This session offers a basic introduction to producing podcasts using the freeware program Audacity. Topics include: The technical workings of the podcast medium, The process of creating podcast episodes Assembling audiences experiences, Basic production operations

can you hear me now all right excellent all right we have anthony and jason here for those of you joining us in the zoom we are live streaming to youtube so if you uh if you unmute your uh video or your microphone know that it is live streaming to youtube and we’re at 12 15 so it looks like it is time to start all right let’s get started here first of all welcome everybody i’m joseph cohen i’m a professor in the sociology department here at queen’s college in the city university of new york and i’m here with two of my colleagues while asked to introduce themselves first the co-director of the queen’s podcast lab and professor in the english department jason tuga jason thanks joe hi everybody i’m jason tuga i think a lot of you know me already i’m a professor in the english department uh co-director of the queen’s podcast lab and the faculty advisor for the knight news here at queen’s college and we are also joined by anthony borrelli one of our team members anthony do you want to introduce yourself uh thank you hi yes my name is anthony borrelli um i am an intern for the podcast lab this semester i’m a part of the accelerated media studies master’s program so i was with an undergrad undergrad which is interesting and i’ve worked in radio before at my previous college and have some experience with podcasting and adobe prem premiere and audition so whatever i can do to help i’m here and um yeah well it’s great to have you and welcome to everybody here in the zoom session and those of you joining us on youtube either live or after the fact this is a lesson on the basics of podcast production um if you’ve ever been interested in starting a podcast but you don’t know what’s involved in a technical on a technical level today’s lesson is going to cover some of these basics but before we start let me just uh put in a couple of announcements let’s get the slideshow going all right um next friday at lunchtime join us for a discussion with jamie cohen author of producing new and digital media with rutledge press jamie is going to offer an introduction to the field of media production so if media production is something you love it’s a you know a craft or a hobby you’ve thought of taking up or if it’s a line of work that you’ve thought of pursuing this is a great chance to meet a professional producer we’re going to talk about things like what do media producers do what’s the difference between you know a run-of-the-mill and a great producer lessons that you know seasons season producers wish they had known at the start and advice for those who want to get into the field of professional production that’s next friday and you can catch it on the queen’s podcast lab youtube channel if you want to be here on the zoom you can write to me at joseph.comqc.cuny.edu also later this month faculty are invited to join us for a discussion about digital content creation and the work of faculty this is a zoom meeting it won’t be simulcast to youtube live but we might use excerpts in a podcast or a web video in this discussion we’re going to talk about how communications and information technology is changing the way uh academics do their work they’re breaking the old communication monopolies that we used to rely on and they’re creating new competitors but also new opportunities for us to do the kind of work that we do if you’re interested in these types of topics we’re going to talk about the new kinds of media that are affecting our profession and how people use them uh join us it’s a zoom conversation it’s open to uh faculty or interested students from any discipline or any institution uh if you’re interested write to me joseph.cohen at qc.cuny.edu oh anthony anthony pointed out thank you anthony that’s friday september 24th not friday september 10th so that’s a mistake it’s the 24th thank you anthony there are a lot more planned events uh learning events that we have uh for this upcoming semester check out our events at queenspodcastlab.org events two in particular on the first and the fifteenth we’re going to have some other learning sessions that talk about uh other aspects of running podcasts on october 1st we’ll run a mini lesson on developing a podcast franchise you know planning uh developing format and things like that and on october 15th we’re going to talk about the performative part of podcasting hosting interviewing show prep and things like that mark it on your calendar as well as the talks from the other great people that we got lined up um today we’re going to talk about podcast production best way to do it is to just go out there and try it and if you try it and you have an episode that you like you think it’s pretty good uh send it to us uh we’d be happy to put it on if it fits our uh shows if you are a sociology faculty member or graduate student from any institution we’re interested in hearing what you’ve made uh and we can put it up on the annex sociology podcast that’s a podcast we run and if you are a student faculty or staff member at queen’s polit college uh we have the qc pod it’s a sort of an open mic podcast in the college radio tradition you can learn more about that podcast by checking it out on our website queenspodcastlab.org qcpod or go to itunes spotify stitcher wherever you get your podcast ask your smart speaker to play the latest episode of the qc pod you can hear what we do there today’s presentation we’re going to be talking about a specific part of the content creation process podcast post-production this is the task of taking all the raw audio that you’re going to use in your show and putting it together into a coherent rewarding audience experience we’re going to talk about the tasks involved in this program and we’re going to show you the very basics of how to uh produce a podcast from raw audio using a pretty good quality freeware program called audacity uh again this tutorial is the very basics uh of how to do an interview or conversation format podcast which is one of the easier uh uh types of podcasts to get started with uh and i’m joined here by uh my colleagues anthony and jason you guys can just chime in as you deem fit uh at any point in in the discussion um so but before we start with that i wanted to talk about what part of the podcast production process we’re going to be talking about today this is post production is what we’re going to be talking about this is what happens after the