How I Make Podcasts →
Casey Liss:
My cohosts on both shows and I are often asked about our podcasting rigs. To be honest, there’s not a lot of magic behind what we do, other than really giving a crap.
That’s the gist of it.
The prevailing wisdom in podcasting for years has been that recording people over Skype with mediocre USB microphones and exporting it with nearly zero editing as a 64 kbit/s MP3 is good enough.
That’s like the default 2004 Blogger template of podcasting.1 It has worked for a while, and it was great when we started doing it a long time ago. It continues to work acceptably for a lot of podcasters.
But you can certainly do a lot better, people do notice the difference, and we believe it’s worth it to push past that baseline where we reasonably can.
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People often say that podcasting hasn’t had its “Blogger moment” yet, and that podcast production will soon be just as easy as blog publishing. I don’t think that time will ever come, because I don’t believe it’s possible. Great audio production is inherently more complicated, technically, than writing well. It always has been and it always will be. For many, the content side of it is easier, but the technical side will always be more complex.
Video has the same problem, but even moreso — no matter how great the hardware and software are, producing good video will always require a lot more time, effort, and equipment than blogging. ↩︎