Pinoy Tech Podcast behind the scenes

I've been asked by email on how Pinoy Tech Podcast is produced.

It's actually not that complicated and a huge chunk of it is riding on free resources out there. We don't have a budget for this show and everything is done voluntarily. Of course there is talk inside our group on how we could possibly monetize to improve the production but we're doing this with baby steps rather than treating it as a startup.

I'll divide this blog to sections of the process so this would be a long blog post, but I assure you - you'll get some tips or two.

Voice and how to record

At the heart of this setup is being able to communicate through the Internet. Obviously, Skype is a huge contributing factor for this show. Without Skype, none of this is possible. We haven't tried other VoIP products out there (Yahoo! Voice is a bit clunky and I think it doesn't support conferences) and for now, Skype is king of the hill.

There are many ways to record a Skype conference. I'm using a Mac during recording, and I have two tools that I use: Call Recorder and WireTap Studio. The former is good for quick calls and the recording is done in one stream, while the latter provides more power by splitting the recording depeding on sources (for example, have my own voice recording and have the Skype recording separate). This could be very useful for post-processing, but so far, I prefer to have the recording published as raw as possible so Call Recorder has been pretty useful for us most of the time. I rarely record uncompressed since I don't find any difference with the quality but I'm no audiophile so I just judge quality depending on how I hear the recording.

There are also other Skype recorders out there for other operating systems, but I haven't tried those.

Recording is a manual process. I pretty much click the red button when we're ready and just talk about topics that we have agreed to discuss. This pre-recording discussion generally takes place in a private mailing list.

A note with gear: Podcast participants are encouraged to use VoIP headsets to reduce background noise. Stereo headsets work but USB headsets provide great sound quality. I currently use a USB hands-free kit or a stereo headset, but I plan to get a real USB mic in the future, if budget allows it.

Post-Processing

When the recording is done, I import the recorded audio into GarageBand in OS X. The software already has templates for recording so I just split the audio channels between the voice discussion and the opening/closing jingle (its just the same) which I also did using GarageBand.

I rarely edit the topic sequences. I tried this before but ended up with a mess and just decided to make sure we have a clean recording and limit the edits to cleaning up the gaps and reducing the "uhhmmss" and "ahhs" of the panel, along with long silent gaps during discussion. This is where majority of work is done in producing the podcast episode and currently, I'm the only guy doing this. But because of the software (GarageBand), this has been greatly simplified.

When everything is already cleaned up and spliced from GarageBand, I do a direct export to iTunes as an MP3 and edit the meta data.

Where to upload

The audio file of the podcast weighs in at around 17MB to 25MB depending on the length. Any webhost would work, but we didn't have a budget for this. A tip from a friend (Ben Canlas) pointed me to upload files to the Internet Archive which I have been using and quite happy of the result. I also get the bonus of having MP3 files converted to Ogg Vorbis. I used to do an AAC version of the episodes, but decided to just stick with MP3 because it has a wider reach in terms of devices and format acceptability.

Website, RSS and iTunes

Any CMS or Blog engine would work for the podcast. We just use Blogger for this and create the entries normally. But I make sure each episode entry has a direct link to the MP3 file hosted at the Internet Archive (also with Ogg if available). This part is important because this is needed when generating the RSS that would be compatible to aggregators like iTunes, the Zune Marketplace, etc.

Blogger allows you to publish your feeds via Atom, but what you need is an RSS feed that recognizes the audio files published - this is where FeedBurner comes into play. You can have FeedBurner get your Atom feed in Blogger, then make an RSS feed that is already optimized for iTunes and other aggregators with relative ease.

Once the optimized RSS feed is created, you can then have this feed tested with iTunes or any RSS reader to check if each entry has the audio file recognized and available for download. When you have confirmed that everything is in order, you can now submit this feed for inclusion to the iTunes Music Store. There are some rules when adding to iTunes, and its a bit lengthy, but as long as you have a proper feed and it follows Apple's standards, your podcast feed should be set.

Other stuff (licensing, scheduling, etc)

We thought of adding more stuff to the show, but decided to make things natural and let it grow in time. We really don't have a lot of "plans" for growth as we just consider this podcast as a hobby for now. We schedule topics for discussion, and knowing who can come or not, with a private mailing list and this works great for us because we can just channel conversation during our free time and still have some things accomplished. It's pretty hard to have a weekly show with our schedules but we pledge to record every two weeks.

All the episodes and the blog are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Philippines which I believe is good for letting anyone share our work, but also protect us in some ways. We also have a disclaimer that whatever we say in the show is our own opinion and does not reflect the collective nor our past, present and future employers and/or business associates, partners, etc.

All in all, its a very simple process that can be done by anyone with enough time and patience to edit a podcast. Since a lot of stuff is already automated, we just record, edit and publish and that's it. Hope this short introduction helps.