Podcasting With Soundtrack Pro
Part 1: Introduction
15 December 2005 Justin Williams Skip to comments
6 Comments
(
Closed)
Podcasting has exploded over the past year. Justin Williams gives you an introduction to creating your own podcast using Mac OS X and Apple's Soundtrack Pro. Part 1 of 5.
The New Oxford American Dictionary of English recently dubbed the word podcast as their Word of the Year. Erin McKean, editor in chief of the dictionary, said: “Podcast was considered for inclusion last year, but we found that not enough people were using it, or were even familiar with the concept. This year it’s a completely different story. The word has finally caught up with the rest of the iPod phenomenon.”
Without a doubt, the idea and implementation of Podcasting has exploded over the past year with venture capitalists investing in companies like PodShow and Odeo as well as Apple adding support for the technology in iTunes. Major media outlets like Fox, ABC, NPR and others are producing podcasts and distributing them online via iTunes and other services. Earlier this year there was even a podcasting convention where all of the major players in the field gathered to discuss the future of the medium.
Back in June (before iTunes) I wrote an article that outlined the concepts behind podcasting and how listeners could get involved. If you want a more in-depth discussion of the history of the technology and how to become a listener, please read my article Podcasting 101: TiVo For Your iPod. The focus of this piece will be an introduction to creating your own podcasting using Mac OS X. In this first piece, I am going to introduce you to the tools we will becoming familiar with over the next several weeks. I’ll give an overview of how they fit into the production of a podcast.
Why Do I Need To Podcast?
Before we begin looking into what it takes to create a podcast, we should analyze some of the reasons you may want to get into podcasting. First, it gives you an easy way to share with your friends and family. Many people create podcasts and release them online for anyone to download, but you can also create a podcast specifically for a group of people.
Rather than writing the typical family newsletter that you send out around this time of year, why not get the family together around the computer and record a podcast of what has been going on in your lives? You can then share the audio file with your friends and family so they can listen at their leisure. Services like Odeo are making it even easier to share a podcast with just friends.
Aside from that, you can also use a podcast to share a hobby with the Internet community. We are all passionate about certain topics in our lives. Personally, I love to discuss technologies like the Macintosh platform and developing for both the Mac and the Web. My brother, on the other hand, loves to talk about cars and how to maintain and modify them. While diverse topics, they are both perfect for creating a podcast.
Moving forward with my brother, he tried to create a blog a few years ago. I helped him get up and running and showed him how to post entries. He rarely used it though. He didn’t want to invest the time sitting there and trying to write about his car and what he was currently doing to it. If he could just sit in front of a microphone and record himself talking about the car, he would have been much happier. For many, speech is a much more natural way of communication than writing.
What it boils down to is passion. Passion is what creates a great Podcast and if you have a passion about a specific topic, you are a prime candidate for hosting your own show. All you need is an idea and the desire.
Passion, Desire, Macintosh
What I just said isn’t totally true. There is one more necessary ingredient. You need a Macintosh and the proper software to create a Podcast. There are several routes to take when it comes to creating your podcast. If you ask four different Podcasters how they create their show, you will most likely get four different explanations. Since this is such a new and changing medium, there really isn’t a set of best practices to follow when it comes to creating a show. I am going to walk you through how I create the MacZealots Podcast that we started creating a few weeks ago.
The main piece of hardware you will need to follow this tutorial is a Mac running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Towards the end of this series of articles we will be using some Tiger-specific technologies like Automator to help make the production of your podcast easier. As a point of reference, I am going to be creating and writing this tutorial on a Dual 2 GHz PowerMac G5 running Mac OS X 10.4.3.
Besides your Macintosh, you will need a microphone of some sort to get your voice into your Macintosh. If you have an iBook, iMac or Powerbook you are in luck: there is a built-in microphone in your machine. Be advised that you won’t get the greatest audio quality from these microphones as they will pick up all of the background noise that is around you.
If you want a more professional sound, you should invest in a professional microphone like the Samson C01U USB Microphone or the Blue Snowball USB Microphone. I have not used either of these microphones, so I cannot vouch for how good or bad they are. If you are a user of either, leave a comment and let us know what you think.