microphones turn off after everybody’s gotten their archival audio the music the sound effects that they want this is the part a process of stitching together a podcast to something polished and a high quality listening experience for an audience member um for those of you who are curious about how podcasting works technically on a general level here’s a flow chart so when you guys can you see my mouse here can you see the mouse yes all right wonderful thank you all right so you as a listener when you download a podcast you have this impression that you are going to itunes or spotify google podcast wherever you get your podcast and that you’re downloading the file from them for most of podcast history and over most platforms though that’s not how it works this is how it works somebody creates an audio file an experience and they upload it to a website usually a website that runs on a blogging platform like wordpress is very popular and you can run that site a wordpress site on an internet hosting provider like the university or godaddy or amazon web services uh there are many specialty web hosting providers for podcasts specifically pod bean bra buzz sprout uh blueberries spreaker libsyn simplecast i use a program called castos there’s a bunch okay but you upload your podcast to an internet server and you do it as a as a a as a blog and on a blog you have you have something called an rss feed it’s a small text file that talks about all of the new posts that you’ve had and you make an rss feed that only tracks posts that you mark as podcasts and you register it with spotify with itunes with google with all of those uh podcasting services that we know and and that we use to access our podcast and when you subscribe on itunes to a podcast like say the new york times daily what itunes will do is it will monitor the ss rss feed of the new york times blog and when the special rss feed for podcast says there’s a new episode it will publish it to the website and it might give you the listener a notice and you’ll download it from the web server and listen to it on your computer or your cell phone um today we’re talking about this part right here creating audio files we’re going to talk about a part of the process where we create the audio files creating the audio files themselves that’s a multi-step process uh you don’t just grab a microphone start babbling and then post it to the internet it will lead to a disorganized and overall unsatisfying uh experience in my research of established podcasters and in our own experience creating podcasts here at the podcast lab we found that what people do is they tend to use a multi-step process they deliberately plan their episodes and then they go out and they curate the raw sounds that will be used in constructing the audience experience they’ll they might record a discussion session or go out and record sounds or download sound effects or music from a third party and they’ll dump them all into a drive and once you’ve accumulated all the sounds that you’re going to use in your podcast then it’s your job to stitch them together in a meaningful coherent audience experience and that’s what we’re going to talk about today once you create a polished coherent experience you deploy it to the internet you upload it to your server itunes recognizes it the listeners come see you and the cycle runs its course concretely or well so basically this is a depiction of what you’re going to be doing at this stage that we’re going to talk about today audio post production so you take the speech you take the music the sound effects whatever is going to be in the final experience and you’re really you’re you’re compiling it together and the way that you do it is you use a media production program that gives you a timeline and you drop audio files into the timeline and decide when people are going to hear what sounds or music or speech and you can alter the elements of the timeline you can you know fade music in or out change its volume all sorts of effects but basically you’re you’re you’re putting raw audio on a timeline and orchestrating a listening experience and if you do a good job you got a good podcast um [Music] i want to stop here are there any questions you can ask them in the chat window uh for those of you on youtube you can ask them for those of you on zoom or if anthony or jason you have something to add you’re happy to please please chime in but if there’s nothing we can move on we can move on let’s give a second all right imran brunei or theo you guys are good all right let let’s move on then so post-production is more than just a technical job there are real creative decisions to be made in this part of the creative process and a good producer is able to leave their own stamp on a podcast to uh make the podcast better or something that wouldn’t have been had the uh producer not invested their own creative energies into the final product so the first step when you approach the task of podcast production i recommend that you assume the posture that it is your job to contribute to the audience final experience it’s your job to make sure the podcast sounds good it’s your job to make sure it has the type of character or it meets the goals that it’s it’s trying to uh achieve and that the stories and discussions being conveyed are being conveyed in a a comprehensible and engaging way you can do a lot of stuff when you’re a producer all right in post-production that’s where we decide what what’s included in the podcast what are what what moments of the discussion are the audience is the audience going to get to see what parts of our archival review which which audio clips that we pulled from the vault are people going to see and what parts get cut out what are we going to hide anthony did you want to say something uh yeah just a little anecdote one of the first times i ever tried to do a podcast my friends kind of like an experiment just to have some fun with the two of my friends i noticed in the editing process how much uh how much i cut out and how seamless it can be you don’t know you could cut out five minutes of a conversation but the end point and the beginning point like with that whatever you cut out in the middle and that’s gone you’re gonna find the spot for those two like there’s two points in me and it doesn’t feel like you’ve lost the beat doesn’t feel like you missed anything skipped anything when you’re listening to something you don’t know what you’re missing you don’t know what got cut and that’s the sign of a good edit and uh i also think that something that people don’t think about is breathing a lot people are breathing and going