Your lectures, available anytime Students/end-users can subscribe to your podcast and get the latest lectures and audio files whenever they launch their itunes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/podcasting Written: March 21, 2007

Table of Contents Understanding a Podcast...1 What do I Need?...2 Checklist...2 Downloading Audacity...3 How do I install the LAME MP3 encoder?...3 If you don t have access to the King s O drive...4 Making the MP3...6 Recording with Audacity...6 ID3 Tags...9 Saving your Audacity Recording...9 Exporting Audacity Recordings...10 Uploading Your Files...11 Editing the XML File...13 Introduction to Tagging...13 Tagging Our RSS Feed...13 How an End-User Will Subscribe (Using itunes)...14 Appendix Sample Code... i

IITS Workshop Handout: The Basics of Podcasting Page 1 Understanding a Podcast You will create an audio file and an XML file. These will live in your King s web space. Your end-users will take the address of the file and subscribe through any number of services. The service will check your XML file and let the user know that new episodes are available. Creator (you) Audio File XML File Web Space itunes itunes Doppler Juice End User 1 End User 2 End User 3 End User 4 Headphones MP3 Player Headphones MP3 Player The end-user will have the option to put the file on their MP3 player or listen to it on their personal computer.

IITS Workshop Handout: The Basics of Podcasting Page 2 What do I Need? Checklist Audio Editing Software Suggestion: Audacity free http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ MP3 encoder http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/faq?s=install&item=lame-mp3 Microphone/Headset Web space to host the MP3s and other files King s faculty/staff space works well (contact the Help Desk) RSS Feed in the form of an XML file FrontPage to edit the XML file Notepad will also work itunes to subscribe/test your podcast http://www.apple.com/itunes/download Note: there are other subscription options available A web page to tell end-users the address to subscribe

IITS Workshop Handout: The Basics of Podcasting Page 3 Downloading Audacity To get your free download of Audacity, go to http://audacity.sourceforge.net Click on one of the download links and follow the on-screen installation instructions. How do I install the LAME MP3 encoder? Because of software patents, the Audacity website cannot distribute MP3 encoding software. So in order to turn your Audacity projects into MP3s you have to download a special plugin. Follow these instructions to use the free LAME encoder to export MP3 files with Audacity. The easiest way to get the LAME MP3 encoder onto your computer is to copy it from the O drive on the King s network. 1. Go to My Computer and double-click on the O drive 2. Double-click on the Podcasting folder

IITS Workshop Handout: The Basics of Podcasting Page 4 3. Double-click on the LAME Encoder folder 4. Locate the lame_enc.dll file shown below and leave this window open 5. The final step involves dragging and dropping the file lame_enc.dll file into the appropriate folder on your computer. a. Go to My Computer b. Double-click on the C drive c. Double-click on the Program Files folder d. Double-click on the Audacity folder, where the Plug-Ins folder resides e. Drag and drop the lame_enc.dll file into the Plug-Ins folder. 6. You should now be able to export your Audacity recordings as MP3s If you don t have access to the King s O drive Download a copy of the LAME encoder from the web 1. Go to the LAME download page at http://spaghetticode.org/lame/

IITS Workshop Handout: The Basics of Podcasting Page 5 2. Click on the appropriate link for your computer s operating system. The File download window shown below will appear. Click the Save button. 3. When you have finished downloading LAME, unzip it and save the file lame_enc.dll anywhere on your computer. I chose to save it in my Podcasts directory. 4. The Download Complete window will appear. Click the Open button to unzip the file. 5. You will now have a file called LameLib or libmp3lame.dylib. The first time you use the "Export as MP3" command, Audacity will ask you where lame_enc.dll is saved. Make sure you remember where you put it.

IITS Workshop Handout: The Basics of Podcasting Page 6 Making the MP3 Recording with Audacity Before attempting to record your narration, please make sure your microphone or headset is plugged into your computer and working properly. If adjustments are needed, please go the audio control panel and verify that your microphone is configured properly. After downloading and installing Audacity and the LAME encoder plug-in on your computer, you can begin the recording process. Just double-click the Audacity icon on your desktop, or launch it from the Programs menu. After Audacity launches your screen should look similar to the one shown below. To start recording, simply press the Record button and speak into the microphone. An audio waveform will begin to go across the screen, this waveform represents your narration. When you re finished recording, press the Stop button.

IITS Workshop Handout: The Basics of Podcasting Page 7 You now have created your first track. To name the track, choose Name from the Audio Track pulldown menu. Let s name the track Narration and click OK. If you would like to record additional tracks, press the Record button. A new track will appear underneath your original narration track. You can choose to edit any part of a track(s) by dragging your mouse over a section of a waveform to select it.

