How Podcasting Works

and welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Poette, and I'm the tech editor here at how stuff works dot com. Sitting across from me as usual, that would be senior writer Johnathan Stripline. Let's turn this mother out, y'all. Yeah, okay, hey there all alright, So today we're going to talk about some podcasting tips. We actually get a lot of requests to do an episode about podcasting, and we keep coming up with the reasons why we shouldn't do it today. Right,

we today, we decided to do it today. We're like, you know what, We're gonna get this all the way. You know why, because if we weren't doing our podcasting works, you know what we would be doing cantennis or tech conspiracy theories to other ones that we keep putting off. Actually, just between you and us, we're not supposed to talk about the tech conspiracy that's right. They don't want you

to know, So let's talk about podcasting instead. Um. Now, we've had a lot of people ask us things, everything ranging from what kind of equipment do we use? What kind of software do we use? Uh, and just general tips on podcasting. So people who want to get into podcasting, what should they do? What should they avoid doing? And uh, A lot of the stuff that we have learned over the course of our what year and a half of podcasting, Uh, mainly we've learned through trial and error. Wow, a year

and a half. Yeah, sorry, yeah, it's pretty much been a year and a half. And um yeah, and and he's he's right. Actually, Um, we were one of the very first podcasts at how Stuff Works com and um we followed stuff you should Know and stuff you missed in history class. So we were the third one. Actually, Marshall Brains Marshall Brain has been doing one for a while, right. He was doing a podcast in a blog sort of independently from the group for a long time. And then

and then we jumped on board. And um, actually when when I was the first Josh's first co host on stuff, you should know, right, So you've been doing this longer than just about anyone else besides Josh. Um. But it's funny because we tried a bunch of different stuff. We've actually had uh, we got We've gotten some comments over the course of the last year and a half, like, you know who writes this stuff, right, and the answer

is nobody. We actually, Josh and I tried a little bit writing some of this stuff out and that just totally we tried to hasket with that and that totally didn't work. The earliest tech stuffs we we outlined the heck out of those early early shows. Um, all right, so let's let's talk Let's talk about the genesis of tech stuff in general, and then we'll talk about some of the equipment we use, and then we'll give some

podcasting tips. How about that? That sounds great? So, you know, this is the sort of stuff that we used to talk about before the show, and we would outline it and we would go point by point. We don't do that anymore, which is why we kind of go through things in a haphazard way, although I do feel compelled to point out that not all the podcasters here at how stuff Works dot Com go by that theory. Now,

in general, we do try to be conversational. I mean that's there's nobody's I don't know if anybody that scripts out what they're going to say when they come onto the podcast. But um, I think everybody pretty much, you know, just has a good rapport with his or her co host and it's sort of okay, we're gonna talk about these ten things, make sure we cover this or that. Jonathan and I are just sort of looser about it. We don't we don't meet beforehand like some of the

other podcasters too. So yeah, everyone has their own style. We'll get to we'll get to style in a little bit. So let's do the history of tech stuff. So um our editor in chief came to us conal Burne. He came to us and said, guys, we want you to do a podcast about technology. Think you would blow it out of the park. You'll be super rock stars, uh, that kind of thing. And I looked around and said, I'm sorry, what are you talking right? And I was like, let me go. I want to do it, let's do

it now. And uh so we were told at that time that we were trying you know, this, this was brand new for us. It was not something that how Stuff works dot com had been doing before besides Marshall's podcasts and the the this is before even Stuff you Should Know had started to publish. This is uh just before it started to publish. So at that time, since we were all kind of new to this, we decided to put some limitations and some parameters up to kind of give us a framework so that we wouldn't just

flail around the way we do now. Um speak for yourself, I flail pretty handily, thank you man. Okay, So the very the very first rules were that the episodes had to be around five minutes in length, and they were supposed to relate back to a specific article on the site. Wow, that just makes me want to laugh. Yeah, we don't do that anymore. We don't. We don't do either of those things anymore now. Now other podcasts they do, they'll

they'll still cover specific articles, which is fine. We just that we don't have to do We're no longer required to do that, but we can do that if we want to. And we've done a couple of episodes where we've talked about specific articles, but fortunately we're no longer uh, restricted to just that. So back then, we discovered very quickly that it was hard to get into a topic

and cover it in five minutes. Most of our episodes were pushing seven or eight minutes easily because by the time we were telling me the introducts, we had about two and a half minutes left to explain whatever it was we were talking about. But we also got feedback from our listeners that and the most of the feedback said, you know, I like the podcast, but it needs to be longer because you're not really getting into the topic.

