Podcasting to the masses: new hardware/software combo
Despite some saying that podcasting is so last year (or was it the year before that) statistics from Feedburner show that there are over 60,000 podcasts in existence and growing at a rate of 20% per month.
Recording voice, mixing in music or sound effects, and getting it to sound decent can be demanding – it’s not necessarily as simple as plugging in a mic to your PC and recording – the results aren’t automatically worth listening to.
If you don’t feel like splashing out on a setup like the Blog Herald has, the Pinnacle believe they’ve come up with a decent and affordable solution – under £100.
The Pinnacle Podcast Factory provides a broadcast-quality microphone with professional 24-bit/48kHz USB audio interface (which they claim will record high quality voice and live music), Audacity recording software, and Podifier software to turn it all into an RSS feed, MP3 file, and upload to server. There’s also a localised video tutorial in 6 languages. Everything’s both PC and Mac friendly.
I’ve used Audacity and it’s a fairly decent system for mixing audio together. As to how good the mic really is – well for £99 it’s not likely to be BBC quality, but it will hopefully suffice for podcasting needs.
I’m tempted.
