Brian Fitzgerald

I’ve done a few personal podcast episodes on this site and more recently, produce the Board of Education podcast on the Lincoln Public Schools website. Through these efforts I have tried just about everything available on the macintosh right now and am yet to find a tool that does a great job of making the entire process easy.

I’ll use the Board podcast as an example. I publish two podcasts for the board. One is an enhanced m4a version for iTunes with chapters. The second is a standard mp3 version for other clients. Here’s how it goes together…

1. First I separate the meeting audio from the video, trim the beginning and end, and save it as a separate quicktime file
2. Then I create a text file with the current date in it which I feed to an application called TextToMP3 to get an MP3 file with the computer speaking the name of the podcast and the date
3. I open up the last podcast that I did in Apple's Soundtrack Pro software and replace the meeting audio and the date audio with the new files. I adjust the bumper music to fit the new lengths and output the AIFF file. (I had a difficult time getting garageband to work with a file that was more than an hour long -- but I've read ways to get past this and will be trying it out)
4. I drop the AIFF file into iTunes and compress it into a mp3 file and an m4a file.
5. Add ID3 tags and the podcast image in iTunes to the two files
6. I open the m4a file into ChapterToolMe and listen to the file, putting in chapters where appropriate.
7. I re-export the m4a file. I now have finished mp3 files and m4a files.
8. I launch Feeder to create the XML entries for the two podcasts and attach the files.
9. I post the podcasts.