Podcasting with Garageband 3

Published by neil on January 27th, 2006

With Apple’s iLife06 comes Garageband 3 with some much talked about podcasting additions. In an attempt to get the production time down of my podcast, I thought I would give it a whirl for Minor Technicality 13.

Apple’s iLife seems to have embraced the creation and publishing of a podcast. On startup, Garageband now presents you with a selection of pre-setups, one of which is ‘podcast’. The setup is pre-defined with five tracks to handle both the various types of audio and the addition of images and URLs to create an enhanced podcast. Recording tracks tailored to cope each with male and female voice recording are present, and these are easily configured to your specific needs.

Clean Voice

The voice recording has had some additional filtering applied by default. This enhances the voice recording noticeably and also appears to include a noise gate to help in reducing background noise being picked up by the microphone. It was possible to create a similar setup manually in previous version of Garageband, but anything that makes the generally time-consuming process of creating a podcast is a blessing. The vocal enhancement includes automatic filters tailored to a number of recording devices such as a powerbook’s built-in microphone or an iSight, and they improve the recording quality enormously.

Ducking
My overly-complex audio setup (for a simple podcast that is) was partly necessary to handle my need of ‘ducking’. Ducking decribes the process of automatically lowering the level of a music track when the presenter is speaking simultaneously - something which immediately makes a podcast sound that much more professional.

This can be achieved in the ‘real world’ using side-chained compressors, but Garageband 3 now includes the ability to duck any audio track under any other. This means that as soon as there is a signal in your voice track, any other track (selectable) currently playing music, will have it’s volume level temporarily reduced. Once you stop speaking, it returns to it’s normal volume - very slick. I was a little unhappy about the way in which the volume of the ducked track is released, so I hope there will be some additional control over that in a future version of the application.

Workflow
Although it will take me a few podcasts to fully optimise my recording time, I was able to reduce my recording, editing and encoding time of a half-hour show to under an hour - including the additional effort of creating an enhanced podcast file.
Stopping the recording at the moment things go awry is much faster over all than searching through the audio file after the fact to delete the offending bit, and insertion of audio clips and music simplified by the full integration with iTunes playlists. The auto ducking also means it is no longer necessary to record the voice and music at the same time, therefore I can save recording time by not having to sit through each song as it records - a big boost for music-focused podcasts.

Enahanced Podcasts

Enhanced podcasts include additional information such as images, URL links and chapter markers. I had previously not experimented with enhancement as it was yet another process to clutter up the workflow. Now, with drag and drop simplicity, I can include images related to the included music tracks, and links directly to the bands’ websites. It took me no more than 10 minutes to create the enhanced podcast file, and with the vast majority of my personal podcast downloads coming from iTunes, it is likely that I will move over to an enhanced podcast in the future (though retaining an additional feed for standard mp3 podcasts).
30 minute limit
Previous versions of Garageband had a 99-bar recording limit (around 30 minutes). That appears to have been extended, which was of great relief towards the end of my podcast when I realised I would slightly overrun 30 minutes!

Encoding
Finishing off the podcast is a one-click process to save everything down to a m4a file format. To convert to mp3 for compatibility, all I did was drop the file into iTunes and select the Advanced>Convert to mp3 menu item.

Conclusion
Having got production time down from about two hours to under one hour on my first attempt with Garageband 3, I am very optimistic about reducing that time even further once I get familiar where everything is. Less production time, means more podcasts, and by the emails I have been receiving recently, that’s what people want!

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Tags: Podcasts
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