Making a Podcast for Dummies (and for Free!)

Well, turns out that I had never actually written down how I made a Podcast in the first place and of course I completely forgot how I did it, so here are notes that I’ve recovered:

  1. GarageBand. I mainly used this because it is free with the Mac. Lots of people end up using Audacity, but I liked the graphical look of GarageBand. The real trick here is to create a new Project as a Vocal. That’s because then you get the right controls called Narration Vocals that makes my squeaky voice sound like a decent announcer.
  2. Intro and Outtro. You need cool Intro music. Lucas made an intro for me and an outtro for me, but I seem to have lost it, so back to the drawing board for that. The coolest thing is that new Messages in Big Sur makes it much easier to find stuff like this, you can just search for a person and see all the photos and other. There even applications like Build Bubbles which create it which generates a synthetic voice with the Podcast. It’s kind of hokey, but it works. Of course there are many free and open source systems that do this. If you just want a couple of music clips, Mediaequipt has some great recommendations like AudioJungle (you pay a nominal flat fee) or even the Youtube Audio Library. As does Buzzsprout so places like Pixabay or Musopen.org for classical

The main thing that I do is:

  1. Have a dual screen monitor so that you can on the left see your notes for the podcast. For me, this is just my most recent blog posts so I just put those on the left screen.
  2. Then on the right screen, I have GarageBand running and this let’s me do the takes. One nice thing is that it is easy to splice things together as I oftentimes stumble.
  3. Then finish it all with a good outtro.
  4. Then when it is all done, just a quick upload to Anchor.fm and it is on it’s way to the Internet.

I’m Rich & Co.

Welcome to Tongfamily, our cozy corner of the internet dedicated to all things technology and interesting. Here, we invite you to join us on a journey of tips, tricks, and traps. Let’s get geeky!

Let’s connect