An excellent opinion piece in my view. Adding a couple of thoughts: (a) it is really about content, content that a podcaster's niche will want to hear and, to this point, it's about differentiation and marginal knowledge value in my field; (b) people will listen to telephone quality audio if the content adds value to their knowledge about something, especially people in a business context (my m.o. has been just audio streamed interviews thus far and it's amazing the traffic I get with phone quality audio); (c) in business-oriented and knowledge-oriented podcasting music and 'bumpers' are totally unnecessary, in fact can irritate the audience; (d) a well-planned talk or interview greatly minimizes post-production, believe me, plus...people are very forgiving about 'uhs' and little mistakes if the content is good and the thing moves along well; (e) I don't think the bogging/podcasting world has really integrated yet in terms of giving the average non-techhie user a simple one stop shop solution. I don't have time to grow all the vegetables, make the flour, butcher the chicken and the rest of it to make the chicken pot pie....I want the pie made up already, and then add my ingredients. James Unland, Executive Editor, Health Business And Policy, Chicago

An interesting read :)

I can see your point about wanting a software to fire bumpers, idents and jingle etc in real time, I don't know of anything either. Apparently
Garageband 3 does it

Alternatively, you could use a sampler and a cheap midi keyboard. You would need to map the sound bites to individual keys that you could play at will.

My tip for good podcasting is to invest in decent microphones and learn about good microphone placement. Relatively inexpensive capacitor mics are best like the AKG C1000 or the rode series.

A good recording compressed to a lower quality will always sound better than a poor recording compressed. It may sound obvious, but the number of badly placed inappropriate mics I hear on podcasts never ceases to surprise me.

Happy Podcasting
Lee Pritchard
Media Music Now

Have you looked at Podcast software for Windows? It may not meet your personal needs, but there are easy to use Podcast production tools with integrated podcast publishing that would take you part way to "Podcast Nirvana".

The site I co-founded is WildVoice. It is an easy to use Podcast community that supports media file upload for all platforms and in-web-page recording for Windows. WildVoice also provides free Podcast Production software for Windows XP called WildVoice Studio. WildVoice studio provides a real-time recording environment based on the "Radio DJ" style recording you are looking for. There is a sound effect board; a board of tracks you can use for bumpers, songs, or other pre-recorded content; built-in ID3 tagging and album art tagging; and integrated publishing to WildVoice.com. If you can borrow an XP machine give it a shot.

Here is a recent review that nicely summarized WildVoice.

James (#1), thanks for your comments. I do agree that technical issues are among the smallest problems, but they're really foundational in my view. In other words, we've not yet seen the Blogger or Twitter of postcasting. I mean the software that makes it so easy to do that everybody who has something to say can say it, and the result is of sufficient quality that listeners can focus on the content without being distracted by technical quality issues.

Thanks!

Lee (#2), I have a keyboard, and tried for quite some time to get sound clips mapped to individual keys. That, more than anything, probably resulted in the death of my podcast. I was so frustrated by my inability to get that working, I quit. And I'm a techie!

You're right, though. If I could figure out how to get my M-Audio Keystation 61es to fire sound clips of my choosing with each key, that would go a *l-o-o-o-o-ng* way toward making me happy.

I'm intrigued by that link you provided about GB3. I dug around quite a bit last year, and then again in research for this article, and never found any indication the software could do anything like that! I've got the iLife upgrade, I just need to install it and test it out. If it's really that simple, well, then I guess I should have known that Apple had seen the same problem I had!

Thanks!

P.S. I was looking into Shure SM58 (or was it SM59?) mics at one point. It just seemed at the time that there was about to be a rush of USB/FireWire products hitting the market, and I didn't want to invest too much until I saw what was coming.

Michael (#3), I do have access to Windows, but not at home any more, and that's where I record podcasts. From the online info, the Wildvoice software looks pretty good. The XP requirement seems somewhat limiting, though! I was on W2K for a *long* time, and almost jumped straight to Vista, but it does happen that I use XP now.

