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Hello everyone and welcome to geekcast. The weekly show of geeky things to do with all the free time you have. Never forget that we have wonderful geekcast products available on our website, so show us some love and help us to bring this great content to you.
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In today's show I'm going to be talking about the basics of podcasting.
The music you hear in the background is Concept 4: The Pain is Gone, but Confusion Remains by Jason Cova, that I discovered at sectionz music, a great resource for creative commons music files. Creative Commons music is a great way to add to the professionalism of your podcast without having to worry about copyright issues. [don't speak this: you can use comments in brackets for something like: expand on creative commons licenses]
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Today we'll focus on basic recording and editing techniques used to create audio files for the purpose of podcasting.
Podcasting, as we'll be referring to it, is a 3 step process. One, recording and editing the audio. Two, uploading the audio. Three, creating a feed for files so that users can subscribe. We'll handle feed creation in our next class.
Podcasting is a great way to get a message out, especially if you're like me and you're just too lazy to type. Podcasting also allows you to use the richness of your voice to communicate a message rather than simple print. Both have their advantages and disadvantages so I encourage you to work with both to gauge how to use each medium for maximum advantage. Don't forget that your user is the most important part of this equation.
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Our first step today will be to use an open source software package named Audacity to record and edit audio files. Audacity is a powerful and free, yes, free, program that you can use to create excellent podcasts. If you're a Mac user you can also use GarageBand for this purpose, but one of the nice things about Audacity is that it works on Windows, Mac and Linux/Unix machines.
The first step toward using Audacity is to download it. To do so, just go to audacity.sourceforge.net [repeat url]. Once there you will see several helpful areas. From download links to help and tutorial links the wonderful folks who work for and with sourceforge go out of their way to help make their software powerful and easy to use. Click on the download link for your operating system, follow the instructions and you should be up and running in no time.
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One other important area that I need to mention is the importance of downloading the LAME MP3 encoder. Without the encoder you will not be able to export to the mp3 format, which would make all of this pretty useless. The LAME MP3 encoder is also free, sorry to all of you who really want to steal someting, sometimes the best things in life really are free.
[don't speak this: you would talk for a few more minutes, but try to predetermine roughtly how long you'll talk]
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Thank you for checking out this geekcast, we appreciate your time and hope you'll enjoy making podcasts as much as we do