. For music etc. higher bit rates are also available. I also record the audio in the MP3 format which makes it easy to edit and export it to any device for playback.
Audio editing
Having recorded the audio, I need to edit it to remove any portions which are either not relevant to the topic at hand or include periods of long silence etc. Sometimes there are periods of conversation with or among the students that are not easily discernible which need to be removed.
I use the Audacity software to do the audio editing. This is an open-source free software and is perhaps the most popular audio editing software in the industry. Even though the software has some very advanced and sophisticated features, for my purposes I end up using only a very small subset of the features. There is a large number of plug-ins and add-ons that one can download and install to enhance the feature-set of the software. One of the commonly used add-ons is called LAME which is needed to export the file back to the MP3 format. If you don’t use this software, once the file has been imported into and opened in audacity, it can only be saved in a native audacity format. Having done the editing, I export the file back to MP3 and save it to my PC.
Hosting the mp3 audio files
Since I already have a host for my websites, my initial thought was to store all the audio files on my web server. However, it turns out that most web hosts do not allow audio files meant for a podcast to be stored on their server. Their servers are not geared for allowing multiple people to access those files on a regular basis. So, I needed to find a different host for the podcast files.
Again, web search showed several different choices – the popular ones being SoundCloud, podbean, libsyn and Amazon S3, among others. After doing some playing around with all of these, I finally decided to use the Amazon S3 service as host. One advantage with this service is that it charges only for the bandwidth used, as opposed to a fixed monthly fee used by others.
Creating an RSS podcast feed
The main purpose of creating a podcast is for people to be able to receive automatic updates when new podcast episodes are added. They should also have the ability to listen to the podcast online as well as to download for later use. RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is one of the most popular file formats that allows delivery of frequently updated content on a blog. Google’s feedburner is a popular service that can add features to the RSS feed and also allows syndication to multiple directories. There, you can provide the URL for the podcast page on the blog, and provide the necessary "metadata". This includes the various "tags" applicable for the podcasts, some basic information about the podcast etc. Once you provide all the information, feedburner will give you a feed.
Choosing a podcast directory
A large number of directories are available online where people can go to and subscribe to your podcasts. The most popular among these is Apple’s "itunes". Some other popular ones are Stitcher, Libsyn, blubrry etc. You can actually add your feed to multiple directories so more people can access your podcasts. For the time being, I have decided to go with itunes only. If need be, I can always add more directories in the future.
For podcasts to be listed on itunes, there are a few basic requirements that need to be met. Itunes uses all the "metadata" that was provided during creating the RSS feed. In addition, itunes also requires a cover art image with a min size of 1400×1400 pixels. You can go as high as 3000×3000 pixels. The cover art and the metadata help prospective listeners to get more relevant information about the podcast.
Of course, to be able to listen to podcasts on itunes, you need to install the itunes software on your PC. You cannot listen to the podcast on the itunes online store.
Whether to use a WordPress plugin or not
This is one area where I had to spend a fair amount of time trying out various solutions, both with and without podcast plugins. There are many podcast plugins available for wordpress – libsyn, blubrry, seriously simple podcasting (SSP), podlove etc. After studying the pros and cons of most of them, I finally decided to go with SSP. As the name suggests, it is a fairly simple plugin to install and use. It gets installed as one of the Post categories in the WP dashboard. It has a "series" feature that lets you add more episodes to the same RSS feed. One benefit of this plugin is that it creates a podcast page on the blog and every new podcast post gets added to the page. That way a reader can get access to all the podcasts from the same page.
While trying out the features of SSP, I was a bit disappointed to find that this plugin does not work with feedburner provided feeds. It provides its own RSS feed. Of course, this doesn’t cause a problem if you are using only one podcast directory (like itunes). However, it cannot use the full capability of RSS which is to allow syndication for much wider availability. However, given the ease of use, I have decided to stay with SSP for the time being.
Steps to create the podcast series using SSP:
- Use the series option under post category "podcast".
- It will ask you for a series slug which is a name for the podcast series and gets added to the feed URL. In itunes, you need to subscribe to this url.
- When you create a new podcast post, make sure to click the series that it belongs to.
- It is a good idea to assign appropriate tags to each post to make it easier for people to find it on itunes.
- As soon as the post is published, you can refresh the itunes and the new episode shows up there.
How to publish on itunes
Having created the podcast on the blog, it is now time to publish it on itunes for wider distribution. To do that, I followed the instructions available on this website. Most of the steps are those that I have already mentioned above. Finally, to submit the podcast to Apple for approval so as to publish it on the itunes store, I followed the instructions given at the link in step 6 of the instructions. Once the podcast is approved, Apple sends you an approval email. At that point you can go to itunes on your PC and add the URL and the RSS feed in itunes. Once the podcast appears on itunes, any new episodes that you add in your blog which are a part of the same series will appear in itunes shortly thereafter.
There you have it – the full procedure that I have used to create podcasts for all the audio recordings from the monthly workshop sessions on yoga philosophy. As you can see, there are two final products: the podcast page on my blog and the podcast channel on itunes which you can subscribe to. Once subscribed, you will continue to receive updates whenever a new podcast episode is added.
If you already have a podcast channel, I would love to hear about your experience with it. If you would like to get started with creating your own, I hope the above steps will be of some help.
Please visit the blog page and/or the itunes channel to listen to the podcasts. I would love to hear back from you with your comments/feedback.
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