and hook like they’re making little noises and you never hear that they get cut out often they get silenced often and you’ll notice that more the more you listen to a podcast yeah totally we’ll talk about that but you are right when you’re able to cut out a minute of an exchange and it doesn’t change the character that means you were babbling and it’s probably less less compelling content it’s easier said than done i’m sure anthony will attest like it’s it’s much harder to figure out how to cut it it’s not a mindless job you actually need to be well versed in the subject matter and have an ear and be thoughtful to do it well jason yeah i just want to chime in with and add to what anthony was saying and give an anecdote that involves one of our student hosts so right now i’m teaching a podcasting course in the english department and we’ve been talking about the fact that when you are both gathering your audio and editing your audio you you do want to present yourself you want to be yourself but you want to be a particular version of yourself right you want to be your smartest most interesting self the one that you want the audience to see and last semester one of our students samantha galvez montiel made a few really good podcasts for us and we went around and around with drafts of editing and when she finally started to get pretty ruthless with the editing she became so pleased with the results and was saying oh now look how smart i sound yeah whereas before i feel like i just sounded like a any old student now i sound like an expert right and now and she did that through editing and partly what what happened was through editing she realized she wanted to re-record some of her audio so that it sounded sharper and in the process of doing that she and anybody else doing the same process will start to um gain an ear for collecting audio with editing in mind right and that’s when you really start having something you can craft really well so true so true and and it is true that you know editing your audio editing your speech editing monologues or lectures that you give it’s like editing a paper and if you read all of our first drafts you’d be much less impressed than what it looks like when it goes into publication because it’s just well manicured and now with technology it’s easy for us to create well manicured audio as well as text it was harder in past eras but definitely definitely uh clipping out stuff and making making yourself sound polished and succinct is a great way you realize your ideas can be good and sometimes your communicative flaws are getting in the way of what are fundamentally good ideas and it a lot of people experience being having their audio edited as a uh a confidence enhancing experience because they’re like wow you know when you most people hate to listen to themselves but once they start listening to themselves edited they’re like you know what i’m not so done this is kind of smart and people like it it’s true yeah i mean not only that if you if you go through several editorial cycles you’ll start realizing what’s the spot in my voice that i use that i actually like right and and that i want people to hear right and then it really starts to get fine-tuned that’s why it’s good to do your own production at least for some of it yeah because you’ll understand yourself as if you’re if you’re a host if you’re a performer which we’ll talk about in a different session if you’re a performer in the podcast you’ll get a better understanding of your performance if you edit yourself that’s for sure there’s other things though i i just wanted to make sort of a list of ways that producers sort of co-author the audience experience producers can also in post-production we can also order the experience right you can develop a hook and put it at the front that’s like a really great exchange or a funny moment and you put it right at the beginning of a podcast so that it’s like a promise to the audience it’s like you enjoy this exchange you’re gonna get a lot of this stuff in the hour to come and people will jump on board uh anthony do you want to say something on this i just had a great example i listened to this podcast called dungeons and daddies it’s a um it’s a dungeons and dragons podcast where uh the campaign is that like their four dads from our world flung into the forgotten realm that’s literally their live line for the whole show and every episode like the uh they do like a little fake advertisement that recaps what happened in the last episode and it’s such an engaging way to bring people in and it’s not like a previously on although they have made that joke before sometimes they’ll do like a fake like ad for a character called the mall who they gonna buy things from because there’s no actual stuff like that like very silly fun keeps you hooked keeps the like and it keeps developing the narrative so that’s just a great example that i could remember that’s awesome did you want to add something yeah i just have a question did you receive like um my email that i sent you you know what let’s talk about that after the youtube live all right uh jason did you have something that or is the i could add one one thing related to what anthony was saying um there’s a podcast called periodic talks that’s hosted by two actors um an actor from community and an actor from ncis and they uh their first names are gillian and dion i can’t remember their last names but they start every episode with one of their friends who happen to all be kind of famous actors giving a really weird stem fact some science fact that is just something bizarre about the world and it’s like a two-minute thing right at the top of every episode and it just grabs you you know and just like there are ways to uh con to structure your podcast so that you get people because it’s really easy to lose people’s attention really quickly right so it’s designed for that so getting a hook is something you can do you can also reorder the experience to frame discussions that means present stuff at the start to you or to you know make the audience see a topic a certain way or get them in a particular mood or uh you know sort of set the groundwork for everything else you’re going to present you can in my podcast i have more of an information podcast and i uh will sometimes put explanatory material at the front stuff that a general audience might not know but needs to know to understand everything that’s going to happen after or you can reorder experience to develop narrative i’m loath to talk about narrative because jason is you know a recognized expert in that field but like you know telling a story i’m gonna stop