Podcasting with GarageBand for MAC: Part 1

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Podcasting with GarageBand for MAC: Part 1

posted by Bo Bennett, Group AdministratorMonday, December 7th 2009 @ 6:55 AM

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As a lifetime PC user, I bought my first MAC because of podcasting. I kept reading how the MACs were ideal for podcasting because of the software that already comes with the MAC, and some of the 3rd party software made for the MAC. So I bit the bullet and bought a MAC. About 18 months later, I own seven MACs, and just two PCs. Without question, MACs make podcasting easier and I would argue that they allow the majority of people to produce a more professional quality podcast. Perhaps the main reason for this is GarageBand.

GarageBand is a both a music and vocal production application that comes pre-installed on all modern MACs. It was designed with the podcaster in mind and therefore works wonderfully for podcasting. Unfortunately, docs and online material the clearly showed how to use GarageBand for podcasting could not be found. So it took me about a year to trial and error to discover many of the tips I am about to share.

Start by creating a new podcast project. When you open up GarageBand, you will be asked to choose the type of project. Choose "podcast".

Create your album art. A podcast logo should be 300x300px. This is the size that iTunes asks for, along with most other podcatchers. I will do a post on album art later, but for now, just realize that album art is very important. If you cannot do a great job at creating it, hire someone who can.

Drag your album art into the "episode artwork" area within GarageBand. When your podcast is playing on a user's podcatcher, you want your artwork to show. This is prime advertising you do NOT want to miss out on. Also, a lack of artwork will make your podcast look unprofessional.

Set up the recording tracks. Let's assume that you have one local mic, your guest on Skype, and your podcast music (intro/outro/transition) track. You want to have 3 different tracks to you can control of the sound of each one independently. You want to avoid mixing sources together whenever possible.

Your voice tracks are "real instruments" in GarageBand. By default GarageBand will start you off with a male and female track. Use the fist one for your local mic and change the sound to "no effects" in the info tab to the right. This is a preference of mine, but you may choose to keep the effect. While you are in that section, make sure you set your input source to your local microphone.

Adjust your track settings. The default settings for your track should be just fine. However, I can't tell you how many times I messed something up by accident and had no idea how to fix it, thus many a podcast sounded like crap! So this is worth paying attention to:

Rename the track by clicking your mouse on the name and holding it. Naming each track helps with understanding.
The red dot to the left means the track is recording. This MUST be on or your track will NOT record. When you click around, this frequently will go off, so you must be sure all your tracks you want recorded have this red dot showing.
The yellow up arrow means that the track will run in the foreground -- the light blue arrow below it means it will be a background track that will fade out when another track has input. For all talking tracks, you want to make sure you see the yellow arrow.
The "L" and "R" button is the balance for left and right speakers. You want this to be in the middle, otherwise it will sound really annoying to the listener.
The speaker slider bar is the track volume. Keep at 0 until post production. This is when you can adjust the track to compensate for quiet guests or loud guests.
The two bars over the volume slider display the sound your mic is picking up. You should be able to talk at a normal volume and see the green bars peak out to yellow bars. If you see too much red, your mic volume it too loud.
If you see a "track volume" section under your track, you hit the "a" key while the track was selected. Select the track and hit the "a" key again to make it go away.

In part two, I talk about the Skype track and more.

Bo Bennett, DTM is a Distinguished Toastmaster, professional public speaker, and creator/host of several podcasts including Philosophizers, EVcast, Twooting, the Toastmasters Podcast, and Real Marketing Bull.

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Comments

Scott Wright
Podcasing for Business

ScottWright said on Monday, December 7th 2009 @ 7:22 AM:

Good step-by-step tips, Bo. If you are new to GarageBand, you do have to experiment a bit and learn what all the controls and options are.

I have found that using a separate tracks for intro music and voice-overs are good. You can put effects into the voice-over to make your own voice almost unrecognizable if you are working on a low budget and can't hire a voice-over expert.

Once you have the settings right for my podcasts, I save the GB project as a template, and keep using it for future episodes, just replacing a bit of the voice-over as needed for episode numbers, and also replacing the main recorded audio track. I found that if I saved each episode as its own GB project, it takes up a huge amount of space on the hard disk. So, I try to just have one template per podcast channel.

- Scott

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Tim Crawford
guest

a guest said on Thursday, December 17th 2009 @ 7:53 AM:

Bo,
Always room for more switchers. I do need to let you know that you use a Macintosh or Mac for short. It is not a MAC. That looks like an acronym. There are quite a few things that use the MAC acronym, many in the field of IT; Machine Address Code, Moves Adds Changes.

Sorry to pick a nit. :-)

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Nathan Lowell
Podcasting for Fun

NathanLowell said on Sunday, December 20th 2009 @ 9:09 AM:

Interesting view (Mac's make podcasting easier) and one that's widely repeated but I'm not sure I buy it. The Mac/PC debate is not one that can be resolved by logic. I'm a firm believer in doing what works for you. If that's a Mac, great.

But if you're going to replace your PC and drop big bucks on buying a Macintosh so you have GarageBand in order to record with, I'd submit that spending a couple hundred on a Zoom H4 will get you a lot further along the "professional sounding" continuum a lot faster, a lot cheaper, and much more easily than trading out your knowledge base on one platform for another.

First, recording on any computer means you have to deal with ambient sound. The machine makes noise. A suitably sensitive mic will pick up fan noise unless you take care to reduce it. The machine itself often introduces line noise from the sound card and connections unless you're very lucky. The Zoom H2 or H4 is a silent device. Print your copy and record in as quiet an environment as you can with no computer adding to the background hum.

Second, the learning curve switching from PC to Mac is not trivial. It's not terribly complex either, but it's not trivial. I work on all three platforms so I'm familiar with how the Mac's work. For people stretching their technical chops by going into the new world of audio, layering on the change in platform is asking a bit much.

Third, audio mixing software like GarageBand is very nice but it's also much more complex than most people need. Multitrack mixing is freely available on the PC platform. Audacity works very well, is free, simple, and runs on all three platforms.

So, I'd maintain that if you're podcasting on a budget and you already have a good machine, keep it. Rather than buy a Mac in order to record in GarageBand, invest in a good digital recorder and take the machine out of the loop until post production when you can deal with digital directly and not introduce the extra noise into your audio source.

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Pat Rainville
Podcasting for Fun

Peacebabe said on Friday, April 16th 2010 @ 5:13 PM:

I love Garage Band. It is what got me excited about podcasting. Personally I like that Apple has included things like Garage Band and other things as standard on their computers rather than having to go and download this from here and that from there etc. It's like buying a car that has more things as a basic standard included in the price of the car. It's the same reason I like IGroops, it's a one stop shop - you get all the things you need in one place.

I agree a switch to the Apple does take a learning curve, but there are some good books out there like Switching to the Mac, The Missing Manual series, it was very helpful with figuring things out. But hey if I buy a different model of car, as with anything new there is always a learning curve involved.

Mac/Apple does best what it has since I first bought one back in 1989, make it user friendly, there is a lot of stuff you can just figure out and there are tutorials on the apple website.

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