Before the “Day Of”

• Contact any guests and explain how the show will progress. Talk to them about the things you want to discuss, but don’t send them a specific list of questions unless it is absolutely necessary. You don’t want them to script their answers or go on autopilot and start giving a lecture instead of being interviewed.
• Plan your show. Write up a basic “schedule” for the time you’ll be recoridng. You can adjust it a bit on the fly, but you should have some idea of what you’ll be doing throughout your taping. It may help to make it in the shape of a clock, with wedges for the segments you plan to do. If you want to be really organized, color code your radio “clock,” and write any relevant notes on matching-colored notecards. That way, if you get confused, you’ll always be able to just grab the right color card and get back on track.

Day of the show: Before you start

• Make sure you have all recorded material you want to play while you’re recording ready (if you add this kind of stuff later, you can ignore this step). If you have intro music, taped segments, or other audio you want to play, put it all in one folder on your computer and cue it up in your software.
• Unless you are totally comfortable with the your setup, run a test before you start. If you’re doing a phone interview, call a friend (or even your own cell phone) to make sure everything is working. It never hurts to take a few minutes and make sure everything works before you do something for your audience.
• Make sure the area where you are physically located is quiet and free from distractions. Radio listeners feel as if you are always focused completely on them, and it can be quite jarring to hear someone else walk into the “studio” or to have a pet suddenly interrupt an interview.
• Make sure you have your schedule handy, as well as any notes, written intros, and any other references you might need. If you are using your computer to show your notes, make sure that all of the files are open and on the screen, preferably organized so when you close one, the next one you need will be right behind it.

Starting your show

• Be sure to have an introduction prepared, and timed to match any music you are going to play. Better yet, some hosts pre-record the intro, match it with the music, and just play it at the beginning of their show. Either way, you shouldn’t play music for more than a few seconds before you start introducing the episode, and you should make sure that the music fades down so it is much quieter than your speech by the time you start talking. If you want to play a longer track at the beginning, do it after the intro.
• Within the first few sentences, you should introduce yourself, make sure you say the name of your show, and highlight one or two things you are going to talk about.
• Make sure you actually start your show within the first minute or two you are on the air. Don’t spend a long time at the beginning promoting your Facebook group or asking for Twitter followers — you can do that during the show, or at the end. Instead, get right into the “meat” of the program as soon as you can. If you want to promote, just give one URL (your blog, website, or other online presence) and get started.

Making the audio make sense

• Keep segments short. No matter how long your show is, make sure that each component is less than ten minutes long. If it is a long-form interview with one person, make sure you significantly change discussion topics a number of times. People will drift away if you spend too long on one thing. If it helps, try to think of your show as a series of “mini-shows” that all fall under one umbrella.
• Be aware that podcasting has the potential for tremendous reach. People who aren’t in your target audience can find your show at any time. How? Well, someone may embed your podcast on their site or even download an mp3 and email it to a friend without any explanation. This means that you should strive for a show that makes sense to anyone from any background, even if they’ve never heard it before: If you use a term that is unique to your topic, explain it. If you mention someone or something from a previous show, include a two-sentence recap. People may not be aware of the context of a conversation. Your job as host is to provide that context.

Wrapping Up/Promotion

• When you get to the end of the show, make sure to leave time to promote yourself. This is where you can give URLs, invite people to subscribe, and ask people to write iTunes reviews — it’s far more appropriate at the end of the show, after they know what it is they are reviewing or signing up to receive. (Yes, this tip is reused from this post.)
• Tell people when and where they can listen to your show, and how often you post new episodes.
• Word-of-mouth can be the best marketing, so ask your listeners to tell their friends about the show. Remind them about posting Facebook messages, Twitter tweets, and old-fashioned emailing of links — they won’t always think to do these things, after all.
• Be sure to finish the show and end the recording before you do anything else. Nobody wants to hear you drinking water or eating chips, and you really don’t want your audience to overhear you turning to talk to your husband or wife, or making a comment about being “glad that’s over.” If that happens, edit it out before you post the MP3.

After You Finish

• When you are done, make sure that the description of the show matches what you actually said. Add tags for anything that came up but you didn’t plan to talk about, and add any URLs mentioned to the text.
• Promote what you just did online, using Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites. especially if it is relevant to your friends. If an interview went very well, say so, and thank the interviewee publicly on Twitter.
• Make a few notes about things you can do better next time. If you write them down and look at them before you start your next episode, it will be that much better than the one you just finished.

