Welcome to Podcast Answers, the show where we help you start and grow your podcast answering any questions along the way. That's right, today we're going to be talking about a couple different things, but first And foremost, we're going to be talking about episode art because it's important now. And I will tell you why. It's important before, but it's really important now.
And we're also going to be talking about Descript and Squadcast and what the integration means for you because they just got bought, Squadcast got bought by Descript. And so what does that mean for you? We'll talk about that here in a few minutes. But here we go guys. Episode art, it's always been important. It's always been something that, that I've always done for as long as I could.
I've always chosen to include the episode art work for all of the things that I do for all of the podcasts I do. But you know that you need to have artwork for your show. You need to have artwork that that indicates what your show is kind of a little bit of your branding, things like that. So people know when they're looking through a, when they're looking through a catalog of podcasts, they know that what yours is, what they can trust for you and figure out what yours is about. But episode art.
So similar to the show level art, your episode level art is going to be a new piece of art for every episode that you put out. That's right. A new piece of art and the same, I would say the same things apply as far as creating it, but we'll get into a little bit more. Why is it important now these days? Cause it's been around for a while. The Apple podcast has included it in their spec for a long time.
They've said, "Hey, we want you to have episode level art, and here's why, but they don't ever actually display it." So Apple doesn't even display the episode level art in their app, but they've finally gone on board and they've finally said, "Hey guys, we're actually going to be including this in our episode art. We're going to be showing this in the podcast app. And so it
is important now, and lots of other apps have done this already. You know, lots of other apps have already showed the episode level art, but Apple podcasts for whatever reason never did it themselves. They never took it on themselves to go and actually show the episode level art. So I don't know if people did or not. I always did because I knew other apps always show that art Spotify shows that art cast a manic shows that art. The only thing that doesn't is Apple podcasts.
So with the new release of iOS 17, album art, it's going to be more important now than it ever has before. And the reason I say that is because lots of people use Apple podcasts as their podcast player. It comes on Apple devices. It's easy to get. It's easy to see people know. Oh, by default, you know, a lot of people are going to use that as their podcast app because it is coming on their, on their device. And so what now that Apple podcast is showing that we need to include that.
In our episodes. So essentially it's going to be the same thing, 1400 by 1400. Up to 3000 by 3000 pixel square. It has to be exactly square. So 1400 by 1400 up to 3000 by 3000. I would suggest doing the larger of the two because with Apple podcasts, it's gonna be showing up on things like the TVs. And so you wanna have a better quality art showing up. So I would go with the 3000 square pixel square art and it can be a PNG or a JPEG.
It needs to be in the RGB color space and it'd be less than 500 kilobytes. So usually with that, I say make it a JPEG. And I like doing mine 3000 by 3000, but again, it can, it doesn't have to be. It can be either one of those, you know, 1400 to 3000. But I say make it as big as you can, because it's going to show up on a lot of the apps. But again, there are things to consider. You don't want to bloat your feet up. You don't want to have it to be too big.
you know, well, that would kind of affect your feed. But, but if you include that art in your MP3 in the ID three tags, because in a wall, we'll talk about that a little bit, but it makes the file a lot
longer to start downloading. So the, it needs to be a unique file name. So you, I would name mine something like EP01 or EP02 or episode three, or whatever you're naming your show, I would name your show art, I wouldn't just call it like show art or episode art, I would call it something that's going to be unique to the, it's going to be something that's unique to that, that episode.
So some, some, some podcast apps though, like I had mentioned, like Overcast, use the ID three tag art instead of the RSS, whatever's in the RSS. So normally you, when you create an episode, you take it through an ID three tag editor, which actually puts the tags in the MP3 and so that's how you title your MP3, you create the art on your MP3, and you can put chapters in there and things like that.
So the file itself has that information, but then your RSS feed has all that same information, especially with podcasting 2.0, you can include a chapter file in there, you can do, you could be four, but you could do the episode art.
the chapters and things like that, but Some apps again don't use the RSS Tags they actually use the ID 3 tags in the MP3 player And the MP3 itself so in that's the case I would maybe recommend going down to the 1400 by 1400 just because the MP3 actually stores when you put things in the ID 3 It's at the very beginning of the file.
And so, especially people on slower connections, if that header is gonna be larger because you have a larger image in there, it's gonna take longer before they actually hear the audio. So you may wanna take that into consideration if you're putting the episode art into the ID3 tag, just let that stuff, it's in the header. And so it takes longer to download the file when you start downloading the file.
So another thing to consider when you're making your episode art is don't have the title in the lower 15, don't have any words in the lower 15% of the art, because it can be covered in some places in the Apple podcast. Apple podcast sometimes covers up the lower section of the art with something else that they put in there. So I would just not put anything important, any words in there in the lower 15% of that.
So why create show art? It's episode art. I mean, it seems like a lot of work. It seems like like extra work that you need to put in that may not be relevant to you. Is it going to actually help anything? So yes, I would say you put episode art in. It's going to take you a little bit longer to make because you have to make that art every time you do it. But the nice thing is it displays on the podcast apps. It displays on CarPlay as far as what that episode is about. It shows that episode.
It shows something a little bit different. So they know what they're listening to. They know what they're doing. You don't have to do this. not a rule that you have to do, but it does cause your episodes to stand out and to be unique because each episode is going to have a little bit different art. So things to keep into consideration when making the art is make it relevant to your episode. If you have a guest, put the guest in the artwork.
