Recording (Podcast)

After you've got all your gear set up and you've practiced your microphone technique, you're ready to hit the record button and go, right? Wrong. Recording is not something you should rush into. In fact, the more time you take to test, prepare, and practice beforehand, the better your podcast will be. You've seen it in the movies or on television — the rock and roll roadie going from mic to mic saying, "Check-one-two," over and over again. There's a good reason for this. He's checking to make sure:

- The mic works

- The monitoring desk at the side of the stage is receiving signal

- The mixing desk out in front of the house is receiving signal

- A person standing in front of this microphone will hear himself

Luckily, you won't have to check quite as many things, but you really do need to make sure everything is working before you start recording. It's time for your own version of a sound check.

Sound check
Sound check is what you do before you press the record button. It's the last sanity check before you commit to your podcast. Even if you've used your recording setup a hundred times before, you should always do a quick sound check to make sure everything is working as expected. Your mental check list may differ depending on your situation, but essentially you have to check the following:

- All your microphones are working and have enough gain

- Any other audio sources are working and have enough gain

- All the equipment in your audio chain is functioning properly

- Your recording device is getting a good level

- Your aux send levels (such as the send to a telephone hybrid) are good

- The level in the headphones is good (if you're using headphones)

Of course, to test whether a mic is working, someone has to be talking into it. This is where "Check-one-two" comes in. Always set and check levels with the actual talent, so you get the levels right. After all, not everyone is as much of a blowhard as you are. In fact, some of your guests may be downright wallflowers. If so, a common trick to get your talent talking before the interview is to ask them what they had for breakfast. Even if they can't remember, or if they say they don't usually have breakfast, it's usually enough to get them started and serves as an icebreaker for the actual show. Of course, you can ask your talent about anything you like — just get them talking for a few seconds so you can check your levels. After you've checked all your levels and are satisfied that they look good, you're ready to start recording.

The countdown
You need to do two things to start your recording session. First, you have to press the record button. It's actually not unheard of for complete interviews to be done before people realize that they forgot to start recording. Unfortunately, one of your authors knows from experience. Save yourself the embarrassment, and make sure to press the record button.

Next, let the talent know that the recording has actually started, and leave a good spot for you to edit later on. This is where the countdown comes in. After you've pressed the record button, put a little identifier at the start of your file, including the name of your interviewee, and a quick countdown, something like, "Interview with Charles Peterson, talking about Leica cameras, in five… four… three… two… one." Take a deep breath. Introduce your show, your guest, the topic, and you're off and running.

The countdown is important for a couple of reasons. First, leaving a small, silent gap at the beginning of your podcast makes it much easier to edit. A common mistake novices make is to go from the sound check straight into the interview, without even so much as a breath in between. It may feel natural at the time, but you'll find when you're trying to edit to clean up the start of the podcast that it doesn't sound natural when you cut out the sound check chatter. Second, the countdown is a focusing mechanism, both for you as an interviewer and for the talent. It doesn't matter how off-the-cuff you want your podcast to sound; you still want it to sound professional, and giving yourself and your talent that extra few seconds to mentally prepare works wonders.

Tip A great way to test your talent's levels is to have them say their name and then spell it. This way you know how to pronounce their name, and how to spell it!

Intros and outros
Every radio and television interview program with a host has an intro and an outro. They're important, because they tell the audience what they can expect during the program, and they provide an overview of the topic. The intro to your podcast should have a "hook" in it, meaning a sneak peek or hint about the subject matter that makes the show irresistible to your audience. Not everyone in your audience is going to be riveted by every single guest and topic you decide to cover. We live in a busy world, and you've got lots of competition for your audience's time. Use the intro to tell your audience why you're excited about the program, particularly if you're covering a slightly obscure topic or you have a guest without marquee name recognition. If you do a good job of getting your audience excited, they'll stick around for the entire podcast.

Similarly, be sure to wrap up every program with a good outro. Obviously, you need to thank your guest(s) and your audience. You should also summarize the program, highlighting the subjects you covered. Then use this time to talk about your next podcast. If folks have made it this far, chances are good that they'll come back for your next podcast, perhaps even subscribe to your RSS feed. You can help ensure that they do so by letting them know what to expect next time around. This may be the first program that some listeners have tuned in to. Even if you don't know exactly who your guests will be or what topics will be discussed during the next program, you can at least give them an idea of what to expect.

Doing "drop-ins" and "pick-ups"
No matter how prepared you are, you may forget to cover something that you absolutely must have in your program. You may realize it at the end of your recording session when glancing at your notes, or heaven forbid you may realize it during the editing phase. Not to worry; if you were relatively careful setting up your levels, you should be able to do it as a "drop-in" or "pick-up."

A drop-in is when you record over an existing recorded piece and replace a section with a newly recorded version. For example, when movies are sanitized for viewing on airplanes and television, the actors have to drop-in over all the blue language and replace it with "drat!" or some other acceptable utterance. A pick-up is when you add to the end of the recording, knowing that you'll later edit the piece and insert the pick-up section where it belongs in the interview.

Drop-ins are more common in multi-track music recording, where an otherwise perfect performance may be marred by a single bad note. In cases like this, the musician or singer will sing along with the recorded version, and the engineer will "drop in" and record over the offending section. This requires quite a bit of skill and is not for the faint-hearted.