• Make a new blog post for each episode. At minimum, re-post the show description you embed in the MP3 (you do that right?). Even better, add as much information (and as many tags) as you can. The ideal situation is a summary of the show’s contents broken down by when in the episode they appear, followed by a full transcript of the entire show (if you go this far, place the transcript after the blog’s “more” tag so it only appears if people view the entire post).
• If at all possible, add a picture to each blog post — and don’t take it yourself. Do a search for Creative Commons licensed images, or look for appropriately-licensed photos on Flickr. Tell the image’s creator that you used it, even if the license doesn’t require it — they may be flattered enough to tell others. Whenever you use a photo, add a comment to the image on Flickr (or wherever it came from) letting other viewers know that you used it. This will let new people know about your show indirectly, and look good for the photographer.
• Name your blog and show appropriately: Either give the blog the same name as the show/podcast, or make a category on your blog that matches the name of the show. Ideally, you would have the URL, name of the show, and name of the blog be the same.
• Put prominent links to your RSS feed and your iTunes store URL (found by right-clicking the image in your iTunes listing) in the sidebar of your blog, and consider putting them at the end of each post as well.
• Embed individual episode players in each episode’s post. In addition, provide direct links to the MP3 download for each episode in that episode’s blog post.
• Optionally, put a direct link to your podcast’s RSS feed, but replace “http://” with “itpc://” this will immediately subscribe anyone who clicks it to your show in iTunes, rather than just bring them to your iTunes listing.
• Add links to your social networking profiles (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) in the sidebar. This will get you more friends and followers — AKA people you can easily tell about your future episodes.
• Use a service like Feedburner to provide an email-based subscription to your RSS feed. This will appeal to less tech-savvy members of the audience.
• Make sure your blog allows easy sharing of your posts to Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites. You want people to be able to click a button and re-post an episode easily. If your blog doesn’t currently support this, look for a plugin that adds it — they’re everywhere.
• If you have the technical ability, make a 30-second audio promo for your show, and ask others to play it. Include a link to the MP3 of you promo on your site, and encourage visitors to share it.
• Always make sure that comments are enabled on every post on your blog. You want people to be able to discuss the episodes where they find them. If people comment, reply promptly — you want your audience to feel like you care about them.

Getting started

• Finding the right guest means being a researcher, a detective, and a salesman. You need to learn about the topic and discover who the experts are in that area, track those people down and get them on the phone, then convince them to take part in the interview.
• You’ll also need to make sure that the guest really is an expert in the area you want to cover, and that they can handle talking about it under the pressure of a recording situation.
• Beyond just testing to make sure that the guest will survive the interview, you also need to decide if they will be engaging enough that your listeners will enjoy their contribution to the show.

Booking celebrities

• If you hope to have a famous person on your show, realize that they are going to see it as doing you a favor, not the other way around. For the most part, celebrities will have higher-profile ways to get their stories out than being a guest on a podcast, so you need to understand their motive for talking to you.
• You will most likely need to talk to a celebrity’s publicist, press secretary, or other “handler” before you can talk to the person themselves, so you have to impress upon that person that you have done your research and are truly fascinated with their boss’s work (their latest album, book, or sponsored legislation).
• If the “official” point of contact doesn’t work out, sometimes you can go through your target guest’s manager, chief of staff, or someone else who you know has access to the person.
• If “we just don’t have the time” is a problem, ask “How can I make it more convenient for you?” Perhaps you can book it well in advance, or can schedule a time when the celebrity will be in the car or taking a break. Some celebrities are less busy outside of “prime time,” so if you’re willing to willing to get up early or stay up late, you might get the interview you couldn’t swing otherwise.