So I always do that for this show and my other shows that if I have a guest on, I go ahead and put them their art as the episode art because that way people know who they're talking, who they're listening to. People know who they're listening to in this podcast episode. And then I would also say if you're talking about a product, put the product in there. If you're talking about the new MacBook Pro, put a picture of the new MacBook Pro in there So people can see what you're talking about.
And the cool thing about this is if you actually use chapters, you can do chapter art with the podcasting 2.0 spec and those images will show up as you're talking about what you're talking about. So it's cool. People may have their phone in their pocket, but if they have it on an out or if they have it on a stream like Apple CarPlay, they can see what you're actually talking about. The other thing to do is keep the same artwork or close to what you have.
This is another idea you could do. Keep the same artwork or close to what you have as your show level art, but maybe put the episode and the season number in there because that will allow people to see that this is what episode this is, but just by looking at what episode number this is, just by looking at it. Again, episode number is not super important
because who cares what episode you're on just as far as what the title is. So maybe put the title in there so people know what they're expecting and what they're listening to. The last consideration is make it large, make text large. So you don't want to try and cram a whole book into the section of your episode art because people aren't going to be able to read it. The image is going to be shrunk down to something the size of like your thumbnail.
And so you're probably not going to be able to actually hear or see what that actually says. So you want to make sure that any text that you do have is brief and very large so that it's legible in that area that is the squished down to a tiny little thumbnail. So those are the things to consider about why episode art is super important now. And again, that iOS 17 is not out yet. It will be out very shortly.
And so those are just some things you may want to go back and start putting episode art into your files or into your feed. If you've not done that yet, it's really easy to do. A lot of most of your podcast hosts are gonna have a section to upload your episode art as you're creating the episode. And so, and that will display in the RSS feed. So it's really super simple.
Like I said, things to consider also putting it in your ID3 tag just because some podcast apps don't show that artwork in from the feed, but they show it from the ID3 tag in the MP3 itself. Now, on to Descript and Squadcast. So Descript, if you've never used it, is a great tool. It allows you to do a lot of visual editing of your podcasts. So it's a editing tool, but it's also a recording tool. You can record right into it. Think of it as a
Word document. As you talk, as you record, as you put your mp3 file into Descript, it It shows the words. You can edit it out. You can just edit it like a document. You can read the documents, move things around, and just use it like that. It's pretty easy to edit. It sounds great. You can use it to pull out filler words. If you say um and ah a lot, you can do that. Then you can also use like a regenerative AI things. You can train it to create.
It's a clone of your voice and you can train it to, if you have to say something different, if you said the wrong day, like, so let's say I'm saying, "Hey, meet us next Thursday because we're doing a live show." And I actually mean Wednesday. I can edit Tuesday out, Thursday out, and I can just type in Wednesday and it'll put that into my voice. It's really cool. The one thing that they had been lacking though is a way to get your guests recording, too.
So there's lots of different products for this squadcast as one Riverside FM is another clean feed.net is another one where you can get your audio in. The nice thing about squadcast and Riverside FM is it does like progressive uploads and it records directly on to the local computer of your guest and yourself. So if I was talking to let's say my friend John, if we have a bad internet, let's say
John has a bad internet connection. His audio would be recorded as he's talking. So if you do know of resume and you have a bad audio connection, you're going to end up with that weird artifacting robot robot type sound that happens when you have a recording over the
internet and the internet is not super great. But the good thing about Riverside and Squadcast is they do local recording on the browser on the one end, local recording on the browser on the other end, and then they do what's called a progressive upload. So you don't need to wait when you're done recording for it to upload into Squadcast, but it takes that and uploads chunks of it as it's recording.
And so then by the time you're done, or pretty close to the time you say we're done and hit end, that audio file is up in the cloud at Squadcast. you have a complete file, a separate track, you can audio edit it. It's great. It's a great way to do remote guests. And, and so Descript was lacking that in their, in their tool set. And so they went out and actually purchased squadcast. And now it's still as of this point, which is August 24th, 2023. It's still a separate product.
If you log into squadcast, it says squadcast by Descript. But it's become part of their product line. So if you have Descript, if you pay for Descript, you get squadcast for free. You can go log into Squadcast, you can marry your accounts together and you have it for free. So there's no extra payment for Squadcast.
It's just included in Descript because they're trying to make a whole tool set for podcast editors to be able to record their interviews, record their podcast, edit it, do it right there. And so if you have not checked out Descript, do it because it's kind of a cool product. And we have no affiliate link or anything for them. It's just, it's a cool product. But then you also have now the ability to record your guests remotely and make it sound like they're in the same room.
If they've got a high quality mic, it's going to sound like they're in the same room with you. I've heard lots of podcasts that are recorded like this and you can't tell the difference. You can't tell that they're not in the same room. You can't tell that they're not sitting right next to each other, that they're actually across the world from each other. So guys, definitely go ahead and check that out. I would encourage you to do that. Guys, it's been a great time with you today.
Like I said, if you've not done your artwork, if you've not done going back and put the artwork in there, go ahead and do it right now. You still have time before iOS 17 is out and you can get your artwork in there. Guys, if you like this content, consider supporting us by going to buymeacoffee.com/podcastanswers. That helps out a lot. It allows us to get new hardware, allows us to support and do things to try out and help you better your podcast. Have a great week.
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