cause i’m gonna embarrass myself but y’all you know what i mean you’re good i think you can keep going i’m not going to quit while i’m ahead i know better to talk when i’m not the expert in the room on topics of uh audio post production cleans up sound and speech you can get rid of ticks or noises that might distract the listener when you do it really well and you create that studio sound you can make a podcast sound really professional you can add music and sound effects to change the environment to influence audience emotion and impart an intended impression you know and you can manipulate how interactions are perceived by doing things like playing with silence and spacing uh i’ll give you an example sometimes silence communicates something about an interaction and it sets the emotional you know sort of sets the emotional uh tenor of an introduction i’ll give you an example right think of two scenarios one where someone says would you like to go to my show and then immediately yeah or you say let me check my calendar so if jason says would you like to go to my show and i say let me check my calendar immediately after he says it that’s different than me saying would you like to go to my show and the person pauses is this let me check my calendar the space where you’re assuming someone’s thinking about whether or not they actually want to go or whatnot is telling you something even though nothing was spoken information was conveyed by a silence and you can use silences or get rid of silences to play with meaning to play with interactions you can uh for example um i wanted to say spacing and science conveys emotional energy when you make people’s the start of people’s sentences immediate follow the end of other people’s sentences it creates a high energy impression when you add spacing it lowers the energy makes the pace seem slower and you can do that in post-production anthony did you want to say something i was just going to add to that um use anything we were talking about editing earlier cutting out like gaps and spaces and such and that’s not always the case you can leave in a space a gap silence a moment of silence because that means that is conveying something and it can fit more than it can hurt sometimes it can work more than it can like you don’t always have to cut things you just have to hear what you’re what you recorded you have to really listen i’ll just cut out everything that is dead air because sometimes that air is funny sometimes that air is serious it’s a moment of silence you don’t know that’s a great observation you’re right don’t just go making everything tight you’re you’re imposing a creative decision you know it has to fit and that’s why you got to start with the audience experience like when you start a process you should know what the show’s about you should know what the show tries to do to its audience members how the show you know the type of experience it tries to deliver and then make your use of spaces and silences and stuff consistent with that jason did you want to say something yeah just that also you can add silence if if you want a gap i’m thinking of an example from an episode of 99 invisible with roman mars that’s about bats and it begins with these people kind of having a debate about bats in austin texas and he delivers it like this i don’t remember the exact words but it’s basically like and what they’re arguing about is bats like that whereas let’s just say if it had been spoken like this and what they’re arguing about is bats yeah right that sounds like no big deal right but he adds drama by in by inserting the silence yeah it’s like wait for it yeah yeah yeah i love it so all of this is to say that if you are involved in post-production you are very much a creator and doing a good job in post-production really adds to the final experience and can be extremely important to a podcast so it’s it it’s it’s a it’s an important job and it’s a skilled job and it’s a creative job and uh good editing is a really important part i think of having a successful podcast so if podcast production is about moving content over a timeline in a media production program you’re going to need to use a program and today i’m going to show you the basics of podcast production on a free program called audacity and you can download it to your own computer using the url now a warning we have very recently there has been news of concerns about audacity’s privacy uh and we have not been able to vet it we’ve used audacity for a long time and we’re going to show audacity because uh it’s free and uh we’re very much about open source and we try to show people how to do things in a way that doesn’t cost them money sort of consistent with our organizational goals at the city university of new york uh you know just open and public however there is an issue with privacy i haven’t looked into it i still am personally using audacity but that’s the disclaimer uh something to think about there are other programs pro tools audition anthony uh other other software that you’ve worked with um i use adobe audition but when i did my first internship of my radio station how to produce my own show i used audacity audacity exclusively um for like the first four or five out of ten maybe the first three and then things i did on my own when i didn’t have money for adobe i would use um audacity because it does work it is it does crash more than other things it’s a free service so like you’re getting what you pay for which is nothing but for that price point works as good as anything else you’re gonna get as long as you know what you’re doing you can do anything with audacity yeah it’s it’s listen if you’re just starting out in podcasting you don’t want to spend a ton of money because the you know professional media production programs are very expensive at least get your start on something free and then once you’re into it sorry jason go ahead that’s all right i would just add i also use audition i like it a lot uh but a lot of students have garage band if they work on a mac and have experience with it and that’ll work fine too oh i missed a comment by imran and i wanted to uh here on zoom and i wanted to write it read it this was uh pertaining to our earlier conversation about how producers add to the experience uh imran writes i forgot the name of the podcast but it was an anthropology podcast and we could hear frogs and birds behind the voice and the host said he was recording it in a jungle type place and it really added to the environment uh the sound dynamics yeah totally right like music it’s about uh it’s about creating a whole experience for the listener and to have music