Record your own podcast on iOS

LEARN HOW TO RECORD AND EDIT A PODCAST IN GARAGEBAND.

GARAGEBAND ISN’T JUST a great tool for musicians. It’s also a radio studio, enabling you to record podcasts.

Some podcasts put a microphone in a room with interesting people, hit ‘Record’ and wait for the magic to happen, uploading the results with little or no editing. Others are painstakingly produced, combining music and sound effects from all kinds of places. GarageBand is happy to work with either.

It’s possible to record your voice using the microphone built into your iPad or iPhone, but you’ll get better results with a dedicated microphone and a pop shield — a circle of fabric that sits between you and the microphone to reduce the noise of plosives, which are “puh” and “duh” sounds that can boom on recordings.

Unfortunately, there’s no microphone socket on an iPhone or iPad, so you can’t simply plug in a USB mic like you would with a desktop or laptop Mac. If your iPad or iPhone has a Lightning port, you’ll need Apple’s Lightning to USB Camera Adapter, which adds a USB port to the bottom of your device; if you have the older 30-pin connector, the dongle you want is Apple’s 30-pin to USB Cable. Non-Apple versions of both items are widely available, but in our experience, the build quality isn’t usually up to much (not to mention potentially dangerous).

There’s another problem: power. Many USB microphones need a lot of power, and iOS devices don’t provide enough of it. You may need to connect a powered USB hub between your iOS device and the microphone. More elegantly, Apple’s Lightning to USB 3 cable has a Lightning port next to the USB socket, so you can just connect your charger.

If you’re new to podcasting, it’s worth sketching out a plan of what you want to talk about in case you get tongue tied, but even if you do, don’t worry. It isn’t going out live, so you can fix problems at the editing stage before unleashing your podcast on the rest of the world.