Before we get going here i want to explain why i picked Audacity as the main recording program. The main reason was of course it was free and the second reason was that despite the fact its free its also quite power full. This program will not only do single track recording but you can lay down multiple tracks should you wish to get into making fancy pod casts with lots of music or effects.

The other tool we need is the lame mp3 encoder and thats a simple .DLL file we need and with that it makes Audacity able to export mp3 files witch is what we want.

So basicly them two things are all we need. Now to get them we have to goto www.sourceforge.net once there type in Audacity into the search bar and do a search. It should turn up the latest version of Audacity also on that same download page you should see the bit on there about the lame mp3 encoder and grab that as well.

After you get both programs downloaded then install Audacity first when thats done open the zip file up for the lame mp3 encoder. Once you have that open you will see lame_enc.dll right click on that single file and extract just that file to the folder where you installed Audacity to.

After you do that load up Audacity and just hit the record button it don't matter if you record audio or not i just want a simple thing to be able to do a test. After you record for about a second or 2 stop the recording and then goto the file menu and select export as mp3. When you try and export what you recorded you will be prompted to tell Audacity where the .DLL file is and since you just put that file in where you installed Audacity then you should know where you put the .DLL file.. Once you tell Audacity where the file is then you will be prompted with your options screen where you can type info into it. For the time being just cancel that and go back to the main program.

Now the next thing we want to tackle is make sure your MIC is working load your windows volume/mixer up thats that little speaker down in the system tray. Double click on that and then goto properties and then recording properties. Now under this next screen you have to know where your MIC is plugged into and make sure the MIC level is set to a decent level. Next with the proper input set in the mixer to where your MIC is you should be able to hit the record button in Audacity and see a wave form pattern show up when you speak.

Note your seeing a stereo wave file being displayed above. If that was a mono sound file you would only see the one waveform and not 2.

Now if you got a wave form and you can here it on play back then your good shape. If you ain't seeing any wave form at ll then the recording mixer isn't set to the right input and you have to go back into the mixer and see whats going on.

That is pretty much it if you can record your audio your ready to go. A few things to keep in mind though is you don't want your pod cast huge as in file size so the best thing to do is to go into the File and then into Preferences now once there select Audio I/O now when this screen shows up set the following...

Set the playback and recording device to whatever your sound card is in my case it's the Sound Blaster Audigy. Next after doing that set the channels to 1 the reason for this is you want a mono recording and not stereo to keep your file size down. Thats it for that tab screen leave the rest of the stuff there at default settings.

Next move onto the next tab witch is the Quality tab and once there change the following to what i have below and leave the other settings at there default values.

Under Default Sample rate select 22050 hz
Default Sample format should be 16 bit

And the rest of the settings on that tab can be left at default settings.

Now onto the File Formats Tab and in there look for MP3 Export Setup and then look for Bit Rate and then set that to 24.

Here is a good time to mention that you don't have to use the same settings i have in this tutorial my settings are the way they are do to i wanted the file size as small as i could get it and still keep a decent Audio quality. If you have massive amounts of bandwidth where you will be keeping your pod casts then you may want to go and up the record quality or not use such a heavy compression such as 24kbps on the mp3 export.. The more compression you use on a file or the lower the sample rate on the recording the worse the audio will be in the mp3 file. So basicly set the settings to what you can afford bandwidth wise.

The last thing i want to talk about is distortion if your not carefull when your recording and you have your MIC level set to high you will be doing what they call clipping witch means your over driving the audio signal. If you do only a bit of clipping thats one thing but if you get the MIC level to high it will end up being all distortion and sound like crap. Your best bet in terms of distortion is to avoid it all together and record your audio with levels that are are not set to max. Play with the program and you will soon see what a distorted signal looks like compared to one thats not i will give you two examples here with screen shots one will be a good recording level and one a bad or distorted signal and what they look like on the wave form display.

In the pic above you see a clean audio signal with no distortion.

In the picture above here we see the audio is clearly distorted and right off the scale.


One thing to keep in mind if your audio levels are a bit low and your finding it hard to here something after its been recorded try and use the Normalize function under the Effect menu. Try Normalize with its default settings and see if that ups the volume. Also you could select Effect and then Amplify and then bring the volume up that way on the audio. Keep in mind for these to work you have to have the part or the entire audio clip selected or they won't work.

This will be the end of this tutorial on the basics of a pod cast. Don't be scared of the software and get in there and mess around with it. Learn what you can do with it. I'm sure if you do a google search there will be web sites out there that will cover more stuff on this program.

WolfManz611..