Actually, the way I upgrade Windows (that is, only when I buy new hardware with it preinstalled), I may be on XP for years. :-)

Have you looked at Podcast Station? Michael R. Mennenga (Farpoint Media) thinks it's a pretty good all-in-one for basic podcasting. Unfortunately, it's Windows-only. Maybe you could get a dual-boot Mac for home? ;)

That does look like it may do what I want, though the interface looks kinda bad. Too, they make what seems like a mistake to me, the same mistake another piece of software I've seen today makes: Why should care about a distinction between "decks" and "carts?" Sure, in the real world a deck and a cart are two different things, with different attributes, but this is virtual. Why impose the artificial limitations of real life when you don't have to?

I could be missing something, though. I doubt it.

Also, $60? Nah.

Great job, Phillip. I produced ten episodes of a podcast back in the spring of '04, and one of the major reasons that I burned out and stopped doing it was because of the enormous time it took in post-production and editing just to get it up what I would consider to be a mediocre standard. I totally agree that a robust and easy-to-use application would allow a lot more people to get into the game.

I wonder though if the audio podcasting "revolution" is already getting run over by videoblogging/ video podcasting.

Ahh, Phillip, you know I understand your frustrations. Very little was more soulcrushing than to put as much time into the podcast as I was and have the results not reflect it. I put a lot of time, energy, stress, and money into the process and never could make it all fly the way I'd wanted.

The combination of the content and the technical was stressful on so many levels and the amount of time it took to produce from pre to post production was staggering. Having had a past in radio, I love the format but never fully achieved my ambitions with it.

I think the idea that better sounders, bumpers and stingers make for better podcasts is looking at podcast like radio. Some of the best podcasts out there have no sound effects - just good content. Ronald D Moore's official Battlestar Galactica podcast is nothing more than him recording on a sony minidisc recorder and someone at the SciFi Channel encoding it to MP3 and uploading.

Yes it would be nice to have software to make production faster - but the current state of recording should not be looked at as an excuse for poor content from some podcasts. Nor should sound effects and audio quality be mistaken for a good podcast.

No one is ever going to say they stuck with you show because the audio quality was so good they just knew eventually the content would come around.

Regards

Rob Walch
host of podCast411 and TODAY in iPhone
co-author of "Tricks of the Podcasting Masters"

I thought about doing a podcast myself around this time last year. Two things led me to abandon the idea. The first thing was that I couldn't figure out what I wanted to say. The other thing was the realization of how much time it would take.

Rob, I'm not sure how anyone could possibly come up with the point of view you're arguing against from anything I've written. In other words: DUH! But you're missing the point -- it's over here:

Let's categorize podcasts into four broad categories based on two major factors: content and polish. A podcast with boring content and poor polish is simply unpleasant, and I've heard a few of those, but not twice. A podcast with boring content and rich polish is a lot like most radio -- appealing to some, but not me -- and I don't listen to those, either. But a podcast with good content that's simple somebody speaking into a microphone is still only half finished. Without that polish, it's still not as pleasant an experience as it could be. Not by half.

It's that last combination that's as rare as hen's teeth, and the current sad state of software is the reason why: quality content, well-produced.

The bottom line is that current podcasting software tends to suck, and I think that's a barrier to the very sort of people most likely to create interesting content, people who care about production values. Plus, as the comments here demonstrate, producing a polished podcast is such a chore right now that people with good content quit simply because it's too much pointless work.

By the way, I've checked out GarageBand 3 now, and it's got the same problem GB2 did -- I can't create my own software instruments, so I can't use my own custom-made bumpers. All the nice royalty-free sounds Apple provides are easily accessible, but if I can modify them, they're not what I want.

So far everything is either expensive or ugly or doesn't work well, with one possible exception: WildVoice Studio. Which is for Windows, which doesn't suit me. Sigh.

There is obviously a large gap in the market, Phillip. Now if only there was some clever coder who knew exactly what podcasting software ought to do. What an opportunity that would be...

Have you taken a look at Ubercaster? I use this solution and spend very little time in post production because I can get pretty tight performance.