Podcasting Guide - Part 4 - making your podcast available to others
Posted By Doug Belshaw On 11th January 2006 @ 07:31 In Guides | Comments Disabled
WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at [1] dougbelshaw.com...
[2] 
If you’ve got this far, congratulations! 
All that’s left now is to convert your podcast into MP3 format, upload it to your website and make it available to the world… I’m not going to deal with manually editing an RSS feed as that is beyond the scope of this introductory guide. I shall add a host of links to Part 5 (advanced podcasting) if you want to explore the technology further.
1. Convert your podcast to MP3. Open [3] iTunes and drag-and-drop your podcast.wav (or whatever filename you’ve given it) into your iTunes library.
2. In iTunes, go to Edit/Preferences, click on the Advanced tab and then the Importing sub-tab. Make sure MP3 Encoder is selected under the ‘Import Using’ option and then in the ‘Setting’ option select Custom. In the box that comes up, select the 64kbps option and tick the ‘Use Variable Bit Rate Encoding (VBR)’ option. (in later podcasts, experiment with the bitrate - the higher the bitrate the better the quality of the audio, but the larger the filesize…)
3. Go back to your iTunes library and find your podcast file (hint: use the search option). Right-click on the file and select Convert Selection to MP3.
4. You should end up with two files which look exactly the same. The bottom one will be the converted MP3 file (you can delete the top one (the WAV) from your iTunes library to prevent confusion). Before you do so, listen to it to make sure it sounds OK! Right-click on your newly-converted file and select Get Info.
5. In the box which appears, select the Info tab at the top. Edit the Title and Author fields accordingly and then press OK. 
6. Your changes should be reflected in the main iTunes window:
7. Find out where iTunes has saved your podcast file by right-clicking and going to Get Info. iTunes will have saved the file in the ‘iTunes Music folder location’.
8. Your podcast is now ready to be uploaded to the Internet. What happens now depends on your particular circumstances. If you use a blog such as [4] Wordpress you can simply upload the podcast MP3 to your website (hint: use a separate subdirectory) and skip to step 15. (if you use [5] Blogger, go [6] here for a specific guide)
9. Next you’ll need a free program called [7] Podifier (as recommended to me by [8] Chris Wilde). This program simplifies the creation of the RSS feed for your podcast.
[9] 
10. Run Podifier and enter your email address. In Feed Details enter relevant information to your podcast. Make sure you include a trailing slash (/) at the end of your Feed Base URL! Press Next.
12. The next screen is where you can add your podcast MP3. Click on Add and browse to the location of your MP3. Once it’s been added to your list, click on the file and edit the details accordingly. Click Next.
13. The next screen asks you for the FTP details of the website to which you want to publish the podcast. If you want to do this in another program, simply choose the option Skip FTP and upload them manually.
14. Once you’ve filled in the relevant details, click Next and your podcast and the RSS feed should be transferred to your website! 
15. Now that you have everything you need on your website, you could skip ahead to step 20. However, I recommend using [10] Feedburner to configure your RSS feed properly and find out how many people are accessing your podcast. Go to their website and type in either the location of your blog (if you’re using Wordpress, etc.) or the location of your podcast RSS feed (if you’ve just used Podifier). Check the ‘I am a podcaster!’ box and press Next.
16. If you are given a choice on the next screen, select the RSS 2.0 option.
17. Fill in all the relevant details on the next screen to sign up for a free Feedburner account. Press Activate Feed.
18. In the main Feedburner control panel click on the Optimize tab.
19. On the left-hand side go to SmartCast. Fill in all the relevant sections and press Save so that the service becomes active.
20. Now all that’s left to do is to test that your podcast works. Underneath the title of your podcast in Feedburner is the location of your feed. Right click on the link and copy the link location.
