I’ve decided to write a little column that might help some of you Mac users do audio editing on your computers. I’ll start today with doing a very basic podcast. These basic suggestions should help guide people into creating their own shows simply, affordably and easily. In today’s article, I’m only going to cover the actual creation of the audio, not the web side of things.

As some of you may know every new Macintosh comes with iLife. iLife includes a application called GarageBand. If you’re a Mac user it’s probably the best app to use for this, but there are others, Audacity is a good, free audio editor, there’s also Soundtrack Pro (which is a little over priced for this article). Now for a simply podcast with only a few things going on, you talking, background music and maybe the odd misc. audio clip garage band is perfect.

First thing to consider is how you’re going to get your voice into the computer. There are many ways, if you use a Mac with a built in microphone this might be enough. For better quality, consider going to a external microphone. One problem that comes up all the time is that the consumer line of Macs don’t have mic inputs anymore, so you have two options, purchase something like the Griffin iMic, which provides you with a Line Level and Mic Level input via USB into your Mac. With the iMic you can use any computer microphone or use pro-level preamps and mixers. Probably a better way to go if you just plan to use a microphone you a good choice is the Samson C01U. This is a high quality mic that plugs into your computer via USB.

So once you have your input method chosen add a track in your app of choice and set your Mic as it’s source. After that’s it’s really as easy as pushing the record button, I recomend recording what you want to say and then adding the background music and sound effects in afterward. Also remember garbage in = garbage out, so shut down anything that makes noise, fans, TVs, radios, anything that makes any background noise.

In GarageBand if you click the little downward pointing arrow it will brings up the track volume, it’s also called a volume envelope. It’s just a line that you can click on and drag up or down to set the volume of the track anywhere in the project. So to easily fade the music when you are about to talk simply add the music track in later and pull that line down. You can do a subtle fade also, just by changing the shape of the line. GarageBand 3 does include “Auto-ducking” but this doesn’t always work just right and learning this technique will allow you to make a very good podcast in very little time.

Once you have everything set consider adding a little bit of reverb to your voice, and maybe even using the male voice EQ setting. you can get at all this by double clicking the icon on your voice track and click the “Details” Arrow that shows up in the drawer. Feel free to play with EQ, compressor, and Reverb settings until you get everything just the way you like it.

Steve Goetz (Contributing Editor)

PS from Victor: My apolgies to Steve who had sent me this piece but I had not posted in a timely fashion.