How I did it

OK, looked around, but all the “podcast tutorials” I saw only told you how to get audio as an MP3 into your computer. Well, I’d been doing that for a long time anyway, so that wasn’t a challenge, I wanted a quick and easy way to slap together a RSS 2.0 feed of a really simple weblog to publish the files, and that wasn’t really covered anywhere.

OK, so to get audio in to the Mac, I use:

– Sony MD recorder (I had one already, and from listening to the horrors of Adam Curry and others, an external recording device sounded reasonable)

– A plugin stereo Microphone (can’t remember where I got this, but it’s a stereo mike with shaped like a “T” with two mikes, and a stereo mini plug. Very small, pretty good.

- A Griffin iMic
- A cable to hook the MD player to the iMic
- A PowerMac G5 (or a PowerBook G4, depending on where I might be)
- GarageBand
- iTunes

The process is simple, record onto the MD player whenever, hook the MD to the iMic, and suck the raw audio into GarageBand. Edit away with GarageBand, suck the AIFF into iTunes, convert it to an MP3 with iTunes.

Now the part that I had to work on a bit…

– Opened an account over at BlueHost.com (www.bluehost.com)

– Downloaded Moveable Type (http://www.movabletype.org/), since it was just me, and I was only planning to do hobby podcasts, the free licensing was OK for me. Edited all the config files locally, pushed ’em all up to bluehost.

– Beat my head against a wall for 3 hours, then found “MT-Enclosures” by Brandon Fuller (http://brandon.fuller.name/archives/hacks/mtenclosures/), a plugin for MT that “just works”, and takes media links in blog entries, and turns them into enclosures in the RSS2.0 feed of MT. If you’ve installed MT, this part is totally trivial

– Started trying out MarsEdit, which looks to be a reasonable match for what I was trying (http://ranchero.com/marsedit/)

Started uploading stuff!

Dec 07 2004