10 tips for great sounding podcasts!

Get close to the Mic! If you're more than about 6 inches from your mic - whether its an expensive condenser mic or an inexpensive usb headset mic combo, you need to be close to get the best sound. The further you are from the mic, the more background noise you introduce into signal. Be sure to address the front of the microphone. Each microphone has a sweet spot. Spend some time finding your mic's sweet spot.

Use a windscreen, a pop filter or speak slightly off center from the mic to avoid popping p's or plosives. Plosives sound terrible to listeners - they are quite jarring. Doing one of the three options above will go a long ways to reducing or eliminating plosives from your recording. The other step that help this is a high pass filter (below).
Record in a quite place. Sounds obvious but if you don't do it your recording is hosed. Make a recording of the room where you plan to record and see what it sounds like. Shoot for peak levels of at least -50db in quiet room (even lower is better). If the room is noisy try a different spot or use a noise gate/expander.
Use stuff from around the house to prevent sound from reflecting off the walls. Some podcasters put their mic on a stand in front of a closet, open the closet doors and face the open closet while speaking into the mic. This minimizes sound reflection and prevents that echo sound which is also jarring. Other ideas include hanging a blanket in front of your mic.
Record to a lossless format like wave or aiff. Don't record right to mp3 unless you plan to do no editing at all. Converting to mp3 throws away 90% of the data
Record at 24 bit if your hardware or audio interface supports it. Most software like Audacity and Garage band 08 support 24 but recording. Recording at 24 bit resolution give you an additional 48 db of dynamic range an help you to ....
Avoid clipping at all costs by recording at safe levels! Clipping is digital distortion that sounds harsh and terrible. It occurs when the analog to digital converter cannot process sounds that are too loud. By recording at safe levels, we mean stay under 0 db at all times. In practice this means shoot for peak levels during recording that are as low as -10 to -12db or even lower. Recording at 24 bit allows us to to boost levels later without a significant reduction in sound quality or resolution while avoiding clipping altogether.
Use a high pass filter to reduce the undesirable low frequencies of speech below 80hz. A lot of mixers, mic pre-amps and other recording devices have either a high pass filter or its cousin the low cut filter at 75-80hz. Push that button in - it helps! If this isn't an option with your hardware, you can do it in software. Some voices that are higher pitched can start the high pass filter even higher 100 - 200hz in some cases. Here is a high pass filter in Garage Band 08's Visual EQ filter:
Apply some compression to to your speech recording. Compression (audio compression not lossy compressions like mp3 or AAC) done right reduces the contrast between the loudest and softest parts of your audio to make the listening experience better especially if your listener is in a noisy environment like the gym or in their car on the freeway.
If this hi pass filter and compression stuff is too much to bother with - just use the Levelator: http://www.conversationsnetwork.org/levelator/. Just drag you aiff or wav file (you did record to aiff or wave didn't you) on the Levelator and watch the Levelator work its magic. It does the equivalent of high pass filter, compression, and level optimization for you. Its free and fantastic. I can't recommend it enough. A few caveats: don't use it for music, and if you recorded at 24 bit, you may need to convert your file to 16 bit first.

Now you can convert your podcast to mp3 and post. Happy podcasting!

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Nice Post

Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 2007-12-25 12:18.

helpful

Thanks

Submitted by Joe (not verified) on Thu, 2008-01-03 13:38.

Thanks Geoff.

I can't wait to try some of this on our next recording. For the most part, we've been following the tips you put out there, but have always struggled with the post-processing. I'm hoping that "The Levelator" will fill in some of these gaps.