To create my podcasts, I use an Apple iSight and a $5 Radio Shack windscreen. I put the windscreen over the iSight to eliminate some background noise and help reduce breathing noises and any other background noise that may be in my environment when I am recording. I don’t have a professional sound from this solution, but it’s better than what I was getting from a desktop microphone or my iBook’s built-in mic.
The final essential piece of hardware for creating your podcast is a set of headphones. Headphones are used to hear what your podcast sounds like as you are recording. If you are recording an interview with someone and listening to it through your Mac’s speakers, you will have an annoying echo effect from your microphone picking up what your speakers are playing as well. By routing your audio into a pair of headphones, only you will hear the audio and it won’t be picked up by your microphone.
The Software
Like microphones, the software you use to create your podcast can vary between podcasters. The main pieces of software that almost any podcaster should have are Rogue Aomeba’s Audio Hijack Pro and Cycling ‘74’s SoundFlower. SoundFlower is used to route audio from a variety of sources into Audio Hijack Pro. It is a free system extension that resides in your Mac OS X menubar. When running, it presents itself as a new audio device in the Sound System Preferences pane. Audio routing is important when we get to the point where we want to use Audio Hijack Pro to record interviews on your Podcast.
You may remember that I wrote about Audio Hijack Pro in my tutorial on recording from an XM Satellite Radio receiver. In that tutorial I gave a brief introduction to the power of AHP, but we will dive deeper into the application as we go forward with this tutorial.
If you are conducting an interview and need to record more than just your own voice, there are two routes you can take: Skype or Apple’s iChat. Both applications allow you to create audio chats between you and several parties. I tend to use iChat because it has an easier to use interface and its guaranteed that any Mac user has it installed on their machine. If you need to interview people that may be using Windows as well, I would use Skype. Let it be noted that you can adapt many parts of the interview portion of the tutorial to adapt to Skype.
After we have all of the audio for our Podcast, we need to piece everything together. To do this, I use Apple’s Soundtrack Pro. Soundtrack Pro is Apple’s professional application for creating original audio using Apple Loops as well as editing preexisting audio in a nondestructive manner similar to Final Cut Pro.
The nondestructive editing is one of the best features of Soundtrack Pro. It allows you to add and remove changes you make to your original audio source by simply unchecking a box. When you are finally at a point where you are happy with all of the changes you have made to the original, you can save it as a final piece. Its intuitive interface make it a pleasure to use.
Besides the nondestructive editing, it also allows for easy placement of portions of your show in multiple tracks. I tend to record my podcast in several segments and then piece it together in a Soundtrack Pro Audio Project. This allows me to put each portion on its own track, adjust that tracks levels to a specific volume and then do some final post processing on the full project at the end.
As I said, you can also use Soundtrack Pro to create original audio productions much like you would with Apple’s GarageBand. Soundtrack Pro, however, has an advantage over GarageBand because it gives you almost limitless flexibility to work with audio creation. For instance, you can use the audio plugins that come bundled with the application to give your production a unique sound. You can also acquire third-party plugins from a variety of sources to give you even more flexibility.
Soundtrack Pro’s $300 price tag may seem hefty to some, but if you are going to be working with with your podcast on a regular basis, it is well worth the investment. As we dig deeper into creating podcasts, I will show you how the application can make your podcast production go even smoother.
The final two pieces of software required for our tutorials are Feeder and ChapterToolMe. Feeder, from Reinvented Software, allows for the easy creation of RSS feeds. RSS files are filled with confusing XML tags that most people do not want to deal with writing and understanding. Using Feeder, you can simply fill in a few fields in the application and have a fully functional RSS file that your listeners can subscribe to.
ChapterToolMe is what allows you to add iTunes chapter marks to your podcast. If you listen to either of the MacZealots Podcasts you will notice that the artwork changes for each segment of the show and contains links that are relevant to the topic at hand. This is a feature unique to iTunes’ podcasts, and is done easily with the ChapterToolMe application.