So with that, we extended the time to about ten minutes, right, we went from five to ten, And so if you look at those early Tech Stuff episodes, you'll see the first few or five minutes long, and then the next group is about ten minutes, and after that kind of explodes because we were told one day we came in and that was when Jerry was producing our show, uh, and she told us one day like, oh, don't worry about the time, just don't go over you know, twenty

five minutes. That's probably that's probably about the upper length of what we want to hit. But other than that, you know, go as long as you need to go to explain the topic. And that's when our episodes really started to change. At the same time that we had the five and ten minute rule, we were outlining our episodes pretty heavily. Yeah, because we had to make sure we hit that time limit. We couldn't go over it, so we wanted to make sure we knew what we

needed to hit. We couldn't just talk our way through it. Yeah. And we also when we had that was very helpful when we had specific ideas that we wanted to hit in the podcast, to which um uh, we don't always get to in some cases. I've gone back and looked at my notes on a couple of podcasts and gone, oh, man, I didn't talk about that. Yeah, it's happened to me too, So you know that it can be useful to have

an outline, especially if you want to do that. But then again, uh, most of the time when we do that, it's because we get so excited about whatever it is that we're talking about, and then we have so much we want to say about it that we just keep going yeah. So once those uh once once beforemat changed.

We we started to change our own methods and we we began to realize that well, not yeah, sometimes so we went to the German opera range um, but no. The we began to realize that the more we would a pair together for a show that we were about to do, the less conversational it was, and the more like a lectur e it sounded. You know, it didn't sound like we have two guys trying to explain and talk about a a topic and give it context. It sounded like the prerecorded notes for some sort of you know,

technology lecture. And so we started to do our own studying at that point, and then we would just meet for the podcast and we need to have our own notes. We would sometimes share links if we saw saw something that was really useful, so that the other person would also have access to it and not just you know,

come out of nowhere and um. But then we would just we sit down at the microphones and hit record, and then we would torture whoever it was that was producing our show at the time with horrible puns as we talked about whatever the topic was. Yes, that's a that's a helpful tip that I would give you if you're considering doing your own podcast, make sure to use plenty of puns. Yeah, because lord knows everyone loves puns. Josh and Chuck are incredibly fond of puns. Yes, they

like puns the way I like pie. You must hate pie a lot more than I thought you did. So let's talk a little bit about the equipment and software that we use. All right, So what do you want to start with? Microphones? Yeah, we'll talk about the mic So we were asking our producers about the microphones. Because you may find this hard to believe, but even though we are the tech writer and editor of how Stuff Wars dot com, we do not have a database filled

with every single piece of equipment that is in our office. Yeah. That's that's true, and uh, you know, sort of bridging the gap between this history of tech stuff and the equipment. UM there are. One of the nice things about us getting into podcasting in the first place was we already had a studio available to us because there were other projects that we used a lot of this equipment for. We already had um, you know, high end video equipment, UM and audio equipment, and people who knew how to

use it. Um, So you know, you don't necessarily this is not necessarily set up. You know, we already had some of this stuff. Yeah, we repurposed a lot of stuff that we had for other projects, specifically for podcasting. Um. We are not saying that you need to go out and purchase similar equipment because for one thing, it's probably out of a lot of people's price range. Um range. Yeah, it's definitely on the mind if I were to do

this on my own. But this is people have asked us what we used, so I thought we would go ahead and explain. So for our microphones, we use a kg S and they are C two thousand B microphones. We were told by Mr Matt Frederick that they are not omnidirectional, despite the fact that they totally look like

omnidirectional microphones. But they're not. They're directional. They just have a wide angle or a wide cone that you can speak into, which is a good thing because occasionally, well you know, lounge in a weird way and just talk toward the microphone and it still seems to pick us up pretty well. Yeah, we also have a nice pop filter in front of itself. Yes, we do. Use pop filters because we don't want to pop our peas. Yeah.