Booking a topic rather than a person

• Sometimes you want an oceanographer, an expert on immigration, or a car salesman, rather than a specific person. In other cases, you want to talk to someone whose house has been foreclosed or who has survived leukemia. In these cases, you want to know how to do your research and — once you find them — approach the potential guest with warmth and friendliness.
• Start with an internet news search on the topic. If you find someone who has been profiled in an article, you know that they are open to talking about the topic. This also helps solve the “How did you find me?” problem — you saw them mentioned in the paper or heard them interviewed on the radio.
• If you are looking for an expert, try searching for the topic on Amazon.com. This will give you an instant list of authors who have written about something, along with brief biographies of many of them that may aid your getting in touch with them.
• For cancer survivors, working-class artists, horseback riding enthusiasts, or other such people, look to online forums or other meeting places that cater to your target group. Look around a site, then start contacting contributors with the qualifications you are looking for.
• For more geographically-focused topics (a Pit Bull ban in a certain city, or South Florida retirement communities, for example), look to the local newspapers. The writers to the letters-to-the-editor section or people quoted in articles on the topic can be great contacts and guests.
• Be ready to explain exactly who you are and what your show is — both in terms of coverage and technology. Many people are still unfamiliar with podcasts, so be ready with a quick “it’s radio that people listen to online” explanation. It also helps to know how many people are listening, and what types of people make up your audience. This will help to convince someone that it is worth their time to talk to you.

The pre-interview

• Once you’ve gotten in touch with your potential guest, you need to do a pre-interview. The purpose of this conversation (which in some cases can last as long as the actual interview) is four-fold: to make sure the person is actually knowledgeable, to gather information to make the actual interview go more smoothly, to find out if the person will make a good guest, and to schedule the official interview.
• It is important to ask questions about the topic, not just about the person’s availability. If your questions are somewhat open-ended, you will get a better sense of the person’s ability to react on-the-fly, to sound like they’re having a conversation rather than giving a lecture, and — more importantly — to tell interesting stories.
• Be sure to follow up on any vague answers to make sure that the person can really address the topic head-on, and ask “Can you give me an example?” a couple of times to hear what kind of stories they tell.
• Once you are sure you want this person to be a guest on your show, explain to them how the recording will work, and offer to do a short test with them if they are uncomfortable with the technology.

If you’ve done these things, you’ll be head and shoulders above other podcasters (and many TV and radio hosts) when you actually interview your guest. Your listeners will appreciate the professional outcome — and so will your guest.

For those of you who missed it, the most recent set of new features for the iPhone included the ability to download podcasts directly to your device’s iPod app without connecting to the computer. Essentially, they have provided a pre-formatted list of all of your available episodes — accompanied by “download” buttons that add those files right to the official player app on the iPhone and iPod touch. That’s way more functionality than you can provide in a mobile version, and it’s all set up for you already.

As an iPhone user, this is great: it allows me to add a new podcast directly to my phone as soon as I hear about it — not to just start streaming it, but to actually store it for later listening, which duplicates the while “timeshifting” part of podcasting that you used to need the computer for. It also lets me add the latest episodes of a show to my phone without making a trip to my desk. When I’m traveling, this is essential, as my iPhone is synced with the iTunes library on my desktop computer, not my laptop.

As a podcast producer, it gets my content exactly where I want it: on the device that a potential listener is carrying with them right now, exactly when they are in the mood to listen to it. It removes the “I’ll listen later” mental excuse that people so often forget about, and it also provides the “media instant gratification” that iPhone users are now used to (for better or for worse).

I’ve set up Boston Behind the Scenes to do this, at least partially. I don’t have a browser-detection redirect set up, but I do have an “iPhone” link at the top of the page. I also have a mobile-friendly URL set up: http://bostonbts.com/iphone (on a computer, this link will just take you to the iTunes store — try it on your iPod or iPhone). Both lead directly to the iTunes app when clicked.

If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, do you like this setup? Would you prefer to have producers do this, make a mobile-specific site, or just leave their sites alone?

I picked up my copy at the local Apple Store the first day they were available, and I’ve used the new version for about 15 hours of recording and editing in the last week. This review will focus on the new features (both good and bad) I’ve seen in that time, and list a few things that I think were left out.

What’s (Officially) New in Garageband ‘08?

Apple’s GarageBand site describes these new features for the software:

• Magic GarageBand: Play with a hand-picked band on a virtual stage. GarageBand generates a new project based on genre and performance styles.
• Multi-take recording: Mark a region to repeat, record your part multiple times, and pick your best performance.
• Automation of tempo effects and instruments: Set multiple edit points in a track to automate EQ and effect changes like a pro.
• Arrangements: Define sections of your song – intro, verse, chorus – and copy, move, or delete at will.
• Visual EQ: Graphically adjust frequencies for each track by clicking and dragging individual EQ bands.

