How To Make A Podcast

The Actual Workflow

I recorded my first five podcast episodes before learning that what I thought was proper audio engineering was just noise and regret layered over each other. If you want to know How To Make A Podcast, start by understanding that the process is roughly 20 percent recording and 80 percent everything that happens after you hit stop. That is not a metaphor. That is how the hours actually distribute themselves when you are doing this alone with no budget. You need a microphone. The USB microphones that sell for two hundred dollars look impressive on a desk but they also pick up everything in the room including your refrigerator cycling on and off. I burned through three of them before settling on an XLR setup connected to a budget interface. The Shure MV7 is fine for starters because it does both USB and XLR, which means you can grow into it without throwing money away. Your recording environment matters more than the gear. A closet full of clothes is a better studio than an empty living room with hardwood floors. Hard surfaces bounce sound. Fabric absorbs it. This is why I ended up recording interview segments inside a walk-in pantry with the door closed. It sounded better than my home office ever did.

How To Make A Podcast Without Wasting Six Hours On One Episode

The editing phase is where most people quit. They buy expensive software, download tutorials, and spend four hours trying to make a fifteen-minute episode sound decent. Use Descript or Reaper. Descript lets you edit audio by editing text, which sounds like a gimmick until you have a guest who talks over themselves twice in the same sentence. Reaper is lighter, cheaper, and gives you more control if you actually want to learn signal processing. Both will do what you need. Here is the counter-intuitive part that nobody mentions in beginner guides. Loudness is not about making your podcast as loud as possible. It is about making it consistently audible across platforms. The industry standard target is -16 LUFS for stereo podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. If you push past that, their normalization algorithms will turn your episode down anyway and you will have just lost all your dynamic range in the process. I learned this the hard way when I exported an episode at -9 LUFS thinking louder was better and then watched Spotify crush it down to a whisper while my Apple Podcasts listener complained the audio sounded thin. Export at -16 LUFS with a true peak limiter set to -1 dBTP. That is it. Do not chase the red line. Compression is another thing people overuse. You do not need to squash every voice into the same volume bracket. Light compression with a ratio around 2:1 and a threshold that only catches the peaks works better than heavy compression that makes everything sound flat and exhausting. My usual starting point is a threshold at about -20 dB, attack at 10 milliseconds, release at 100 milliseconds. Adjust from there based on whether the speaker has dynamic range issues or just occasional loud moments.

For background noise removal, use something like iZotope RX or the built-in noise reduction in Adobe Audition. But apply it sparingly. Aggressive noise gating creates that pumping artifact where the background noise suddenly surges during pauses. I once spent an entire afternoon trying to clean up a field recording where the wind was registering at roughly forty decibels below the speaker. The software made the wind sound like a jet engine during every breath pause. I ended up just leaving small sections of wind noise in because the alternative was worse. Listeners will forgive a little ambient sound. They will not forgive artificial-sounding silence.

Recording Setup That Actually Works

Record at 48 kHz sample rate and 24-bit depth. This gives you headroom for editing without degrading the audio. MP3 files for recording is a mistake. You are compressing the source before you have even edited anything. If you are doing remote interviews, do not rely on Zoom audio. Zoom compresses voice to approximately 32 kbps and it sounds like everyone is speaking through a telephone. Use Riverside.fm or SquadCast instead. They record local audio tracks for each participant and sync them in post. The difference between Zoom audio and Riverside audio is the difference between a casual phone call and someone sitting in the room with you. One specific edge case that cost me two weeks: I recorded a three-person panel remotely with all participants on different platforms. Two were on Riverside, one was on their phone via cellular. The cellular participant's audio drifted approximately 140 milliseconds out of sync with the rest of the track over the course of the episode. I caught it only after the file had been uploaded to my hosting provider. The workaround was manual waveform alignment. I zoomed into the audio editor, found a sharp transient like a hand clap or a keyboard tap that appeared on all tracks simultaneously, and shifted the drift track sample by sample until the waveforms matched. It took about forty-five minutes. I now record a synchronized click track or have everyone do a sharp percussive sound at the start of every session so alignment is trivial.

Export Settings And Distribution

Export your final mix as a 192 kbps AAC or 128 kbps MP3 stereo file. Stereo is standard for podcast distribution even though most people listen in mono on phones. The major platforms handle the downmix for you. mono export can sound thinner on certain players. I switched to stereo about two years ago after testing both on multiple devices and noticing the mono export lost some clarity on voices with higher formants. Your RSS feed is the technical backbone of everything. You need a podcast hosting platform like Libsyn, Transistor, or Buzzsprout. These services take your uploaded audio file and generate the XML feed that Apple, Spotify, and every other directory reads. Do not try to self-host your RSS feed unless you enjoy debugging XML schemas at 2 AM. The hosting platforms charge between ten and twenty dollars a month and handle the distribution, analytics, and backup. That is not a luxury. That is infrastructure. Episode numbering and artwork matter more than you think. Apple Podcasts has strict requirements for cover art: 3000 by 3000 pixels minimum, JPEG or PNG, no transparency, no watermarks. If your artwork does not meet these specs, Apple will reject your podcast and you will not know why until you check your submission queue. I spent three weeks trying to get a show approved before realizing my PNG had an alpha channel. The solution was exporting as JPEG and resizing to exactly 3000 by 3000 pixels.

What Nobody Warns You About

The biggest bottleneck in podcast production is not technical. It is scheduling. Guests disappear. Co-hosts get busy. Life happens. I launched with a biweekly schedule and ended up releasing episodes seven to twelve weeks apart for the first four months. Consistency is more important than quality in the early stages because algorithmic recommendations on most platforms reward regular publishing. An average episode on a regular schedule will outperform a perfect episode released once every three months. Another thing that is not discussed enough: episode length. The data across most podcast platforms shows that listener retention drops significantly past forty-five minutes unless you have an established audience. New podcasts should target thirty to forty minutes. This is long enough to go somewhere meaningful and short enough that people will actually finish it. Finishing an episode matters more than starting one because completion rates influence how platforms recommend your show. Audio file naming convention sounds trivial but it prevents headaches. Name your files with the date and episode number before you upload. Something like 2024-03-15-E012.wav. Most hosts auto-name files and you end up with tracking numbers that mean nothing to you six months later when you are trying to find a specific interview clip.

If you are on a tight budget, here is the honest breakdown: microphone around two hundred dollars, interface around one hundred fifty dollars, free editing software like Reaper or Audacity, hosting around fifteen dollars a month. That is roughly four hundred dollars to start and one hundred eighty dollars a year to keep running. The remaining cost is time. A well-recorded and edited thirty-minute episode typically takes between two and four hours from recording to upload if you know what you are doing. The first time through it will take longer. By episode ten you will have a system and it will drop to about ninety minutes per episode.