We also have as our pre amp UM. You don't necessarily have to have a pre amp if you've got a microphone. The plugs directly into say a USB port, but we aren't using that. We're using a pre amp, the the Applied Research and Technology pre amp UM, and we have one of those per input. We have got three of the pre amps because we do have three inputs, although we have not actually used the third one yet. UM Stuff you should know has used it for their

healthcare series. They had Molly in and she got to she set in and joined Josh and Chuckers as we like to call him for sometimes listeners like to call me Chuckers when they forget that my name is Jonathan. Um, well, you know Jonathan sounds like Chuck. Yeah, we haven't figured out, by the way, which one of us should be more offended, Chuck should be more offended, or if I should. Neither of us are really offended, because you know, Chuck's a

cool guy and and I'm not on his radar. So um now, as for as for the software we use, we're using uh final cut right, Yeah, so that's the that's the audio software we're using. We record with Soundtrack, which is part of that suite, and then um for all of our sound effects whenever we do soundscaping, Liz pulls that from the suite as well. Yeah, we're we are using a Macintosh computer to do this, but you there are software programs for Windows and Linux both that

can can do the same kinds of things. And and Matt Frederick also wanted to me to point out that his favorite piece of equipment that we have, We're not using it right now, but his favorite piece of equipment is called the Blue Icicle, and you can plug an xcel Our microphone into this. It converts it to USB and it actually has a volume control on the device itself, so you can help control that the levels before it ever reaches your computer. Yeah. Yeah, then the name of

the company is Blue and it is the article. So but he he wanted specifically for us to point that out. So that's that's our setup. But here's the thing. Now, we're gonna get into some podcasting tips. And one of the tips I would give people is don't sweat the

the equipment and software that much. Yes, that's not necessarily that that that should not be your number one concern, because if you're concerned with having the most technologically advanced equipment and the most the software with the most features, you might have a podcast that sounds really good, but that that's not enough for listeners to tune into you

week after week. Yeah, I mean it's it's uh, as long as you have a quiet room, um, you know, something preferably without hard floors and some where you're not gonna be Yeah, I mean you might. You might even try out a couple of different settings, especially if you have a laptop computer and something that you know, something that simply plugs into your your machine should be fairly easy for you to test a couple of different environments and see what sounds good to you. You can, I

would suggest testing up several different kinds of microphones. Maybe, like there's some headsets that actually aren't that bad. They actually provide a very decent sound. Um. At home, I use a snowball mic which works really well for me. It's a nomnidirectional mic and it actually I like it a lot. But I use that with my mac um and then a lot of you know, I would probably recommend against using a a native microphone on a computer.

I mean, some of them can pick up sound pretty well, but most of them you're not going to get the best sound quality out of those. And that's one thing I would say is getting an independent microphone is probably a good purchase, a good investment. I I think that, Uh, that's sort of a very basic necessity unfortunately, but you don't have to to fork over, you know, hundreds of dollars to to do that. In fact, you can even get a good XLR for less than hundred dollars really

or maybe just over right. You would just need to have the equipment to plug it into exactly, so perhaps a nicicle or or a pre app or uh, you know, in an expensive board. It depends on how many inputs you're gonna want to use, too, because if you are, if you're gonna want to have, say, get your your friends together and do a podcast with a bunch of people, you're gonna need something to handle the different channels, assuming you're not all going to speak into one mic. Uh,

you could be a little cozy quarters there. So let's talk a little bit about some other stuff like uh, post production. I just said right there, that was yes, I heard the now. Some podcasters would want to go in and take out all the uz um pauses things like that in order to make a podcast sound more smooth and professional. That would be really time consuming. It

takes so much time that that can take. Okay, you imagine a thirty minute long podcast and then you and now you're going to interruptions you're gonna take keep doing. It will take you hours to get the sounds of Plette screaming out of your podcast because you're strangling him repeatedly. So concerning yourself with this, I think taking out really really bad stuff, like stuff where it just it brings

the recording to us halt. That's fine, But I wouldn't worry about any of the small things because it gives your your podcast little character. People really talk like that. It's not something to be ashamed of. Unless you're like some sort of professional voice over actor or radio personality. You probably haven't trained yourself to take that that stuff out of your speech. I haven't, and I'm doing this

as part of my job. So that's all well and good. However, you know, um yeah, I think one of the problems with that is, I mean, you sort of have to think about what you're gonna do here. But I think that also makes it sound really flat. Yeah. I mean, if you were, you know, reading off a script, you don't have any ums or us it just it comes off as really really flat. Yeah, it doesn't. It's not very inviting to the listener necessarily. Uh So let's talk

a little bit more about some other tips. The one of the big tips I would I would give anyone who's getting into podcast is really, what's the purpose of your podcast? Define that figure out why you want you know, why do you want a podcast? What is it that you want to say? Is there a specific topic or uh category of information that you really want to talk about. Is there a specific game that you want to do a podcast about, or a specific television show or genre? Um,

don't you know? Doing a podcast about practically anything sounds like it's very liberating, but it actually ends up being really frustrating and difficult to to pull off well. It also is hard to get an audience because someone may have a real interest in one topic, but your next topic doesn't interest them at all because it's not at all related to the first one. It's hard to build