21. If you are using Wordpress or other blog software, create a new post with a link to your podcast MP3.
22. Open iTunes and go to Advanced/Subscribe to Podcast. Paste the location of your feed into the box and press OK.
23. You should now be taken to the Podcasts section where iTunes will attempt to download your podcast. If successful, it should appear in the list of podcasts you are subscribed to. Double-click on it to hear it. If you hear yourself, congratulations, your podcast is available to the world! 
24. If you are a blog user, to add further podcasts you simply need to link to the MP3’s you produce in your posts. If you’re not, use Podifier to add further podcasts to your website.
Feel free to comment below with problems, questions and, most importantly, successes!
(try subscribing to my sample podcast by copying and pasting the following into iTunes: [11] http://feeds.feedburner.com/mrbelshawcouk/teaching)
Popularity: 5% [[12] ?]
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Comments Disabled To "Podcasting Guide - Part 4 - making your podcast available to others"
#1 Comment By Mr Ross On 22nd January 2006 @ 16:15
thank you so much. A brilliant article!
#2 Comment By Doug Belshaw On 22nd January 2006 @ 16:17
Thanks! Glad you found it useful. Like the website - your Wordpress theme looks familiar… 
#3 Comment By Mr Ross On 1st February 2006 @ 19:06
Cheers again for your help Doug. I’m having some issues with my itunes subsrciption. The first time it updates it all goes smoothly. However if you then try to update again it does not connect to the feedburner feed. Rather it trys (and fails) to connect straight to my site - [23] www.ilovehistory.co.uk
I thought I would try subscribing to your feed to check this out, but it did not manage to download anything from your feed.
Any ideas?
S
#4 Comment By Doug Belshaw On 1st February 2006 @ 20:06
I think the problem is with the header info on your website. In Wordpress, edit your header file where it says:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://www.ilovehistory.co.uk/index.php/?feed=rss2" />
<link rel=”alternate” type=”text/xml” title=”RSS .92″ href=”http://www.ilovehistory.co.uk/index.php/?feed=rss” />
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/atom+xml” title=”Atom 0.3″ href=”http://www.ilovehistory.co.uk/index.php/?feed=atom” />
You need to change the [24] http://www.ilovehistory.co.uk/index.php/?feed=rss to point instead towards your feedburner feed on all three of these links. I think that should sort it…
#5 Comment By The Red Herring On 23rd March 2006 @ 20:19
Hi Mr Belshaw -
Why do you recommend exporting to WAV and then converting to MP3 with iTunes if Audacity can already export directly to MP3?
Is there any particular problem we should be aware of when exporting to MP3 with Audacity?
#6 Comment By Doug Belshaw On 24th March 2006 @ 09:06
No, there’s no problem with exporting to MP3 in Audacity, but you have to have an MP3 encoder installed and configured. For ease of use for beginners I thought it might be easier using the method I described!
If you want to export straight from Audacity you’ll need something like [25] LAME installed…
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URL to article: http://teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk/index.php/2006/01/11/podcasting-part4/
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[1] dougbelshaw.com: http://www.dougbelshaw.com
[2] Image: http://teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk/index.php/category/guides/
[3] iTunes : http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/
[4] Wordpress: http://www.wordpress.org
[5] Blogger: http://www.blogger.com
[6] here: http://blog.forret.com/blog/2004/10/how-to-podcast-with-blogger-and.html
[7] Podifier: http://podifier.com/
[8] Chris Wilde: http://www.wildelearning.co.uk/
[9] Image: http://podifier.com/
[10] Feedburner: http://www.feedburner.com
[11] http://feeds.feedburner.com/mrbelshawcouk/teaching: http://feeds.feedburner.com/mrbelshawcouk/teaching
[12] ?: http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress/popularity-contest
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[23] www.ilovehistory.co.uk: http://www.ilovehistory.co.uk
[24] http://www.ilovehistory.co.uk/index.php/?feed=rss: http://www.ilovehistory.co.uk/index.php/?feed=rss
[25] LAME: http://lame.sourceforge.net/
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