History has shown us many changes in the way people consume content. Many centuries ago it was printed words, one century ago it was the radio. From there it went to television and finally the internet took over. The internet was and still is very visually focused, however in recent years audio content has been gaining traction quickly. With inventions like Amazon’s Alexa and the Google Home, along with the integration of smart phone capabilities into car entertainment systems like Apple’s CarPlay, audio content is becoming easier to consume and distribute in a way that will allow you to reach as many ears as possible. A few months ago a few friends and I wanted to start recording podcasts and sharing them with the world (or as many people as would willingly listen to us) and I am going to share how I taught myself how to produce a podcast and how I was able to save some money but still create a good-sounding audio.
Let’s start with microphones. The cheapest option, from what I have gathered over the past few months of recording and editing podcasts, is if you plan to have a podcast with people who are in different rooms or even different houses all together. There are free applications that can make most microphones sound perfectly acceptable for a podcast. Will they sound like perfect studio quality? No, but they are more than good enough to give a podcast a shot and see if it is an idea worth putting more time and money into.
I recommend using Discord. It is a gaming-focused communication application but it works extremely well for really any kind of communication – and it works wonders for people with lower quality microphones. It has features that let you virtually mix the audio as well. This means that if one person is louder than another you can adjust their individual volumes so that the audio is all balanced and nicer on the ears. Furthermore, it allows there to be one main “host” in charge of recording the podcast and balancing audio while the others only have to worry about opening Discord and speaking. The only catch is that the “host” will likely have to pay up for a better microphone than the rest of the people on the podcast. This is because their audio will be recorded locally and Discord’s audio quality magic will not apply to their track. (A work around could be recording from a separate computer through a separate Discord account which will be a dedicated recording account, although this does complicate things slightly).
Finally, recording the podcast. Once everyone is logged into Discord and balanced it is time to open an application for recording the discord and the host’s own audio. I would recommend Open Broadcasting Software (OBS) which is free to use and is a rather powerful application – though for the purposes of a podcast it is quite simple and we will not be making use of the majority of its capabilities. All you have to do is set the program to record your desktop’s audio as well as your microphone’s input and you have both the host’s audio and the other people on the podcast’s audio. From there, you can balance the host audio to match the other audio by using OBS’s input volume adjustment sliders and everything will be all nice and level once more. After recording, export the file to your favorite editor – something like iMovie works well if you have a Macintosh or DaVinci Resolve for Windows users. All you need to do is adjust audio levels and/or make some cuts at the beginning and end of the podcast and then export.