an audience that way. And one thing you can consider too, is um limiting yourself more at the beginning, because you can you can always change. You think back to the early days of tech stuff. We had to uh, we had to talk about a specific article. So we would look on the site for something that we wanted to talk about and then okay, we got a topic, a specific topic, and we you know, would riff on that

for five or ten minutes. Well, now, um, one of the things that Jonathan and I and I like to try to do, I mean, other than answering listener meals. That's kind of been where we've been the last few weeks. But um, you know, we've want to try to come up with something that's not on the website. But you know, we still are working within the confines of computers and electronics. Um. But you know, it did give us a platform from which to start, because we already had something to talk about.

I mean, you could say, well, I want to talk about everything, but maybe start with something you know, well, like video games. And then maybe you say, well, I like talking about video games, but what if I want to talk about board games too, so you could have a games podcast or even like you yeah, exactly, I've been talking about role playing games. Now, maybe I should talk about this fantasy movie that I really like, and

that that'd be fine too. I mean, having it grow organically is probably a good tip as well, you know, don't You don't necessarily have to force it into any kind of um any specific model. Another thing I would recommend an easy way to build an audience, a good dependable way pay them no, is to have a regular and dependable production schedule. If you if you publish your podcast,

you know, whenever you have time, and that's it. And so it may be that you push one out one week and then the next week you have a second episode, and then it maybe three or four weeks before you have a third episode. It's very difficult to build an audience that way. People will tend to um, to lose interest and start to leave. So it's good to set up a schedule of publication and stick to it as

best you can. And part of that um that can be really challenging if you just you know, some weeks you just don't have the time to to do recording, right, I mean, and have or you're sick with the swine flu. So what what what what we do is Chris and I will sit down. We record two podcasts at a time,

sometimes three uh in one recording session. Uh. And then we do enough of these so that we've built up a backlog of episodes so we can when when we started publishing, we had actually recorded and I don't know, maybe six or seven episodes it's total before the first one ever was released. I think there may have been more of that. More than that. It could have been as may as like ten or twelve. Yeah, so they plus they wanted to evaluate them. We wanted to um.

They had other people listening to them too to see what they thought. And you know, so, you know, because it was a thing we were lucky they didn't have to They didn't want us to change too much. I mean, they gave us the go ahead to make them longer,

and that was about it. But the yeah, you know, if you if you record them ahead of time, if you do, if you do several episodes so that you have a backlog, then you don't have to worry so much on those times where you know you just don't have the time to to record, You've got episodes to fall back on, and you can keep publishing them even if you had to take a break on recording now. Granted, of course that's only gonna work for so long. You can't,

you can't. We found that out. Yeah, Yeah, we've we've ran Yeah, we ran out of the backlog a couple of times and then had to go into some intense recording sessions to build it back up. Um, we're currently I guess maybe a week and a half ahead something like that. So um, at any rate, the the best advice there is just make sure you've got a few episodes recorded, uh, and and publish them, like I said, on a regular basis, whether that's once a week or

every day. I mean, if you're doing a daily podcast, you're probably recording every day. Anyway, that might be a little bit different. That's challenging. Our episode is not necessarily timely. We aren't always tackling something that's in the news, although we have done that before because and we do a little of that on Tech Stuff live. Yeah, we've got a live streaming show that we handle most of the

timely stuff. We don't. We don't worry about that so much in this podcast, although we have, like I said, tackled some some fairly timely topics. So if you're if you're not handling, if you're not talking about something that is time sensitive, then you have the luxury of being able to record as many as you like before you start going live. Um, if it is something that's time since,

of course that does change things. If you're doing something where you're you're discussing, say a show, a television show, and you want the episode to go up live the day after the television show airs, you don't have that kind of flexibility. So, I mean, it all will depend on your situation. But I do think that if you can, if you can establish that reliable publication schedule, you will

build an audience much faster than otherwise. Yeah, just just as a comment, I sort of envy stuff you missed in history class, because um, you know that's history for us. We have actually recorded stuff and have it, have had it go out of date before it actually goes live because we're doing and then you know, we go oh yeah yeah. Nothing like saying something like you know, Android phone is never going to go to any other carrier, It's just gonna stay on Team Mobile and then the

next week like, well it's on Sprint. Well all right, well you know that, ha ha. We'll just have people. Oh it's on Verizon now we've some of them. We've had to uh have our engineers re edit a couple of the podcasts, like go back into the studio for five minutes and sort of for cord a patch to uh rip out the older Actually, you may have actually noticed a couple of ye, because there's some of those this just in. Yeah, we've done a PostScript where you

could tell that we had to go in afterward. Uh. Sometimes our our editors are just very good at at cutting out the offending bit and inserting a new bit and you can't even tell thank you, Lizzie, Thank you Lizzie. Um so, do we have any other tips that we want to give, like any other like just general tips about podcasting. Um, I just want to reiterate, don't get hung up on the whole podcasting biz thing, because you can honestly do this with a computer and a microphone.