Four of these five listed improvements will be useful to many podcasters (while Magic GarageBand has a limited appeal for performers, it offers very little to podcasters), but there are many other enhancements under the hood.

Recording Improvements

Increased Audio Resolution

GarageBand 4 (the official version number of the new software) can now record at up to 24-bit resolution. This means that the software can differentiate between more levels of volume. That doesn’t mean that you can suddenly get louder without clipping, only that the loudness scale is more nuanced than before. Considering that the previous version of GarageBand could differentiate between 65,536 levels of volume (the same range a CD player can reproduce), the increase to 16,777,216 levels is mainly of interest to musicians.

If Apple had added more sampling rates (that’s the 22/44.1/48 kHz number you may have seen), it would be easier to import the audio from a digital video camera into GarageBand. Maybe that will come in the next version.

Record Multiple Takes

This will be an interesting feature for some podcasters: the ability to take as many tries at a section as you need, then pick the best one for your final project. This seems particularly useful for re-recording a section of an almost-finished show, as multiple takes on the first time through are as simple as leaving the recorder on and trying something again.

To use the multiple takes feature, click the cycle button in the playback controls section, then move or resize the yellow line that appears in a new track at the top of your project – it should cover the area where you are going to record your takes.

While this is a cool feature when you need it, I would like to recommend it with a warning: In my testing, if I set the yellow selection region so that it overlapped other audio, that audio would disappear from my recording when I finished recording the takes. If you are going to use this, either cut out the section you are going to replace, or just delete it entirely before you start the multiple take process.

Automatic Level Control

There is a new checkbox in the track info pane for Automatic Level Control. This feature is similar to the Auto Gain Control you see on some portable recorders, and it seems similarly unwise to use.

What Automatic Level Control attempts to do is adjust the recording input level down to keep loud sounds from clipping and boost it to keep quiet sounds audible. Unfortunately, this means that a few seconds of silence will result in the next sound recorded being much louder than it should be. I did a test of this, and it took a pause of just 5 seconds for the record level to get too loud for a decent recording. In other words, if you check this box, don’t ever pause to go over your notes or to take a drink of water.

New 9,999 Measure Limit

Earlier versions of GarageBand limited projects to 999 (GB 1 & 2) or 1,999 (GB 3) measures, which at the default tempo meant that the longest podcasts you could produce with the software were 33 or 66 minutes. Of course, changing the tempo before you started recording could as much as triple the recording time, but it was still a limitation that frustrated many users.

In GarageBand 4, the limit has been increased to 9,999 measures, giving you 5 hours, 33 minutes and 16 seconds of recording time at the default 120 bpm tempo, or up to 16 hours, 39 minutes and 48 seconds of time if you reduce the tempo to the minimum 40 bpm. If that doesn’t work for you, your podcast is too long!

Editing Improvements

Automation

Apple’s list mentions that – in addition to volume automation – you can now control tempo, EQ, and effects with automation curves. What it leaves out is that these automation curves can now be locked to the track: if you move a region of sound, your adjustment curves (volume or otherwise) will move along with it. This one change puts an end to fixing all of your volume adjustments after you realize you missed an “um” and have to go back to edit it out. This is a major frustration I’ve had since I started podcasting with GarageBand two years ago, and it is finally fixed. Enable this feature by going to Control > Lock Automation Curves to Regions.

The advertised automation improvement is of interest as well: Though the new tempo adjustment is mostly something for musicians, the ability to add a bit of echo or EQ to one part of a track can be useful if you want to make a quick fix or enhancement without making a new track and copying the offending section over. For some, this may be a big help, but for me, it is mainly a time-saver for those few instances where you need to do something like that.

Delete and Move

This is a very simple but useful feature for podcasters. It deletes an audio region and moves the regions that follow it earlier on the timeline to take its place. This – combined with the ability to lock adjustments to the audio– will make it far easier to remove a piece of an already-edited podcast without a headache. Also, if you edit by cutting out sections, deleting them, and then moving the later regions toward the beginning of the timeline, this will remove a step from your editing process. Luckily, there is a simple keyboard shortcut for this operation (control-Delete) which gives you an easy choice: “Delete and Move,” or simply “Delete.”

