This is the OLD podcasting tricks site.

If you are on the podcastingtricks.com/wordpress.com site you are at the wrong place. The new site is at http://podcastingtricks.com/

Thanks

MP3 Trimmer – PodcastingTricks.com

If you distribute your podcasts in MP3 format, it’s almost a sure bet that at least once, you’ve wished you could edit the final MP3 file without having to start from scratch, going back to your original, editing and re-converting.

Thanks to a nifty Macintosh-only utility called MP3 Trimmer, you can remove unwanted portions of your MP3 files without losing quality.

Beyond the simple things, you can even do fades, change gain, join or divide songs or files, repair or analyze the MP3.

The program is sold as shareware. And for the $10.95 registration you get free upgrades, Registering will remove the reminder pop ups for good, allowing you to work much faster. It will also enable you to use MP3 Trimmers drag-an-drop functionality to full extent.

Open Source DAW – PodcastingTricks.com

If you’re into open source products, you probably think I am going to talk about Audacity. But you’re wrong. Instead, I am going to point you to a much more robust, (and harder to learn) piece of software called Ardour.

Ardour is a digital audio workstation (DAW). Podcasters can use it to record, edit and mix the audio for their podcasts. While products like Audacity allow for quick and easy sound recording, DAWs like Ardour are more about crafting and refining sound. This product would be more comparable to ProTools or DigitalPerformer.

There is one big difference between Ardour and other high-end DAWs…it’s free. The makers do accept donations but they’re not required.

Ardour doesn’t run on Windows but it does run on Macs or Linux. It supports VST plug-in architecture. It has one big advantage over some commercial DAWs in that it doesn’t interact with any particular hardware. If you want to run ProTools, you have to use Digidesign audio interfaces.

Since this is an open source tool, and free of charge, it’s not quite as robust as some of the pro-line DAWs. It’s not a sound file editor, a MIDI sequencer or a loop-based music system. But if you want to record, edit and mix audio for your podcast and you want something that does that fast and free, Ardour may be the DAW for you.

About Tagging Your Podcast – PodcastingTricks.com

There are lots of ways people find your podcast. One way is to search del.icio.us or Technorati. But which tags should you use? Believe it or not, by adding or deleting even one syllable from a word, you can greatly increase your chances of being heard.

Here’s an example. . . suppose you decide to tag your podcast with the word “podcasting.” Would you be surprised to know that by dropping the “ing” and simply using the word “podcast,” you’ll likely get twice as many responses? How about “podcaster?” The word “podcast” generates 50 times (yes 50 times) more response than the word “podcaster.”

What if you broaden your tags a bit? Using the tag “RSS” you’ll likely get twice as many responses as the word “podcast.” Now realize, the tag “RSS” isn’t specific to podcasting, but it’s close enough that you should consider adding it to your tag cloud.

The takeaway here is simple. Do some research before you apply keywords to your podcast. Selecting the right tags potentially means more audience.

Recording Phone Calls – PodcastingTricks.com

I’ve been getting lots of calls and emails lately about recording phone calls for podcasting. A while back, I posted a link to an article on how to record using Skype. But if you want to do it like the big boys do, you need a telephone hybrid.

I use the Telos One. It’s around $600 and probably out of reach for most podcasters, but if you want to go Cadillac, you have to pay the money.

Most major market radio stations use this product because it delivers reasonably good sound. Keep in mind that it’s very difficult to get perfect phone audio, but the Telos One can come close. There are variables like the quality of your phone line, the quality of the caller’s phone line and even the quality of the caller’s phone handset comes into play. But the Telos will get you the best results you can get short of a dedicated ISDN line.

You hook this unit to your mixer and route the caller audio and your audio in such a way that the caller can hear you talking over your mic and you can hear them talking over your headphones. You put the mixed signal to your computer interface and record into GarageBand, ProTools, Logic or whatever your favorite recording software might be, and then you treat the track as you would any other. Apply EQ and any other audio post-processing you need and away you go.

In a future post, I’ll provide a routing diagram that shows how to hook the Telos One to a simple mixer and document the signal flow.

Cool Mac Audio Application – PodcastingTricks.com

Thanks to David Battino at MacDevCenter I learned about some cool little audio applications for Mac users. They’re free, they’re fun and they’re valuable. A great combination.

For me, the most valuable is the Xtract2Wave44 app. It will let you convert QuickTime movies or audio files (like MP3, Aiff or other) to 16-bit, 44.1 kHz Wave audio files just by dropping the files on top of the icon.

Who’s Got Your Back? – PodcastingTricks.com

I received a frantic e-mail this weekend from a new client. She’s so new, I haven’t even started on the research she asked me to do. She had already recorded five podcasts before meeting me and now she can’t find them. Turns out her son may have accidentally erased them from her hard drive. Since she had not yet uploaded these to her host, she had no backup copy. With her permission, I am sharing this incident because it brings home a good point. Have a backup plan.

Most podcasters rely on their host as their backup. You create a show, upload it and figure, well if it gets lost on my drive, I can always go get it from the host. But what if the host doesn’t keep shows past a certain date or they have a failure?

I think it’s prudent to have at least one physical backup in addition to the copy you send to your hosting solution.

My workflow goes something like this.

1) I make a backup copy of the GarageBand original file and send that to an external hard disk, and leave a copy on my personal server.

2) I send a copy of the finished compressed podcast to my host, and then again, make an additional copy for my external hard disk and leave a copy on my personal server.

3) I make an extra backup copy on DVD of each show.

Using this system, I am relatively sure that I can get to my older shows if need be no matter what. I do want to caution that saving shows to DVD is not something you want to do if you are archiving. DVDs (and CDs for that matter) are for short-term backups only. There’s mounting evidence that these formats degrade over time. So understand that there’s a difference between backup and archive and plan accordingly.