If you really want the simplest solution, maybe look at something like squarespace’s built in podcast features? Unless there’s a reason nobody has mentioned it yet.
Haven’t tried it, but seems pretty straight forward:
http://help.squarespace.com/guides/podcasting-with-squarespace
JeffL:
Gonna start from nearish the top, so please don’t think I’m being pettily condescending with you; I feel like we’ve all probably been hitting on parts of the whole and having silly little arguments about this stuff in a confusing, unhelpful manner ;).
Domains are sold by domain registrars, who have permission to parcel out URLs to people for money. Hosting can be done by just about anyone, and is mostly about providing you access to an internet-connected server to load your files/website onto. You can then “point” a domain name/URL at wherever that hosting is located, and voila, it’s accessible.
Vertical integration here (e.g., buying your hosting from your domain registrar) potentially saves you a couple of (very brief, simple) steps upfront (the "pointing the URL to the backend web address of the hosting), potentially simplifies your support structure (no getting bounced back and forth between two different companies blaming each other), and gives you a single point of entry for most of your backend controls.
On the flipside, those benefits are kinda marginal (the steps are very brief, customer support can be good OR bad at any company; reviews illuminate that better, and you will probably almost never need to login to the backend controls), and there are downsides to hosting with your registrar. If you ever want to move it elsewhere for some reason (this can happen), they can sort of hold the fact that they control EVERYTHING over your head. Moreover, just because someone is a good, reputable domain registrar doesn’t mean they also have all the qualities necessary to be a GOOD host. It’s way easier to find two separate companies who are each good at their own part of it.
There’s not a “correct” answer for whether to get hosting/domain from the same place or different ones. In my opinion, the cons of both sides are unlikely to crop up in a situation like yours. Go for whatever the best deal is (noting that quality of service is just as important as price when it comes to what constitutes a “good deal”).
Managed Wordpress-style hosting generally means you get far less control of the backend of the hosting (for instance, on a more general-purpose hosting plan, you are free to also install, say, a shopping cart on the same webserver to sell things alongside the main website. Or setup your own email service, in some cases. Or even host multiple different websites off of the same server, just pointing to different locations on it with different URLs). It ALSO means that you might need to deal with limitations put on WordPress itself by whoever sets it up for you. WP is EXTREMELY extensible, very powerful software. You can make it do almost anything you can imagine, and people have written themes, plugins, and add-ons to enable all that, and if you want to dig into the code yourself, you can do even more! But managed WP hosting generally provides one or a few pre-set “modes” you can’t really change in a deep, significant way. So, if you are three months down the road, and discover that you REALLY want the features provided by Awesome Plugin v7, but your Managed WordPress host doesn’t support Awesome Plugin v7, you’re kinda out of luck!
The two problem sets could even collide! If you buy your domain name, hosting package, AND WordPress setup all from the same company, then discover you REALLY need to do things/use features they don’t provide, and they won’t budge. . . it could be a real nightmare to move EVERYTHING you own from that one company to one or more others, and they aren’t necessarily under any obligation to help you make it easier.
On the flipside, managed WP tends to simplify setup even more, and in a case like this, where you want a fairly specialized/specific set of features, it can remove a lot of the guesswork of trying to figure out what combination of tweaks, themes, and plugins you should use to achieve all your goals.
To some extent, this may come down to how likely it is for you to spend time learning how to do all of this stuff yourself, and how likely it is your little website/podcast’s needs will grow and adapt over time. All-in-one solutions like domain/hosting pairs and Managed WordPress certainly reduce some (but not all!) of the learning necessary upfront, but they can lock you into a certain philosophy or tech pathway that runs counter to your eventual needs, making it difficult to grow and evolve your work.
How interesting is this stuff to you? How much do you want to dig in and do this “right?” In a sense, it almost feels like rolling your own PC versus buying a pre-fab. Both have ups and downs, detractors and supporters, but for most people, the end experience is the same: a bitching gaming PC. Just different paths to get there.
Right.
I’m a little more cynical about the benefits of “simplicity” in this case, basically - because I’d be happy walking people through the few extra steps on a forum, they’re not hard :)
Having podcasted for 4 years at this point.
Things I learned.
Good luck! I would suggest libsyn, which also publishes a blog for you, along with the RSS feed. Might be all you need. I personally have a hosting service I use for my podcast site and other websites I own, so I put blog entries on there for each podcast episode. It is fun. www.bornintheeighties.net (wordpress site)
Libsyn feed/blog
https://directory.libsyn.com/shows/view/id/bite
If you don’t want a site, you can just go with libsyn. 20 bucks a month for 400mb/mo is perfect for my show.
Don’t fuss over bitrates for your mp3’s. I run around 96k, (more or less) to get a filesize of around 80 megabytes.
The other awesome thing about libsyn is that it auto creates embeddable audio/video players to post on websites and stuff. It is a really nice solution.
Also, if you want to PM me or something for any advice, I would love to help.
I’ll also toss out my buddy Joe, who just successfully Kickstarted a gamer-focused relationship talkshow with his wife. His updates on KS are already really cool, but he’s also SUPER active on Twitter/FB/email, and I can’t help but feel that he’d LOVE to talk about how he’s getting everything setup with another newcomer to the field. he might have some interesting perspectives in terms of getting started right now, as compared to in the past.
Link to the KS updates: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1588459684/heart-piece-podcast-relationship-talk-show-for-gam. If you’d like a more formal introduction, I’d be happy to make one over email.
You can also check out http://www.podcastmethod.co/ by Dan Benjamin, the guy behind the 5by5 podcast network which has a lot of shows I enjoy. I think this is more on the equipment/recording/production side than the hosting details, but I haven’t looked into it much.
