Podcasting 101: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Our Process - E131
Sep 19, 2023Episode 131
Rachel Johnson, Katie Attwell
This week, we are sharing our podcasting process. We'll get into our past and current podcasting practices, as well as the apps and tools that we use and love! Whether you are interested in podcasting for yourself or with your students, this episode is packed full of great tips and tricks to get you started.
If you like what you hear, we would love it if you could share this episode with a colleague or friend. And make sure you subscribe so that you don’t miss out on any new content! And consider supporting the show by buying us a coffee or two!
We would love to hear from you – leave a comment on our website OR check out our FLIPGRID!
Featured Content **For detailed show notes, please visit our website at https://edugals.com/131**
This week, we are sharing our podcasting process. We'll get into our past and current podcasting practices, as well as the apps and tools that we use and love! Whether you are interested in podcasting for yourself or with your students, this episode is packed full of great tips and tricks to get you started.
If you like what you hear, we would love it if you could share this episode with a colleague or friend. And make sure you subscribe so that you don’t miss out on any new content! And consider supporting the show by buying us a coffee or two!
We would love to hear from you – leave a comment on our website OR check out our FLIPGRID!
Featured Content **For detailed show notes, please visit our website at https://edugals.com/131**
In this episode, we are talking all about podcasting.
Katie:
We are going to share the process that we use as well as all of the apps and tools.
Rachel:
Let's get started. This week Katie and I are doing something a little bit different and we want to kind of talk about our podcasting process and journey a little bit, because we often get a lot of questions about it.
Katie:
Yeah, I've had a few teachers ask whether it's interest in doing. podcasting with their students, et cetera. They always wonder like what tools we use and how we edit and how we go about this whole process. I guess it's kind of a how much work am I getting myself into type of a question. Um, but we've definitely changed over the years and so I think it's worth kind of sharing where we started, and also where we are now.
Rachel:
Yeah. We knew absolutely nothing when we first started.
Katie:
Do you remember those days? Like it was like, we were so nervous. It was, it was very frightening, but uh, we found a rhythm.
Rachel:
We did find a rhythm and you know, I, I kind of fondly look back on those times where we would giggle for, you know, a good 10 minutes before we could actually start speaking and recording because we were just that nervous.
Katie:
Yeah, and we had so many bloopers. Do you remember those? Oh my goodness.
Rachel:
those were fantastic.
Katie:
It is interesting how, even the idea of talking into a microphone now isn't so scary, or getting in front of people and talking now because of podcasting is no longer such a scary thing.
Rachel:
Yeah. No, it's, it's been great for developing all of those, all of those public speaking skills for sure.
Katie:
But, uh, so when we first started, we were brand new to this, obviously as you were hearing. and we hadn't really recorded much of anything, and so we kind of went with the tools that were easily accessible, and that we kind of had heard about, so to speak.
Rachel:
So we both started with GarageBand because we're both on Max. No, actually, Katie started with Audacity, didn't you?
Katie:
Yes. I didn't have a Mac when we first started, so I was using Audacity, um, which I didn't love, and it was very kind of, what's, what's the word for it? It was very temperamental and there were so many times where sometimes it would work, right? And other times I'm like, what is happening right now? but I, maybe it's just a version of the program. I had no idea, but it was not my favorite.
Rachel:
I remember you having a lot of issues with it and Yeah, it, it was not very good. You know, even GarageBand, well, it's great and it's free if you're on a Mac and that's all you have available, like it will do the job. But even that, like it's, it's designed for creating music and not necessarily just a voice kind of. Podcast. So you know, it works and it's great. It's, it, it was just, it was still a bit clunky too, and I'm the one who goes through and edits the episodes, so it took me forever when I first started editing, and especially in GarageBand, it was, it was a bit temperamental.
Katie:
Yeah. Now disclaimer, I still record using GarageBand because we are separate when we do it. So recording with it, if you're just recording is okay. But the editing part, yeah.