IITS Workshop Handout: The Basics of Podcasting Page 8 If you would like to select everything in your tracks, choose Edit/Select/All or CTRL + A. Once you ve made your selections, you can begin to add some effects to them. Choose Normalize from the Effect pulldown menu. This effect provides a consistent output level for all tracks. When the Normalize window shown below appears, click the OK button to apply the effect. There are many effects to try out in Audacity. The Echo effect is one of the more popular effects applied to narration tracks. Remember you must first select all or part of a track before attempting to apply an effect. If you don t like the effect after you ve applied it, simply choose Edit/Undo to restore your track to its original state.

IITS Workshop Handout: The Basics of Podcasting Page 9 ID3 Tags It s a good idea to create ID3 tags for your podcasts. These tags provide information such as title, artist and the genre of your podcast to audio players such as ITunes. If you re working with Audacity version 1.3.2, choose Open Metadata Editor from the File menu. If you re working with an earlier version of Audacity, choose Edit ID3 Tags from the Project menu. The Edit ID3 Tags window will appear. Fill in the fields with information about your recording as shown below. Click the Done button when finished. Saving your Audacity Recording Choose Save Project As from the File menu. If the warning window shown below appears, click OK. When the Save Project As: window appears, type in a file name for your Audacity recording and navigate to the directory where you would like to save the file. I chose to save my recording in a directory named Podcasts. Notice that the file will have a.aup extension. This indicates that is an Audacity project file. Click the Save button.

IITS Workshop Handout: The Basics of Podcasting Page 10 Exporting Audacity Recordings Audacity can export to five different file types. Because we are creating a podcast, let s export our recording as an MP3 file. Remember, in order to have the MP3 export option available to you from within Audacity, you must first have downloaded and installed the LAME encoder plug-in. From the File menu, choose Export As and then MP3 If the warning window shown below appears, click the OK button to confirm that your tracks will be mixed down to a single mono channel MP3 file. In the Save MP3 File As: window, name your file and choose a directory to save the file within. Click the Save button.

IITS Workshop Handout: The Basics of Podcasting Page 11 Uploading Your Files Your end-users must download your files from somewhere, so we will continue to use FrontPage to upload our files to King s Staff server space. Enter http://staff.kings.edu on the next screen, then click Open. Enter your login information in the following manner: Your site contents will be listed on the left hand side. Click the New Folder button to add a new directory to your site. Call it podcast. Click on the podcast folder on the left-hand pane. Click File > Import to open the import window.

IITS Workshop Handout: The Basics of Podcasting Page 12 Click Add File and select your.mp3 file to upload. Click Open to add it to your list. Add as many files as you want by repeating those steps. When you re all done, click OK and your files will upload into your site. Now, the file that is on your machine is also up on your staff web space!

IITS Workshop Handout: The Basics of Podcasting Page 13 Editing the XML File Introduction to Tagging When you tag in certain languages, you will traditionally do it in the following way: <start> <code link= http://yoursite.com height= 100 color= #CCCCCC > <title>happy Birthday</title> </start> In this sample the <start></start> tags define the area in which the code in the middle will be held. The <code> tag has some sample parameters inside (height, color). The <title> tag has plain text inside that text is marked as the title, thanks to the <title> tag. Tagging Our RSS Feed This sample code may not be easy to understand at first, but it does make sense. The first two lines explain what version of XML you are writing (line 1) and what version of RSS you are writing (line 2). Line 3 opens a <channel> tag, which will hold all of your custom information about your podcast and podcast files. Lines 1-3 will be closed at the end of the document. A channel must have the following elements: <title> <link> <description>. Our sample has extra elements, like <language> and <copyright> information. Line 10 starts our first <item>, which has our actual episode information. You will want to have the elements we have above, at the very least. This will ensure that your user s podcasting software will be able to recognize a <title> for the episode, a <description> of what it will contain, an <enclosure> to tell where the file is, and a <pubdate> to organize the files (by the date they were published). Notice that our <enclosure> tag has three sub-elements: url= http://yoursite.com/01.mp3 length= XXXXXX and type= audio/mpeg. The URL tells where the MP3 file is, the length is the size of the file, in bytes, and the type tells that it is an MP3. If you do not include the length, some software may be suspect of your code and not download the file automatically. When you finish with your enclosure, you must then close the item tag, with </item>. If you only had one episode, you could also enter </channel></rss> to close their respective tags and complete your document.

IITS Workshop Handout: The Basics of Podcasting Page 14 How an End-User Will Subscribe (Using itunes) We suggest that you create a web page to post your RSS feed link on. Users can go to that page and copy the address. They will open itunes. On the menu bar, they will click Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast They will paste in the address to the.xml file and click OK. The podcast will appear and the latest episode will download. They have the option to download past episodes by clicking the GET button. They will see your XML information in various fields in itunes (title, date, description).

IITS Workshop Handout: The Basics of Podcasting Appendix i