Your first podcast

Now that you can record your podcast, it’s time to create it. The first thing you’ll want to do is “take a level”. This means setting the gain on each microphone so that it’s not so quiet that you can’t hear a person speak, and not so loud that a voice distorts or is “clipped”.

Open up Audacity. In the top right you’ll see two horizontal meters, one with a microphone symbol next to it and one with a speaker. These show the current recording and playback levels, and are colour coded green, yellow and red.

You can monitor the signal that the Pulse Audio server is sending to Audacity by clicking in the top meter. The basic idea when setting a level is to get a speaker to raise the meter so that it just tips the yellow area when talking.

Ideally, you’d get someone to talk into a microphone, set the level appropriately, and that would be that. But what actually happens is that when people get excited they raise their voices and get louder, or sometimes they may speak more clearly when you’re taking a level than they usually do.

So as host you need to keep an eye on the levels during the recording. If they hit the red region and “peak”, the signal is too loud to be captured. If they drop too far into green, it’ll be too quiet to hear. With a hardware mixer you can adjust the slider to keep the sound in the sweet spot. If you’re using the Pulse Mixer you’ll need to get good with your mouse.

And that’s it – you can record your podcast. Don’t forget to save it when you’re done, and then move on to the walkthrough to learn how to edit it together.