Rachel:
Yeah, for sure. Recording with GarageBand is great. If you could then take it into a different editor, it will make your life a lot easier. I've upgraded my recording software now just because I was editing in this program for quite some time when I had upgraded. Now it is a paid program, so there is a cost to that, but it's called hindenberg. And it's fantastic. it is actually designed for voice, so that's kind of really nice in terms of what it does. And it, it's got a lot of really great, um, little plugins and add-ins and stuff like that that can make your voice sound really good. So, fantastic for editing for. When I started using it, um, I've moved on now for editing too, but I still record in Hindenburg.
Katie:
Yeah, and remind me, because I'm not the one that does the editing, I get to kind of let Rachel take the reins on that one. But I think you could also create settings for each voice. So for me, you had a setting or like a something to kind of clean up the audio, audio a bit, and then you had one for you as well.
Rachel:
Yeah. Well, what's really neat in Hindenburg is you can, like, once you have a section of audio that you. You've tweaked and you really, really like, and it sounds really, really good. There's a voice profile or, kind of app or or thing in Hindenburg. And so you get it to basically just read this section of your voice and create a voice profile for each person, and so then when you go through and edit. Okay. Just at the end, instead of having to do all those tweaks again, which can take a lot of time to get, audio to sound really, really good, you just apply the voice profile and it makes you sound exactly the same every single time.
Katie:
So, yeah, so that was, um, we, how long did we use Hindenberg for?
Rachel:
I was editing with Hindenberg for probably a good year and a half or so.
Katie:
Yeah, and I think it was just recent, well, recent ish, I guess, that we've switched.
Rachel:
My process changed, in terms of the editing last year, last school year because I knew I was going back into the classroom and while editing with Hindenburg can be fairly quick, like it's faster than GarageBand, it still was taking me. Several hours to edit a podcast episode. You know, maybe about three hours in total. And, um, so I found this program, it's called DS Script. And if you have not experienced this, it's amazing. Again, it's paid, it's a, it's a subscription kind of plan, but when you go in, it will create transcripts automatically for you. You can, you can do some magical, magical stuff with it right off the bat so you can get ready rid of any spaces between speaking. Just with the click of one button, you can also get rid of all the ums and ahs with a click of one button. Now it doesn't do a fantastic job. You do have to fix a lot of those, but, um, can, can really sort of bring down some of that editing time. So I would say now it takes me about an hour to, at most two hours to edit an episode. So it has brought down my editing time and I get a transcript out of it.
Katie:
Yeah, and I think that was one of the biggest selling features. We had a couple of inquiries or, or questions about, transcripts of our podcast. And whenever I, I saw those comments, I was like, oh, I, we don't have one. And, and we looked at some workarounds to figure out is there an easy way to get one? But there really wasn't. Like, remember when I even like put it through, Google, read and write or like a, a voice to text type thing to try to see if it could pick up everything. It wasn't great. And so accessibility is important and, and it, really bothered me that if we couldn't do it easily, so DSS script came around at a really great time because then we could have that built right in.
Rachel:
And they keep adding features and really sort of building it up. So what's neat is they just partnered with Squad Cast, which is a remote podcast recording studio. And so you can now do your remote, remote recording in there and then bring it right into DS script so it, it actually. Like, we haven't tried it yet in terms of our podcasts. That's, that's on our, our next thing to, to try out. But that can actually take, you know, a good 10, 15 minutes out of my process just from, you know, using those tools in there. And then they're also adding all these new features based on ai, which is so exciting.
Katie:
I know it makes me nervous. It makes me excited. I'm just not sure what to think. I know AI is here to stay, so I have to like wrap my head around it and embrace it, but, uh, I don't know man.
Rachel:
Well, there's one little neat thing. So like if you take out an, um, for example, but it, it doesn't quite sound right, like sometimes we say, um, and like we will link them kind of together. Then they have this new sort of AI feature now where you can go on that split where you've done it and you can actually get it to regenerate your voice over the, those couple of words.
Katie:
Oh man.
Rachel:
Yeah, and I tried it with one of our episodes, like just in one spot, just to see how it works. It's not bad. It's kind of scary.
Katie:
Right, because AI does that, right? Like you can create videos and as long as you have a sample of a voice, it can create a video of a person saying things they didn't actually say. That to me is actually a little bit frightening because of the power that that may have.
Rachel:
Yeah. One podcast I listened to that's all about health and fitness and stuff, they changed their podcast artwork that now says a hundred percent human made.
