Podcasting for Newbs with Technical Pro
Podcasts have been around for long enough that even my mother has started talking about them, but I still don’t know anyone who keeps a regular podcast. Perhaps that’s informed the impression that podcasting was rather difficult and technical, with a sharp learning curve. However, having recently tried my hand at podcasting with the Technical Pro PM-21 Podcast System, I realized that compared to many things one does on the Internet — set up a blog, Web page, or Flickr account — podcasting ranks as pretty darn easy and my mind is now totally blown to the new possibilities.
The Technical Pro is a podcasting kit including a 4-channel mixer with individual bass and treble controls, professional studio-quality headphone, microphone, microphone stand, and an instruction booklet with software to help get you going. The mixer connects to your computer through USB and has jacks for two microphones, which is helpful if you’re ever conducting interviews; an RCA outlet (though no cable for it); and an MP3 player input device so you can hook your iPod to the mixer and fade in some tunes.
The kit also contains a CD that contains little more than the freely-available Audacity (a sound editing program) and LAME (a way to export your audio files into mp3s). Audacity is a great program and definitely useful for tweaking audio recordings of all sorts. It’s under the GNU license, which means it’s free for anyone to download and cannot be licensed for commercial use. You don’t need this kit to get Audacity, but they picked a good program to start you off on. And, as a bonus, our CD popped up with Chinese characters on it. Why? We don’t really know.
Technical Pro also directs you to a free service entitled podbean.com, which allows you to make an account and upload podcasts. However, there are plenty of other podcast hosting sites out there, many of which have free options. Set your search box to how to choose a podcast host and you’ll find all sorts of useful suggestions.
We found the headphones to be just so so. Though chic, they were rather uncomfortable to wear. I swapped them out for a set of my own trusty headphones and solved the problem. Low and behold, my own headphones were also better quality. The microphone worked pretty well on the other hand. This isn’t major studio recording equipment or anything, but it recorded a fairly full-sounding voice that was much better than the mic attachment on most headsets.
Unfortunately, whether the microphone was on the sensitive side or we were somehow picking up radio waves from outer space, I’ll never know, but there was a very low-level background noise of Latino music that I do not think I will ever be able to technically explain. I’m still not entirely sure I’m not crazy for hearing it.
The most necessary item in this kit is the mixer. There’s really great and expensive mixers out there, but this one is just the right size for your podcasting needs, and fits nicely on the side of your keyboard. The bass and treble are adjustable for each individual mic you hook up, as is the volume for each input device. I have a somewhat high voice, so I adjusted the bass input on my voice a bit to make me sound more “adult”. This system also allows you to add music through your MP3 player and fade it out for the sound of your own voice. Granted, the few times I tried it, it was just another thing to worry about and it’s perfectly possible to do that post-processing, but I enjoyed the option.
Twos reasons to buy this kit are the step-by-step help, if you’d like to introduce a kid to podcasting for instance, and the mixer. It’s a pretty easy, cheap system, though still might take a bit of time to setup and connect properly. If you’re super serious about podcasting, perhaps go the extra step and buy quality parts individually, but for a good mini-recording studio in a box, it’s pretty solid. Available for $130 on Amazon.