Don’t spend 600+ dollars on Mics. That is my advice. Things get condensed down an insane amount when recording to an mp3, and you’ll have a hard time finding a difference between expensive mics (250$ plus) and good mics (80-150$). I would suggest an MXL 770 or 990 (around 80-150 bucks) for excellent quality. (They use these in radio stations) I can’t believe how much money people want to spend on microphones, it is as if a good mic will make your show better or something. A lot of the higher end microphones are for voice-overs and vocal recording. Nothing on a podcast will need to be that quality, and all of that awesome richness and tone from these expensive mics will get eaten up when you mix down into an mp3 at 96kbps.
This is an effing steal MXL 990 Condenser Microphone with Shockmount
There are about 100 other things that will ruin your audio quality even if you have super expensive microphones. I found that the most important thing to making a show sound better, without much cost, is room acoustics. If you are using condenser mics (which seem to be what everyone wants for some reason) you are going to pick up a lot of room noise and echo, because condenser mics are not as directional as a shotgun mic or a dynamic mic. Shock mounts are key, as are good microphone stands.
One cheap way I fixed up my apartment spare bedroom (the podcastin’ room) was to hang comforters (purchased secondhand) on all of the walls, really helped deaden the room noise.
Also, think of this as a hobby, you wouldn’t buy a 4k Cinema camera to film home movies, get something that is good and useful, and if things really take off or you love doing it, buy the expensive stuff. Yeti makes some amazing USB mics for skype/google podcasting.
Everyone: you guys rock. Seriously. I think I’ve got this, at least enough to start and jump in.
Based on everything here plus from links that you’ve pointed me to, this is what I think we’ll go with to start ( and yeah, I tend to go overboard before it is wise. Just how I am. ;) )
Domain: some domain registrar. I’ll do some homework on that.
Web host: Arvixe. I’ll get a standard package, Very good reviews, very nice offerings. Btw - you choose between Linux and Windows ASP hosting. It appears Linux is the standard, does that mean I need to know Linux or what?
I’ll use Wordpress, and I think Lybsyn and Blubrry are pretty equal for the media/podcast hosting part, leaning to Blubrry.
That Mic offer is crazy. It’s $59, whereas the cheapest on Amazon for that is $129. We will get two, and feed them into a mixer. Going to get a headphone amp to feed the headphone out to our two headphones.
The mixer will feed into a Roland r-05 digital recorder I have that is pretty nice.
I was going to use audacity, but I find it cumbersome for editing, so something that makes that as easy as possible will be a nice add and worth it in the long run.
Now we need to settle on a name that isn’t taken, find artwork that is iTunes compliant, and so some investigating on how to use short clips of commercial music for the bumper and the transitions.
Then we need to take care of the trivial stuff, like actual content that is worth listening to. ;)
Windows vs. Linux hosting: for what you’re doing, I suspect you won’t find it matters a lot. Since you’re not using VPS hosting (I assume), you’re not really gonna be “remoting in” to the webserver or interacting directly with its OS; instead, you’ll be using FTP or a pretty graphical interface like CPanel, which will look/act mostly the same.
Some packages/tools may require one stack or another, but WP, for instance, should run fine on either. My impression in general (and please note, I’m not a pro, just a guy with a personal interest in this stuff) is that for the sort of things you’re gonna be running, Linux hosting is more common, so the tools/software you might look to in the future might prefer it, but I sincerely doubt you’re gonna run into a case where this matters a lot. Someone more experienced like Starlight might have more to offer.
I like Hover as a domain registrar. They’re not scammy, have a clean UI and free telephone support, and they have a wide variety of domains available. There’s often coupon codes available because they sponsor a lot of podcasts (like Accidental Tech Podcast) Just Google if you need an up to date code. I’m on my phone so here’s an ugly link: http://hover.com/atp
I’m with Armando. You’ll not need to use a command line and unless you need something windows-specific like ASP - and you don’t - Linux is both generally cheaper and the “default”, with more future options (and often a better graphical control panel).
(The “worst” thing you might need to do is set permissions on a directory, but that’s not only true for both types of hosting and you can do that through a FTP program’s GUI, I use Filezilla, which is literally “right click on directory, file permissions”)
I almost picked up that MXL deal, but I already have 3 mics. Condenser mics are nice and pick up a better tone than dynamic mics (unless you spend 300 bucks for a super nice one) but they pick up more room noise, just make sure to position yourselves to help with echo.
Did I mention you guys rock?
Man, if I didn’t already have a Blue Yeti, I’d totally pick that up, it looks awesome.
They have those at the radio station that I have DJ’ed on. They are very good mics for everyday use (at least broadcast) probably wouldn’t want to record lead vocals for your next single on it, but for talk radio, they are great.
And I am just realizing that using short clips of commercial music as bumper and transition requires expensive licenses. Surprising, since I have listened to a couple of new podcasts that I know are shoe-string startups, with several BMI songs on each podcast.
Looking for something easier that Audacity for editing. I suppose I should just do some simple Audactity tutorials others mentioned…
There are some nice royalty free music places.
Incompetech is good.
I had a musician friend make bumpers for me.
Found some of those on Google; we’d just wanted to use some 5 second clips of some familiar/popular songs that went with the upcoming segment. We hear clips like this on some of the podcasts we listen to. But it appears that the cost is really high, looking at, e.g. BMI’s licensing site.
That’s just one of the licences you need, btw, if you go with liscence-mainstream-music and that route.
https://wiki.creativecommons.org/Podcasting_Legal_Guide#Licenses_You_Will_Need.
Get royalty-free music, or have your own made. Seriously.
Hmm. Wonder how the small podcasts are doing it? I have some friends I need to ask - on their little blog/webpage for their podcast they list the music in each podcast with a “licensed from BMI” note.