Software Question for Vocal Training ... Potential Future Podcast

There was a podcast festival in Toronto last weekend. Interesting stuff. I did FOH for a couple of events.

https://www.hotdocs.ca/p/podcastfestival





Find out if there's a similar event where you are.

Great community.

A friend and I have been talking about launching a podcast series as we're both storytellers by nature - and there have been a couple of requests.

Equipment is one thing, but storytelling is what you need to be able to do.

Go to local storytelling events. They are huuuuugely helpful in developing your voice/rhythm. Listen to what works - grab a few slots for newbies - pretty much every storytelling event I've been to leaves a couple of 2 - 5 minute slots for new storytellers. Kind of funny - a few of the storytellers I've met at these events were at the podcast festival - cuz they're known now

Hopefully jes pops in with her experience with the genre.

I podcast. My mic is a part of my headphones. It is a SADES SA-708 and it's not bad (note: it has two plugs so I use an adapter when plugging it into my PC).

I use TeamSpeak to record and Adobe Audition to edit. For YouTube, I pretty much never record myself making a video (if I do, I use Screencast-O-Matic, the pro version). For sound without video, I slap a single image on it and use Windows Movie Maker to extend that single image to the entire length of the sound part of the broadcast. Then upload to YouTube and I'm done.

TeamSpeak requires a channel but you can start with the public ones and just hit record on TeamSpeak. It has a push-to-talk feature that I recommend, so you don't record your sneezes. It's free to download. Downside: it makes a large file.

Screencast-O-Matic has a free and a paid version. The paid version is something like $25 and it takes away their icon and gives you more time to talk. But I would not recommend it for more than maybe 15 - 30 minutes of talk.

Windows Movie Maker is free to download and a bonus is it makes a fairly small file when it's done, but it does take a while to do its thing. I podcast 2 hours or more at a time and WMM takes about as long to do its thing so I just go off and get dinner or something.

Adobe Audition is the one costly item. But it's very good sound editing software. For a free version, you might want to try Audacity. One big upside to Audition is that it will save your TeamSpeak sound file to a much smaller file.

For really long videos (e. g. not just one image), I would recommend Adobe Premiere for editing; can't recall if you can record with it. This one makes a big file again, and those take longer to upload to YouTube.

Ask me whatever you like. I'll be flitting in and out of A2K.