and sound of it just you want to transport people if that’s what you’re about and it can be very easy to do especially when you’re dealing with audio only like effects are so easy when there’s no video aspect video can look bad you can get away with free stuff on audio and yeah let’s get back to so we’re going to talk about audacity today um and let’s show you how uh it works um so before you start any project what you should do is you should create a folder on your hard drive and you should take all the mp3 files or all the sound files they might be mp3 wave whatever you take all the sound files that you’re going to use and you put them in the project folder so they’re all at the same place on your hard drive usually in podcasts and for reasons we’ll explain in a second it’s traditional uh to record one voice track per person so let’s say jason anthony and i were going to record a podcast we would talk but we would each record a soundtrack with just our voices on them and there’s a lot of benefits to doing it uh some of which i’ll explain in a moment so you dump all those on and store any show notes or preparation material anything that you had with that episode and before your start get all your stuff in one place jason did you say yeah just a word of warning something i learned the hard way uh you do not want to store these files somewhere on your computer where they end up in the cloud because the software will lose track of them so you want to be sure they’re actually on your hard drive and if you’re getting serious and doing a lot then you probably want to invest in an external hard drive that you can keep up it all on if you keep everything there and have a series of organized folders by episode uh it’ll make your life a lot easier and because your computer will fill up if you just keep pouring auto audio files on it yeah the only thing is is some portable hard drives are slow to read and write data from and it can really extend your production time so be careful about that but definitely it’s best so yeah don’t it’s bet rather than do it on onedrive or dropbox or google cloud do it on your c drive do it on your d drive anthony want to show us your uh yes this is a passport it’s an external hard drive i think this has uh either a terabyte or 50 or 60 or 100 or it’s a lot of gigabytes or one terabyte which is you know a lot of gigabytes so definitely grab one of these and copy everything you work on the one thing you should know more than anything double triple save everything you do and have it on multiple different platforms on your computer in a hard drive or on your yeah save them in a folder in your computer so you’re going to hold around here send it to yourself in an email if it crashes and you have not saved you will never feel a pain worse than losing a project that you’ve worked on for hours especially when it comes to editing editing can be tedious and it’s rewarding when you’re done but if you have to backtrack it’s like you’re playing a video game in the save file corrupts and you have to start from the beginning you don’t want to so always be diligent all right good ver it is and also well let’s we’ll let’s uh show you in a second so let’s take a look at how this how this program works uh and i’m going to show you sort of a few types of operations that you can engage in and we’re going to start with just importing your tracks so take a look hold on i’m going to get out of this share and i’m going to get out of this and hold on i’m going to share my uh desktop okay so if you take a look at my desktop uh you’ll see i have i’ve uh open an audacity project and i have a uh folder with uh all of the uh sound files that i’m going to use today if you’d like to try these sound files you can go to our website queenspodcastlab.org and download the files yourself in a pdf production guide you can practice along with us see what we do so i have some uh i have some practice audio that i recorded with my colleague ryan sperry who i interview with and i’m going to just show you a few things that you can do but before i do that i just want to show you so the first step before you do anything you have to drag the audio files into the audio editing program and i’m all i’m going to do i have them here in this folder and i’m just going to drop them in to to audacity and put them in there now once they are in the next step is hold on i’m gonna i’m gonna hold on that the the next step is you want to [Music] hold on clean the audio and that involves removing uh background noises and adjusting the levels to make sure everybody’s talking at the same level so for for background noise uh there is a function if you go to effects and you go to noise reduction there is a an effect that will take a constant noise in your track and it will extricate it from the uh from this from the particular track so if you see here this says joseph cohen that’s me that’s my part of the discussion and this is my colleague ryan who was uh who is uh speaking with me and i’m going to so here you can take a look so for example here i’ll give you a few seconds i’m going to delete all of this all right hopefully you can hear this hold on no you can’t hold on speakers i believe it’s uh just his personal opinion so we’re gonna start off with the introduction and uh you’ll put that on uh on a bed of music we’ve provided you with music so here’s the introduction welcome to the fake podcast my name is joseph cohen and today we’re going so i had some preparatory remarks i was talking before the actual show began and the actual show the introduction begins here welcome to the big podcast my name is joseph cohen so what i’m going to do is i’m going to start the audio there now when you take a look at my levels when i’m talking to the fake podcast my name is joseph quite loud today we’re going to talk with you i can uh lower the uh the volume uh in a bunch of different ways you don’t want it up in the red welcome to the fake podcast it means that there’ll be some distortion you can turn it down a little bit to talk with ryan sperry about podcast and you want your audio to be peaking at the top of the green practice podcast ryan’s less loud than me but you can see ryan’s levels are also happy dude so i’ve adjusted i’ve adjusted the audio so we’re roughly at the same level i can take background noise i highlight uh to to erase the background noise on a channel highlight a part where the person isn’t speaking and you can only hear the fan running or the radiator whatever is creating a consistent background noise not like the bird tweeting outside my you click get a noise profile and then you highlight the entire track