What A Tease!
That’s all we are going to cover in this first installment of this series of articles. I wanted to give you an introduction to the tools that we will be using in future articles and give you an opportunity to download the applications and try them out. It will be much more beneficial for you to have a bit of experience working with each application before following the tutorial because you will better understand their user interfaces.
In our next segment, I will walk you through the creation of a one-man podcast. We will cover recording our own audio and how to edit it to get a better sound using Soundtrack Pro.
Update: Part 2 is now online. Check it out!
Justin Williams is founder and chief author for MacZealots. He switched to the Mac almost five years ago hasn't looked back since. When not blogging or coding, you can find him watching copious amounts of TV. Justin can be reached at
Reader Comments (6)
DISCLAIMER: The views expressed below are those of their authors and not necessarily endorsed or supported by MacZealots.com. In all cases, the comments provided here are offered as a courtesy and will be moderated. Any content deemed off-topic or offensive will be removed without notice. Posting a comment here boils down to two things: 1.) Think before you type 2.) Respect the thoughts of others. See our commenting guidelines and/or privacy policy for more information.
#1) On December 16, 2005 12:18 PM
Thanks for the review Justin. A podcast specific review of STP is just what I needed. The Blue Snowball bundle with the retro tripod is on my Christmas list. btw, I heard there is a sweet edu price on STP for all students out there. Anxious for part 2.
#2) On December 16, 2005 4:15 PM
I’ve been using a professional level mic for a year with my iMac. My Sony mic, which I’d use in a minute in live gigs, plugs nicely into the back of my iMac w/o having to use a USB connection. I have a 10.3.9 OS X, 1.8 ghz G5 with 1 GB of DDR SDRAM. So there’s No need for a USB mic.
Also, I compose music on a daily basis and garage band is a very good tool to connect 3rd party devices such as the M-Audio keystation or an electric guitar. I find the settings for voice to be near infinite. While I don’t doubt Sound track pro a good tool, GB can certainly be used very effectively for podcasts w/o the additional $300 cost.
#3) On December 16, 2005 11:46 PM
I use the Samson C01U with my Powerbook and it sounds great! And it’s so simple and easy to use. It looks much cooler, more like a regular mic than that weird snowball one.
#4) On December 17, 2005 7:23 PM
Soundtrack Pro is cool, but for $300 I would perosnally recommend instead getting a PreSonus Firebox FireWire audio interface, which comes with a free copy of Cubase LE.
Cubase LE seems to offer many of the same features that Soundtrack Pro does, certainly enough to put together a basic podcast. And, you’ll get a high quality FireWire audio interface along with the deal!
http://www.presonus.com/firebox.html
Then, instead of getting a USB mic, just get any old standard microphone from Guitar Center (or even RadioShack if you’re on a budget) and plug it into the Firebox. It supports CoreAudio, so you won’t even need to install any drivers!
#5) On January 4, 2006 1:24 PM
I bought a Snowball and I have to be honest. The only piece of software I have been able to get it to work with is Garageband… and I never use garageband.
WARNING: This mic is not as “plug and play” as they claim. There is a work around in the FAQ on the blue site, but the fix doesn’t seem to help at all. If you plan on using anything but Garageband… DON’T BUY THIS MIC… at least until they work out the bugs, or develop a driver for it.
#6) On January 10, 2006 6:32 AM
“WARNING: This mic is not as plug and play as they claim. There is a work around in the FAQ on the blue site, but the fix doesnt seem to help at all. If you plan on using anything but Garageband DONT BUY THIS MIC at least until they work out the bugs, or develop a driver for it.”
I am sorry to disagree with you but I have two of these mics and it was simple as plugging and playing. Now if you feel having to set up 2 pref’s as a bug then ok :roll:
within 5 minutes of recieving the first mic i recorded this song i wrote years ago
http://www.macidol.com/jamroom/play.php?band_id=801&song_id=10459&mode=song_hifi
http://www.macidol.com/jamroom/play.php?band_id=801&song_id=10459&mode=song_lofi
preace,
rob