I thought I would give you all a peek behind the scenes of a fledgling podcast.
Recording one episode is easy. All of the popular solutions offer enough free time to record one episode: Riverside, Podcastle, SquadCast, Alitu. The first four episodes recorded for free if I’m willing to learn a new tool each time. I’ve tried the first two so far. Those experiences could be their own posts. Cost will factor into an ultimate decision. For example, the least expensive version of Riverside costs $15/month if you pay for a year up front ($180) and only provides 5 hours of multi-track recording. Podcastle costs $12/month if you pay for year up front ($144) and provides unlimited audio recording.
Editing is the next hurdle. Fortunately, there is a full-featured free solution: Audacity. The interface feels outdated, but I don’t have experience with anything to compare. There is definitely a learning curve to audio editing; I don’t know what I don’t know. I’m learning about compressors, limiters, envelopes, and auto-duck. Another Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) is Reaper. I haven’t run into a problem with Audacity except for the time it takes to edit an episode. Do I need a better tool that comes with a price tag? I don’t know, yet.
Hosting the episode files and providing an RSS feed is the third step. Once again, there are many options. Here are a few that I considered: RSS.com, Buzzsprout, Libsyn, and Podbean. Let’s take a look at Libsyn: for $5/month (probably paid annually), you can upload 3 hours of content or 162 MB of storage. That’s 162 MB of new content each month, and the quota is reset on the 1st of the month. So far our episodes are around 60 MB in size, so we could get by at that level. Adding basic stats is an extra $2/month.
Podbean has a free tier that allows you to host a total of 500 MB of space (so about six episodes), and 100 GB of monthly bandwidth — 1666 plays if each episode is 60 MB in size. If you want unlimited storage and unmetered bandwidth, then Podbean jumps to $9/month and of course that is billed annually. That might have been a better option.
I chose to go with RSS.com. “Start your podcast for free!” Unlimited audio storage, unmetered bandwidth, analytics, episode scheduling, and more. All that sounded good, but I’ve since made two realizations. The first is that in order to publish a second episode, I will need to get a subscription. That’s $12/month if I pay for a year up front. The second realization is that the “free” episode was a great hook. Now that RSS feed has been submitted to all of the podcast directories. If I want to change over to another hosting provider, then that’s going to be a lot of work. Well played, RSS.com.