Katie:
I like that.
Rachel:
Yeah. Yeah, it is. It is quite funny.
Katie:
So, the squad cast. So in few of our episodes, particularly when we've had guests join us, we've used Zencaster. And so that's like where you can have video and audio and see each other, and it's like a web-based recording studio. So is squad cast similar to that?
Rachel:
Yes, it's, it's exactly like it. And there's quite a few of those sort of programs out there, so I know Riverside fm, there's Zencaster Squad cast. I'm sure there's a million more that I'm forgetting. They are all paid sort of apps for you to use again, like costing money, right. But like, you don't have to use apps that are paid. You can record like right in Zoom. I know lots of people use Zoom when they're doing podcasting and recording with guests. we do what's called, um, oh, I forget what it's called. It's something like end-to-end recording. And so we just kind of jump on a Google meet and then we both record on our own ends. and so we don't have to worry about the internet flaking out or anything else happening. so it's, it's really good that way.
Katie:
Yeah, I, I like the, I don't, maybe reliability of knowing. I have a separate file that is being recorded regardless of my internet. So if something were to happen, we still have what we have recorded so far.
Rachel:
Well, and when we first started out too, we wanted to do everything as cheaply as we could. You know, any, any of the free tools, like that's what we were gonna do. So our recording is, was done all free.
Katie:
Yeah, like this was a hobby and we were like, who knows how long this is gonna last? Like, let's not spend too much money. We already had to buy mics, so it was like, Hey, but like let's talk about progression of mics because I feel like we're very happy with where we've settled now.
Rachel:
before we jump into Mike's though, just kind of talking about some of those other remote recording apps, the reason we kind of went to Zencastr is because you can sign up for. A free account and it does give you a limited amount of recording time. So, two hours of audio and video recording, gives you the audio in MP three format, which is actually still pretty high quality. We tend to record and, and do everything in wave, which is better quality, but like, you can't tell the difference between the two. So like, if you are looking for something, Remote and you wanna record with someone else, but uh, you don't wanna spend any money. Like I would say Zencastr is a great place to start.
Katie:
Yeah, I have liked it when we've used it. Like it's, it's very convenient when we have people joining us and the audio is fine. Like it's great.
Rachel:
Okay. Microphones?
Katie:
Yeah, I don't even remember the brand of my first one. How bad is that? But it was something I found on Amazon and it was fairly affordable, and I knew nothing about Mike's at that point. Enough said.
Rachel:
I had a Samsung Q to you, and the reason I got that one was because I went and did some research and looked at for podcasting mics, and that one got really great reviews and it wasn't very expensive. So that one was great. did its job and I don't really have any complaints about it.
Katie:
Mine, well, you remember I was in a plastic bin for the first little while,
Rachel:
You were.
Katie:
so, so it wasn't the best microphone because it was picking up so much from around me and in my house, and it was very echoy. So I had to kind of line a big Rubbermaid bin with some blankets and pillows, and I would hide in the bin during recording and it made for really funny videos.
Rachel:
Yeah, I know we should have, we should have just made this a video podcast'cause that would've been hilarious.
Katie:
Yeah, that would've been awesome.
Rachel:
But you had a condenser mic and. I had a dynamic mic. So the, the sort of difference there, the condenser mics, they're often used more by musicians because they pick up all the sound around it. And you kind of want that when you're a musician, but when you're wanting just. Voice recording a dynamic mic is really the way to go because it just picks up what's in front of it. So you do have to have, and you do need to practice like really good microphone skills. Like you need to sit, and Katie and I are both sitting like about four or five inches away from our microphones talking into
Katie:
it's true and you have to otherwise, like, the further you get like it, it becomes very quiet.
Rachel:
Yeah, so it is, it's a little weird getting started and, and it feels a little bit awkward, but eventually you get used to it.
Katie:
Yeah, I don't even think of it anymore, which is interesting to me.
Rachel:
Now, we both did upgrade. Katie upgraded first because she wanted out of the bin.
Katie:
I want it outta the bin. It was time and so I went with a road pod, mic, and I love it. It's beautiful. It looks really fun. Now I do cover it, obviously, but, um, it's, uh, it's a really neat mic. It's not terribly expensive. and so it made sense.
