PodCasting

Here's a page dedicated to the art and mechanics of PodCasting.

Hardware for PodCasting
I'm all about trying to use as much of the existing, on-hand technology that we have on campus. Of course, you can use an Apple iPod with an optional microphone attachment, but that can get pretty expensive. (A 30 GB iPod is coming down in price ($199) and you can find these on eBay, hopefully not somebody's stolen iPod.) You can try to use a cheap-o desktop boom microphone, but the recorded quality leaves a lot to be desired. You can't simply plug a standard hand-held microphone into a MIC input jack on the computer's sound card because the microphone doesn't supply any voltage to the sound card -- the sound will be faint and very tinny. See an option below to use a powered mixer with a standard microphone.

Here are some offerings from [|RadioShack] for different options you can use or adapt for podcasting:
 * The [|Olympus® WS-100 Digital Voice Recorder] is a 64 MB Digital Voice Recorder with a USB connector to hook up to a PC/Mac system. Their Catalog # is 14-1144 and priced on the web at $79.99. Holds 27 hours of recordings. Podcasting seminar leaders at the 2006 WoW AzTEA conference used this and it was very nice quality. Here is the main index page for their [|digital voice recorders] offerings.

I've used a very basic powered microphone mixer (older model from Radio Shack) that was sitting around. I plugged two mics (one with an XLR connector that ended with a 1/4" mono connector into the mixer input, the other mic had a 1/4" mono connector) into the 1/4" connector inputs and then used an RCA connector from the output of the mixer to a 1/8"/3.55mm mini connector (similar to a Walkman-type headphone jack connector) into the PC soundcard microphone input. I then used the open source sound recorder/editor, [|Audacity], to record the "live" input - great recorded quality for a non-pro set up. Here's a [|sample of this set up] from a little test interview I did with a student in the Library computer lab. The MP3 audio file can also be found on my CDO Repair Tech web page for [|Multimedia] info.