or the part that you want to get rid of the persistent noise and once you have gotten the noise profile you press ok and the program will extricate the consistent background noise once you have the uh your tracks that are where everybody’s roughly speaking at the same level and there’s no background noise you’re ready to move on to the next step is there anything that uh anthony or jason you’d like to add about this phase sort of the cleaning audio tracks i guess i would just add that you want to be careful with levels as you’re recording as well because you can get distortion that you can’t remove if you record them too high yeah always watch your your levels it’s true so when i was working on i did a project where i was doing a music show and i had to drag in all the different songs and i may not realize this but every musician records at a different level so making them all uh hit the same is a lot harder than you think because and also this is the same thing with vocals if somebody’s talking loud or talking close to the mic and you lower that you’re gonna hear the difference if you don’t really take the time to notice the level you’re gonna hear the difference when somebody’s lowered like somebody’s volume’s longer and somebody bought somebody’s volume is raised or one zone comes in blaring and other comes in light so you have to turn it up and down mixing or not mixing um i guess mixing the volumes is is definitely something you have to be focused on so i agree with jason you really need to make sure while you’re recording the vocals are as even as they possibly be can be so you should always do a test run in the beginning um i don’t sit still so if you’re having a guest on that maybe he’s like me doesn’t sit still or doesn’t say you gotta make sure that they know like you gotta be right here in front of the mic so we hear you clearly concisely were the same volume the whole time you know you have to make sure that you communicate with whoever you’re doing the show with so they know what you’re getting into and uh you’re just trying to make post-production as easy as possible for yourself afterwards or whoever edits for you totally great piece of advice okay let me show you how to put a bed of music so we we we cut out sort of the backstage talk and now what i’m going to do is i’m going to put a bit of music over my introduction um just to show you how to how it works so take a look at what we’re doing let’s see just want to make sure i got the the right screen here all right so i’m going to take this song it’s a freeware song called soul searching by jairus okay i’m going to drag it onto the audacity window and i’m going to move the track to the top read over my introduction talk so here take a look this is my introduction here i’m going to mute the uh music so you can hear the the first part welcome to the fake podcast my name is joseph cohen and today we’re going to talk with ryan sperry about podcasting you’re not going to want to miss this okay so there’s my introduction i’m going to delete i’m going to delete most of this music track that i am working on and so what i do is i make sure that the selection tool is chosen i’m going to left click on the timeline i’m going to hold down the shift and press the end button to get rid of the entire song and i’m going to press just so you see it i’m going to press the delete key and that erased the remainder of the music i only want to use a clip of it i’m going to use the time shift tool and i’m going to push the two audio tracks down a little bit so that my speech so that the listener hears this intro song for about three seconds before we speak then i’m going to highlight the part where i’m talking on the music track if you use an effect called auto duck auto duck it will pull down the volume of the intro music while there is talking in the track directly below the music track which is where i’m talking so i’m going to press ok and if you see auto duck has lowered the volume while i was talking oh no and i think i made a mistake here because i didn’t leave enough room hold on okay now let’s start the main okay i i cut out too much of the music so let me just do this push this to three seconds this to three seconds so my audio starts somewhere again selection tool while i’m talking effects auto duck and and this video will be posted to youtube so you can follow along and do it at home or you can read the written tutorial and then i’m going to i’m going to bring in the interview you see this is where the interview starts i’m going to pull it back and i’m going to fade out the music fading out means the music is going to stop slowly and someone’s going to start talking while the music’s fading out so i’m going to highlight the part that i want to fade out and i’m going to hit effect fade out and now listen we have an in we have an introduction listen [Music] welcome to the fake podcast my name is joseph cohen and today we’re going to talk with ryan sperry about podcasting you’re not going to want to miss this okay now let’s start the main part of the program how’s it going ryan okay how’s it going ryan i’m just gonna pull that out pull that in i probably should have left the music running a little longer and if we were doing this for real i would say the fade was too short but then the fade out comes how’s it going ryan pretty good thanks for having me on the practice podcast and there you go we um hold on so basically we uh took some music we arranged it on the timeline we deleted portions we added music and we created some effects on the music and now we have a serviceable introduction with introductory music and something that sounds like a podcast um jason says you can find music on wfmu’s free music archive with no copyright restrictions jason you want to say something here uh yeah just that you got to be careful when you’re using music about copyright and there are a number of sources where you can find music that you are allowed to use so anything on and wfmu’s tends to be very comprehensive and it’s arranged by genre which is pretty helpful and when you go to download it you can look at what the specific copyright rules are around any given piece of music so it’ll say you’re free to use it this way this way in this way sometimes it’ll say you can use it for anything you want sometimes it’ll say you can use it for anything that’s not commercial so if if you’re trying to make money with this thing then you can’t use that music right so you just have to be careful and read the fine print claiming that you use things for educational purposes as well that’s what i did in my old school because i wasn’t making money