Rachel:
And then I upgraded to the same microphone so that. Katie, Katie liked it. It sounded great. And so we wanted to have a little bit more consistent sound between the both of us. We figure we might as well have the same equipment
Katie:
Now, I did need a cloud lifter on its own. My, my waveforms weren't very big, so I did need, a cloud lifter to kind of amplify the, the
Rachel:
Yeah, and I, I got one of those as well. And then this microphone is an X L R microphone, so it's a special cable, which means that you need an interface to go with it. So we're, we're very high tech at the moment.
Katie:
Well, do you remember my first interface? It was like the little road one. It was the very small one that was kind of designed for the pod mic, but it gave out after I think a year and a half. And so then we went crazy and it's beautiful.
Rachel:
so we both have road caster pros, and it's a bit overkill honestly, in terms of what I need, but. It's great and it's, what's kind of nice about this, it's got four sort of inputs where you can plug in four different microphones. You can also connect to your phone to us, uh, Bluetooth, you can also add in. Any kind of audio, sort of recordings and stuff like that too. So there's some stuff in there like laugh tracks and I don't know, all sorts, sorts of silly stuff. like I, I haven't really used any of it, but it's there.
Katie:
I played with it quite a bit when I was, um, getting my students to record.'cause we just used the one interface with multiple mics and, um, it has like preset sounds, which was amazing. So even like intro, outro music, like it has some already built in you could use. but uh, it's really neat. It's a powerful board and so. I'm looking forward to really kind of taking advantage of everything it has to offer this coming year.
Rachel:
Now that being said, if you are starting out with any kind of podcasting, you don't need this fancy equipment.
Katie:
Oh, no, not at all. Like we didn't have the fancy equipment and in order for us to find, um, our intro outro, we just looked for royalty free music. and you can get little clips of it. There's lots of websites out there. and then. We kind of just pieced it together.
Rachel:
and there are like, if you want a good quality mic, there are lots of microphones available. You could go on Amazon. Anything with, that's U Ss b, that's a dynamic mic, you're probably gonna, you know, be pretty happy with.
Katie:
We started out that way and it was just fine. We just got, I.
Rachel:
We went a little overboard.
Katie:
We really did. But it was like this excitement. It was something we looked forward to every week and we wanted it to be fun and crazy and and we're nerdy. So there you go.
Rachel:
So I guess once we've kind of got our podcast in that, like, let's talk about our process, about getting it published, getting it reco, like getting it out there to the world.
Katie:
so in terms of hosting, we use buzzsprout and so essentially we create our episode, edit all that good stuff, and then we upload it to this hosting program or site, and then release it to the world from there.
Rachel:
Yeah, and we can also include a link to Bus Sprout. Now the link will include is our affiliate link. We've never put an affiliate link in anything before, but um, I think it does get you some. Something off or some, I, I don't know what, what sort of deal it is, but, gets you a little bit of something and then gives us a little bit something back to the show. So like, if you're interested, that is a worthwhile link to use. you know, it, it, it can help support us.
Katie:
Mm-hmm And when we first started, we just did the, the free account. Because it was enough time per month in terms of what we were uploading and releasing. and it made sense. As we continued on, we then kind of made that decision to, to pay the subscription cost, because we were going over, we're getting really, really tight in terms of how many minutes we could actually upload. but it was worth it.
Rachel:
Now a bit of of a disclaimer. Now they're free accounts. You can upload two hours a month, but like it has changed, the episodes are only hosted for 90 days and you have a limited amount of storage. So in order to make sure that your episodes are hosted indefinitely, you do have to have a paid plan, but, You know, they've been great in terms of hosting and we've had no issues whatsoever. We love it. We pay for just the cheapest plan and gives you up to three hours of uploading each month, which is perfect for us. Yeah.
Katie:
and it's easy to navigate, which I kind of like about this one. and then right from this hosting program or site, you can actually then, Get your podcast pushed out to various, apps where people can access your content.