Pick-ups, however, will probably become part and parcel of your podcasting routine. For example, you may want to redo your introduction to reflect something that came up during the interview. Or you may want to rephrase some of the questions you asked, or perhaps even ask a question that you forgot earlier in the interview. In this case, you can simply do a pick-up, where you record what you need after the initial interview. Then, during the editing phase, you can move the sections around at will. Editing is covered in the next section.

What Is Podcasting?

Just two years ago, at this writing, the idea of a "podcast" made its first appearance on the scene. Already as many as 10,000 people are podcasting and as many as 15 million listeners are downloading and listening to audio programming through Real Simple Syndication (RSS) channels. Early podcasters are earning a living from their work, while others have launched service businesses that deliver audio production for commercial clients. But for most, the vast majority, podcasting is about one-to-few communication facilitated by IP-based networks and simple tools


The tools of the podcaster's trade

The basics you need to do a podcast: A microphone and recording device, which could be an old tape player, a solid-state recorder, or your personal computer, editing software, and a place to host the resulting program. This sounds like a lot of pieces, but compared to the complexity of producing and distributing a radio or television program a decade ago, podcasting is self-produced media realized. In a nutshell, a podcast is, according to Wikipedia, a "direct download…file, but the subscription feed of automatically delivered new content is what distinguishes a podcast from a simple download or real-time streaming." This is a description of many different services that pre-date the introduction of podcasting; a more accurate definition, in our opinion, is this:

"A podcast is a series of audio (or video) programs delivered through a static URL containing an RSS feed that automatically updates a list of programs on the listener's computer so that people may download new programs using a desktop application. Programs can be delivered to the listener automatically or when they choose to download them."

Already there are variations on this definition, because podcasts can be delivered directly to handheld devices without the intervention of a desktop computer or software. Likewise, podcasts have changed radically as video has been added to the mix. Originally, podcasts were simply MP3 files, a widely used audio format. Today, podcasts include MP4 and other video file formats, as well as other audio formats such as Windows Media, Ogg Vorbis, and Audible that support subscriptionbased and advertising-based podcast business models.

If you remember something called "push" technology from the late 1990s, podcasting may sound familiar. Companies like PointCast Inc. distributed client software that periodically polled network servers, downloading massive amounts of topical content, including audio and video programming, dumping older content from the user's hard drive to make room for the new material. Pointcast's audience could browse the new content without any network latency, which was the rule in those dialup times. It was the first attempt at non-streaming rich media delivery, but "push" was doomed to fail by its business model, which front-loaded costs for everyone — producers paid for distribution, and Pointcast incurred massive bandwidth and technology development expenses that killed the company before it could convert its audience into advertising revenues. The audience got everything for free, although Pointcast had plans to offer subscription-based programs before it collapsed well in advance of the rest of the Internet bubble's bursting.

However, push technology and podcasting are significantly different. Podcasting is built on opensource foundations. Instead of concentrating the distribution channel in the hands of a few companies like Pointcast, podcasting protocols allow any developer to add the ability to query a server to retrieve content to its application or Web service, and most importantly, podcasting allows anyone to place a program into distribution without having to go through an intermediary host that aggregates many channels of information. Pointcast is unneeded in many podcasting scenarios, because the podcaster can communicate directly with the listener. At its founding, podcasting was designed to subvert the economic equations of existing media, thwarting not just the role of the aggregator but also the advertiser.

But much about podcasting remains controversial because of those initial assumptions about the revenue models, or lack thereof.

Discussion of podcasting is difficult, because it is so young. The people who helped launch the industry are very particular about what is a podcast and what isn't. Moreover, they are vocal about it. That is, people talk about podcasts like the form is a kind of poem or book, turning definitions of what a podcast should be into a kind of religious argument. Podcasts, according to programmer Dave Winer, one of the people credited with inventing the technology, should be free — in fact, according to Winer, podcasts were engineered specifically to defy advertisers' efforts to include promotional content in podcasted programs.

"If you're not using MP3, you're probably trying to make podcasting into a replay of previous media," Winer wrote on November 12, 2005, the day after an advertising tracking service was introduced by Audible Inc. "By design, podcasting took a poison pill at the very beginning of its life that made it impossible for the corporate types to subvert it without fundamentally changing what it is. That's why I was sure that Audible wasn't doing podcasting. Basically MP3 can't be rigged up to serve the purpose of advertisers, and that's why I love MP3. And only MP3 provides the portability and compatibility that users depend on. Any other method will force them to jump through hoops that they will resist. If so, then podcasting isn't for the advertisers."

Winer's initial choices about podcasting's technology reflect that he served the poison pill. Yet, by the time he wrote this, podcasts were being delivered in many different file formats, including Quicktime files that played on Video iPods from Apple Computers Inc. The cat was out of the bag, and new uses must and will be found for podcasting or users will route around the rigid boundaries.

In fact, if podcasting is going to remain relevant — and we think it will — the technology will be extremely pliant, supporting many file formats and many more business models. Had the inventors of the personal computer decided what kind of projects it could be used for, the PC would have been designed for failure. In fact, one of the fathers of the PC, Alan Kay, says today that the problem holding back the personal computer today is reliance on the narrow range of ideas he helped think up in the 1970s.