off of it that’s awesome yeah like what you said so like i had a show where i just picked like new hip-hop songs and put them on and um nobody ever said anything but if they did for educational purposes i can do that because i’m learning how to do this and if you want to make things maybe not post them maybe you can and if they get taken down from soundcloud or wherever you put them that’s fine but just like make things first you know what i mean don’t profit off them if you like because then you’re gonna get shut down for sure but make whatever you want first with whatever sounds whatever practice practice makes perfect and then worry about that stuff later because that’s what’s going to happen obviously if you’re trying to make a profit off of it like you use drake’s sound like a song he just put out and it blows up they’re going to come after you for that right and you don’t want that but again well i’ll tell you we’re going to later on this semester we’re going to bring on steve van doren who’s a podcaster and a lawyer it turns out it does it it stay away from copywritten material to the best of your ability under any circumstances because even copyright law is written in a very strange way where even if you were singing happy birthday in the park to your friends and somebody recorded it and can prove that you did it the people who own the rights to happy birthday can make your life miserable uh you don’t it doesn’t even matter if you’re not making money doesn’t even matter if you’re trying to teach like there’s a whole complicated world and my advice when you’re starting off is stick to creative commons stick to public domain go to the library of congress look for stuff that’s free use or con creative commons we’ll learn more about it in that session stay away from copyright it is a landmine there’s a uh there’s a show called the h3 podcast that is big right now on youtube and uh they do a lot he’s one of the only people the guy who uh has the podcast even client he’s one he won a landmark uh free use battle because they he used a clip of uh a lesser youtuber’s show or whatever he made and took him to court ethan has money ethan isn’t like rich rich but he has enough money because of his platform to go to court like that you do not you are in college you cannot afford these battles so please don’t please don’t play around with that free use is something that you’d have to you have to fight for even if you do even if you are in the right in the situation you don’t have that kind of uh it’s not your fight to fight at this moment totally let me show you a couple other things you can do as part of a production your work as a producer i want to show you silencing errant noises on a on on an exchange so you saw how to make you saw a few things in the cut of that uh of that intro you saw how to delete stuff and how to push tracks up and down the the line i want to show you here at 137. in our fake exchange i believe i have something where i’m interrupting them here’s the thing there are only hold on 137 my 137 or walking around the neighborhood i find it’s a good replacement okay you can hear in the background you could hear my wife talking on the telephone to get rid of errant noises in the background highlight them choose the selection tool highlight them and this button up here silence will get rid of any uh any additional noises i realize i put i manipulated things up oh here we go listen to this clip is an audio format of uh delivering content i tried to clear my throat [Music] recordings it’s me trying to make uh crude noises right that’s that’s gonna happen a dog’s gonna bark a doorbell is gonna ring something like that’s gonna happen and that’s why we record on separate tracks if i’m speaking with anthony and jason and my dog comes in barking while anthony’s in the middle of something great and we want to keep it we can just highlight the errant noises and silence them you can do things like push tracks backwards and forwards in time so for example i can pull back uh let me find a gap so for example i can get rid of part of what i wanted to say or what i was saying by just deleting it i can also click tracks all right i press control i and i can move tracks up and down the timeline i can silence or delete what people said and the idea is is you go through and you get rid of things you can get rid of things like ticks verbal ticks that’s when people like say um or er or you know or things like that you can uh get rid of entire pieces of conversation but the idea is is that you’re cutting and reducing and expanding and working on the timeline you can also insert sound effects here’s a horn a car horn content uh distribution on the internet i guess i guess that’s how i would say that’s probably not the best definition there that’s all right that’s pretty good all right that’s it i put the car horn in there you can see it down here on the timeline so there are all sorts of different operations that you can uh employ while you are managing the timeline um oh i didn’t realize that that wasn’t i probably wasn’t broadcasting my screen well we’ll redo it in post um and then the last thing i want to say while you’re doing it um hold on while you are um while you are editing uh a podcast you can do a lot for people downstream by keeping notes of what people were talking about when the topics change uh when there were some interesting exchanges this is a great time to write the tweets or the facebook or instagram posts that you expect to put out on the day that the podcast is released uh you can help other aspects of the podcast enterprise by keeping track of what is said in a podcast and creating shareable material when you’re done you export the track from audacity as an mp3 so for example on this on uh this example i would go to file export export as an an mp3 uh oh i didn’t do that did i do that i didn’t do that in the window did i file export export as mp3 like that and you can save a single mp3 file um make sure you use a lower uh a lower quality file because it will be smaller and smaller files will tax your web hosting solutions and be faster to download and for most speech that type of audio fidelity that you need in a high quality large file is not really worthless uh in my opinion besides that the next step is to just get out there and start practicing record your podcast try to make an episode and i just want to remind you uh remind those of you who are uh doing this if you hold on if you [Music] create something and you like what you’re making and you want to just put it out there if it is sociology content let us know drop us a note at the annex sociology podcast