Rachel:
they've added lots of really cool things over the years. So they brought in Buzz Sprout ads, which we don't use. Uh, we decided that we didn't wanna put ads in our podcast just because, you know it. We have ads on our website. We, we wanted to keep this pretty clean, but you can earn money. From your podcast as well, and maybe we should, you know, think about ads somewhere down the line. But, uh, we're, we're not really there yet. So they have that, and that's really neat. And then they've brought out some really neat sort of editing tools that we haven't tried yet, but sound really, really interesting. So they have this magic mastering, which will make your audio all sound consistent. Now the editing programs I use does that, so we never need that. and then they just brought out co-host ai, which is like using AI to come up with all of the other stuff that comes with your podcast, which I don't know, sounds entertaining, but, um, we have not tried it yet.
Katie:
No, it's, it's a, it is a paid subscription and part of us is like, it would be nice to try it with one and see what it looks and sounds like and what they do with it, but, I don't know that I wanna commit to every single one of them. And what if we don't like it? And yeah. All that good stuff.
Rachel:
Yeah. So there are lots of places though that I, I can think of one offhand is Anchor, which you can upload your podcast for free and host them for free.
Katie:
Yeah, there's lots out there. This just happened to be one. We did a bit of research, looked at a few different options, and this kind of fit with what we were looking for.
Rachel:
So again, you can do everything for free. Like really all if, if you were doing a podcast for a hobby or you know, because there's some information you wanna get out there. Really, you just need a good microphone and away you go. There are lots of free programs and frees to get the rest of the content out there. If you're doing it with students, you don't even necessarily need the good microphone, you just need a device to record on.
Katie:
Yeah. Lots of kind of options out there, and it can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be.
Rachel:
So once we've got our episode uploaded and ready to go in Buzz Sprouts. There are some other pieces that kind of go with it in terms of our process as well. So we post to social media, we do a newsletter, we do a blog post. there like, there's a, uh, several other like little bits that can be kind of time consuming, but do really sort of add to our podcast. And I've been kind of exploring lately using chat G P T for some of it. Now, I don't take everything for face value from chat g p T, but it is kind of useful for things like coming up with ideas for episode titles when you're stuck or trying to think of, um, a great way to, to summarize and, and create social media captions and things like that.
Katie:
Yeah, we are, what? This is episode 131, and after the first, I don't know, 50, we started to be like, what do you wanna call this? What do you wanna call this? Because we, we tended to have like phrases or, or terms that we would always lean towards, and we were like, no. We need to stop.
Rachel:
yeah.
Katie:
So chat g BT was kind of nice because then giving us suggestions, we could just be like, Ooh, I like that.
Rachel:
or you can take, you know, you might, you might ask it to spit out 10 different title suggestions based on a description. You give it, and then you can mix and match pieces of them together, or it could spark an entirely different idea. And that's what I think I like about it.
Katie:
It definitely kind of does the grunt work and gets your brain, I don't know, more inspired to use some of that different terminology that perhaps we wouldn't have right off the bat.
Rachel:
then Katie writes a lovely detailed blog post to go along with our episodes. So, you know, I kind of do all the, the grunt work with the editing. And then she does all the grunt work with the blog post.
Katie:
Yeah. And we try to link in everything, put everything together. Yeah. It's um, I like the balance and I like having that blog post or my sh notes as I call them, it kind of gives that extra, feature. It's not just a podcast. We're more than just a podcast.
Rachel:
And we host our website on WordPress. so again, that does cost a bit of money, but there are lots of ways to create free websites.
Katie:
I think that's kind of it in terms of our process, things we use, what we do.
Rachel:
Yeah. So on that note, we'll wrap up our conversation here today. So hopefully you've learned a bit about podcasting and our process and, and how we do things. And so what we'll do is we'll include any of the links or resources we talked about here today in our show notes. You can access our show notes for this episode@edugal.com slash 1 3 1. That's edu G a l s.com/ 1 3 1.
Katie:
And if you like what you heard today, then feel free to share it with a colleague or a friend. And don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast app so that you don't miss out on any future content.
Rachel:
and if you still have questions about podcasting or want to learn more, then let us know what your questions are. It it'll be great for us to then take those ideas and be able to create more episodes for you. So you can do that by going onto our flip at edu.com/flipgrid and leaving us a video message there. Or you can go onto our website@edu.com and leave us a written response.