Here’s something a bit different – a post without a podcast 
We could have recorded this but it seems easier to just write it down and easier for people to refer back to.
We’ve been asked a few times about how we record Testing In The Pub, and for hints and tips for people starting a podcast. So here goes….
Equipment
The equipment that we use depends on how we are recording. For face to face recordings then it’s one of these microphones:
- Zoom H2N. This is a great, portable mic and recorder, which is easy to use and simple to carry around.
- Blue Yeti. Exceptionally good quality mic, which is easy to setup and use in noisy environments by altering the beam pattern to block out what you don’t want. Much bigger and bulkier than the Zoom so not so good for conferences, etc but great for recording in pubs near home
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- Samson Go Mic. Super portable and can be plugged into a phone in order to actually record. Beam pattern can be altered so you can block out some background noise but it’s nowhere near as good as the ones above. Far cheaper and much, much more portable tho.
If we are recording remotely then we use zencastr and either in the ear mics or the Zoom or Blue Yeti above, plugged into laptops or MS Surface. One thing to watch with zencastr is to make sure all other programs are closed on the devices that you are using. If you don’t do this then it’s common to get audio drift (where the audio on each channel, i.e. each participant, goes out of sync). Correcting audio drift in the edit is a painful and time consuming experience.
Editing
We use Audacity for all our editing. It’s great, free and really easy to use. Most of the editing involves removing background noise (the filter for this in Audacity is really good) but removing the odd section , and adding the intro. There’s no need to use anything else.
Hosting
We self host our own WordPress site using tsohost and also serve the streaming content from there too. This works at the scale that we are at currently but if we get much bigger then we’ll need to explore other solutions.
We use the blubrry podcasting plugin in order to push episodes to iTunes, etc as well as to provide the rss feed, streaming controls on our WordPress site, and handle downloads. It works really well. Blubrry also offer full hosting solutions which is something that we may well consider in the future.
Other Stuff
- We use iTunes in order to update the relevant metadata and add the logo to each episode before upload.
- Show notes are written directly in the WordPress site and once the relevant episode file has been linked then publishing the show notes also pushes the new episode to the relevant podcast directories and our rss feed.
- Blubrry can also push episodes to Spotify. We need to set this up as we are currently not on there.
- There are free options for podcast hosting (I’ve heard good things about podbean) but be aware that it can be harder to move away from free services if either the company goes bust or you need functionality from a paid provider.
- Don’t forget SEO. There’s lots of great SEO plugins for WordPress that you can use to get your podcast well listed with Google.
Hopefully this is a useful overview of how we do things. Comments and questions are very welcome so leave a comment.
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