if you are a sociology faculty or graduate student from any institution uh send us your mp3 let us listen to it and if it’s right for our show maybe we’ll put it in this series for uh queens college student faculty or staff same invitation from the queen’s the qc pod if you make a uh make up something that you like and you just want to put it out there in the world by all means let us know send it to us a final word uh this seminar and everything we do at the queen’s podcast or wait for before i do the final whatever uh do you have any do you guys have anything to add or anything to uh to say uh on production any closing words or anything i missed um i do have a quick question yeah i were to use um voice memo um to record something on my um you know my phone or my laptop how could i export that into um something that audacity could read just uh when you use voicemail it usually records your voice as an mp3 on your phone drive and if you go to phone files you should be able to identify the mp3 or depending on what you use i don’t know about voice memo but you can also use the share button and upload it to dropbox and it will be waiting for you there and then it’s just an mp3 file and you just drag and drop it in or your google drive if you don’t have dropbox yeah gotcha now i have a trick for you bruno if you’re going to do an interview and you you do it with two phones because you want a separate track one trick that we used is uh we would count at the beginning of the uh of the interview so you’d have your phone with voice memo i have my phone and then i’d say one you’d say two i’d say three you’d say four i’d say five you’d say six and then it’s really easy to line up on the timeline so do that counting exercise and it will help you calibrate two audio sources that might have been yeah so you pick up these tricks as you do that’s why really the best way to start podcasting is to just make podcasts it really is it’s the best way is there any other i would just add i’ve i’ve only well i’ll back up and explain a little bit when we record episodes for the queen queen’s podcast lab we use a platform called squad cast which is nice because it includes video and it records each voice as a separate track so it’s easy to edit i have only recently learned that you can record audio on separate tracks for each speaker via zoom and also every queens college student has access to a zoom account and if you need there are tutorial videos on how to claim those if you need those uh let me know i can send it to you they definitely post that in the chat because yeah something some people here could use that let me let me post it in the chat give me a second all right and try to post it to youtube uh or maybe i will once you put it in the chat before we leave just sort of a you know public service announcement or a commercial um final word uh the this seminar and the stuff we do at the queen’s podcast lab these are free educational resources and they’re brought to you by the state and city of new york these are your tax dollars at work our work creates free public resources and non-commercial scholarly media content and great educational experiences for young new yorkers who aspire to careers in fields like marketing media communication entertainment culture and information if you want to support the kind of work we do whether it’s online learning series like this or our podcast like the annex or the qc pod or you want to support our students by help helping us give them learning experiences that are on par with what the kids get at the expense of private schools then please visit our website queenspodcastlab.org and click on donate your tax deductible charitable donation will go through the department of sociology at queen’s college in the city university of new york and it not only helps us create all these things but it communicates to our superiors at the university that people appreciate what we’re doing so if you can support us if you like what we’re doing and you have the means to do so please please support us um so that concludes our session any any final words anthony any final words jason uh i have a final word for students some of you know this already but uh student life would like to uh revamp what was the student radio club and they’re in the process of renovating what should be pretty nice production studios but they need students to organize to charter the club which means there needs to be a president a vice president a secretary and a treasurer and they have to submit an application and there have to be at least 10 members so i i think i’ll follow up via email but i have posted the call for submitting the application that student life just put out a couple days ago in the chat and so please download that if you’re interested if you want to if you want to get this going we need student involvement and student leadership so i really want to encourage you to uh get involved and organize and and like i said i’ll email about it to try to rally some people why don’t we do this if you’re interested in being in the radio station which is also going to have podcasting facilities live streaming facilities you can live stream your gaming all sorts of stuff uh contact you send me an email joseph.cohen at qc.cuny.edu and we’ll all get together online on zoom as we do and and just hash things out uh anthony anything uh before we go um i’ll definitely talk to you both about that after but yes all right all right oh i was just gonna say i did actually have something to say that uh people um whether you got something from this or maybe you’re just inspired maybe you want to be a part of this maybe you don’t uh go out and create do what you want and take that opportunity any opportunity or time you have do not sit on your laurels do not waste time uh there is no time like the present just get out there and make what you want you will fall on your butt get back up and keep going because you know it’s corny you’ve heard it before but you’re never gonna know until you know i listen back to all the old things i’ve recorded and i hear the progress as much as it makes me cringe to hear myself talk on any platform i cringe less the older i get and the better i get because like you were saying earlier you know you progress is so important and it’s very it’s very um hearable it’s very seeable it’s visible in an audio platform but you know never stop you know what let’s leave it at that what a great way to close so thank you very much to all of you joining us on youtube on behalf of my colleagues jason tuga and anthony bareilly i’m joseph cohen thank you for joining us please join us again all right