Alignment Guides

GarageBand 4 now includes Alignment Guides (Control > Show Alignment Guides), a feature that has been borrowed from Keynote, Pages, and other Apple software. I have a love/hate relationship with Alignment Guides in other programs, and that seems to have carried over to their use in GarageBand as well.

With Alignment Guides enabled, it is far easier to align audio regions and automation tracks with one another. In fact, it not only makes it easier, it makes it almost unavoidable (this is where the love/hate part comes in). When activated, this feature not only conjures little lines to tell you when your regions are aligned, it also snaps the regions into alignment if they are only almost aligned. At the default zoom level, this means that you can’t make adjustments within about 1.5 seconds of an edit or volume automation adjustment without snapping to that nearby point.

This feature is great for making sure there are no gaps in a recording with background noise, but bad when you want to tweak something forward or backward a fraction of a second. Luckily, it is easy to switch on and off when needed.

Arrange Track

The Arrangements feature (Track > Show Arrange Track) isn’t just for musicians to keep the verses and the chorus straight, it can be useful for podcasting as well – but not as useful as I’d hoped.

Arrange allows you to select and move whole sections of a GarageBand Project as blocks – including all of the tracks, automations, and audio regions. Unfortunately, you can’t treat these “Arrange Regions” like you would the audio regions in a project. If you move a region to the left two seconds and let go, it won’t move the contents of that region two seconds earlier in the file. Instead, the Arrange Region will trade places with the previous region in the project – even if that places it 10 minutes earlier in the recording.

I can see the Arrange Track being useful as a way to keep track of the sections of a long podcast, or to rearrange large segments of your show, but it doesn’t behave the way everything else in GarageBand does so I probably won’t use it much.

Type-In Time on the LCD

Another simple one, but a nice addition: if you want to go to a particular spot in your project, you can now double-click on the time display LCD and enter the target time (or measure) to bring the play head – and your view – to that spot in the project.

More Refined Auto-Ducking

I do all of my ducking manually (ducking is reducing the volume of background tracks when foreground tracks come in), but I have heard that the Auto-Ducking feature in GarageBand is popular with some people. Part of the reason I didn’t use it was its lack of options – something that has just been solved in GarageBand 4. The newly-adjustable ducking tool seems to work pretty well when set right, but I still prefer doing it manually.

Visual EQ

GarageBand’s equalizer settings have been greatly improved in this latest version, with a new visual EQ editor that includes an overlayed spectrum analyzer. This makes it easy to adjust equalization by picking one of the presets, then fine-tuning the sound by dragging the blue line that represents the adjustments being applied.

This was one of the tools that I didn’t know I needed until I had it – it has proved itself useful many times in the first week I’ve had it.

Exporting Improvements

Normalization

Garageband has a new checkbox in the Advanced section of the application preferences called Export Projects at Full Loudness. This adjusts the loudest sound in the recording to be at 100% volume, insuring that your listeners won’t have to boost the volume too much on their end to listen to your show.

New Share Options

The Share > Send Song to iTunes menu item now lets you set the metadata (album, artist, etc.) and playlist you would like to use when exporting your song to iTunes. This can save you a step or two when exporting audio that doesn’t fit your default “My Info” settings in the GarageBand Preferences. The other big improvement is the ability to select what format and bitrate your projects are exported in. That’s right, you can now create AIFF, MP3, and AAC files right in GarageBand. In addition, all of these option are available whether you’ve selected “Create New Podcast Episode” or “Create New Music Project” when you first open your file – no more AAC-only podcasts!

In addition to the Send Song to iTunes option, there is a new Share > Export Song to Disk choice as well. This option gives you the same compression and bitrate settings as the iTunes export, then asks you what folder you’d like your finished file deposited in. This is a great feature that allows you to bypass iTunes entirely – as long as you don’t use it to add artwork or shownotes to the file.

Conclusion

GarageBand ‘08 (or GarageBand 4, whichever name you want to call it) includes many time-saving and headache-saving improvements over the previous version. It also includes some new features that – if used properly – will improve the overall sound and quality of your podcast. For a heavy GarageBand user, I see these improvements as nearly worth the $80 pricetag for the iLife suite. Of course, iLife includes iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and iWeb in addition to GarageBand, so the purchase should be a no-brainer for the Mac-based podcaster.