Just make an MP three of your yourself talking and making a podcast. Yeah, it's not it's not rocket surgery. I can't yeah, I can't imagine. I can't imagine what it would be like to do this on my own, you know, I think it to be harder I mean, we have people who record this for us, we have people who edit the podcast, where you have people that publish them two iTunes for us, which is for which

we're all extremely grateful. Uh speaking for everyone there, well, even I'm pretty sure, I mean even just thinking about doing it, like without a co host. I then when it's just you and a microphone, that changes the dynamic quite a bit. I would plan. Yeah, I don't know if he meant that he was gonna ditch me or that he was going to uh you know, he wanted

to take the show over himself. Yeah, I was. I was totally gonna start a new podcast called Stuff on my Desk, And because that never changes, I don't need to worry about it, like seven episodes and then just rerun them. Yeah, exactly. It's sort of a mini series. Those are our our tips and just you know, general information of what we do. Uh, if you you're curious about our our process. We pick our topics usually the week before we record, and then the day of the

recording is when I've end up doing research. Despite the fact of having an entire week to have looked into it. Um, but we've researched the topics independently, we come together, we have our conversation, and then we sit there and notice that we've been recording for like thirty minutes and then realize that we need to stop and the timer is off. Well, that's because my phone started vibrating because of the Yeah there's there's a kid. Leave your phone out of the studio. Okay,

I have my phone set on airplane mode. It's just because the damn schedule thing went off. I'm not telling you. I'm saying, don't forget to turn off that stuff. Actually, uh, we're not. We're generally not supposed to have phones in here because they actually cause interference with our equipment, and including phones that are because our studio is actually in the middle of the office, and people whose phones are the people who sit just around there. It can the

equipment can actually pick them. Well, that's that's why I have it on airplane mode, so it doesn't I know, it doesn't say I'm stops a tip, stop person cuting me. I pop my p just then. All right, so let's let's wrap this up with a little listener me. We were talking about the old time so much, and I

just thought i'd go back to it. This comes from Miles and Miles says in your podcast about the different types of keyboards, you mentioned how you wouldn't want to switch to a divorate keyboard because of the major change from the Quarty standard. This is an example of negative transfer because you're so used to the quirty style. It would actually be harder for you to learn how to type on another type of keyboard than someone just learning how to type uh for the first time. I assume

I can't take all the credit for this knowledge. I must give credit to my girlfriend who's studying human factors and ergonomics in graduate school and has knowledge about such things. Anyway, I wanted to say that I love the show. Keep up the good jobs, sincerely, Miles. You know I've experienced negative transfer a few times, like when I went to

the University of Georgia. They and accept all my credits and I had to take classes again, did I. But it's a shame that they can't see the look I'm giving you, right, Yeah, it's pretty much the look of disgusted. Think think Thank you for the info, Miles. Thank your girlfriend for us as well. We we have given her credit. She should see that on the transcript. Next time. Yeah. Yeah, just look for that in the place where we never

put it. Yeah, if you would like to learn more about podcasting, we actually have in the article on how stuff works dot com about podcasting. And of course we have tons of amazing podcasts available. I know that we're the best, but we also have some other good ones. There's stuff you should know, stuff in this and history class, stuff from the b sides, high speed stuff, stuff of genius. Uh was the stuff on her coolest stuff on her? If that's the one that I was about to forget?

Um and more so check them out. They're great. They're great podcast If you ever want to kind of listen to the different styles, you'll hear how not everyone prepared as for their podcasts the same way. You can actually kind of pick that up by listening. And uh, if you want to see what we look like when we are trying to talk about technology, tune in one o'clock pm Eastern time Tuesdays. That's when we do tech stuff Live. And you can find the link to that on the

house stuff works dot com blogs. Just go to house stuff works dot com look on the right side. You'll see the links there and Chris and I will talk to you again really soon For more on this and thousands of other topics, does it how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out the new tech stuff blog now on the House Stuff Works homepage, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you