Podcasting - Garageband

Garageband - Simple and Powerful

If asked for software suggestion by a teacher wanting to create several podcasts with his or her class, we would probably recommend Garageband. Garageband is a commercial product from Apple Computer that comes as part of the iLife suite. Recent Macintosh computers purchased for school settings may come with this software already installed. With Garageband you can create both podcasts and vodcasts.

Garageband is our choice because it has what some call a low floor and a high ceiling. It is relatively easy to learn to use and yet it has the potential to do some very sophisticated things. We understand that resources and equipment/software preferences vary so we will both attempt to explain this product and offer some suggestions for those wanting to take another approach.

Our intend here is to describe the process of creating a podcast (actually a vodcast) with Garageband. We have made an effort in other tutorials to be fairly complete in our explanations. Here, we will offer a less complete description to keep this section manageable. Hopefully, the level of detail we offer will at least be sufficient to convince you that you could learn to do this within a reasonable amount of time. See the Garageband link that appears above for some additional information (see the video tutorials).

Garageband is a product suited to multiple purposes all involving audio. You may be familiar with Garageband as a product of interest to those with musical talent (or at least musical interests).

When a user the first launches the Garageband software, the software asks what type of project the user wants to create. Creating a podcast episode is one of the options and selecting this option opens a work environment which we have attempted to approximate below.

Note the following features:

• multiple tracks with controllers (podcast track, male voice, female voice, jingles, others can be added)


• access to multiple media elements (the images from iPhoto, loops offering "jingles", sound effects that are royalty free), and


• a record button (the red button).

To lay down some audio, I would click the male voice track to activate that track and then click record to add some audio. The timeline scrolls back and forth and a red vertical line marks the location of the "record head". Clicking the record button will generate a new region at the position of this vertical line and this region will expand until the record button is clicked again to halt recording.

Audio can be recorded using the internal microphone, but I prefer to use a headset to better control the sound that is picked up. There is no need to try to record an entire session in one take. If working alone, it typically works better to gather your thoughts and then speak in short segments. The segments show up in the track as "regions". Regions can be joined or loops (stingers, sound effects) can be used to create transitions between regions. Regions can be edited to remove unwanted content or individually deleted and rerecorded. One region appears in the simulated workspace displayed above.

Of course, podcasts sometimes simply record the audio content contributed by multiple speakers. In this case, a mixer is used to combine the input from several microphones before sending the audio to the computer and long sections of audio are recorded. Editing does not require regions that are short.

The jingle track is traditionally used to add other sound effects. The software comes with a variety of loops and one can purchase additional royalty free content if greater variety is desired. It is tempting to access commercial music and add something familiar as a musical background. This is an obvious copyright violation and just can't be allowed when sharing podcasts online.

The podcast track is for images and video. The easiest way to add such content is to first store the images in iPhoto and video in the Movies folder (perhaps after creating video content with iMovie). Access to this content is controlled by selecting Photos or Movies. Using the mouse, content is added to the iPod track using "drag and drop".

Regions of sound (voice, loops) and other forms of multimedia are easy to move around to created the desired effect. Copy and paste, drag, and other familiar concepts apply and can be used to carefully position content within tracks or even to move content across tracks. Typically regions in different tracks are purposefully overlaped to create smooth transitions. Garageband offers a feature called "ducking" which automatically prioritizes the content in one track over another. For example, in the example I created, the jingles track was ducked so that the volume level for this track is automatically lowered if there is audio in the voice track. Visual content is positioned in relationship to audio content to determine when the visual material will be displayed.

Once completed, the final product can be saved as a file (MPEG4) or sent to iWeb (a simple web site authoring tool available within the iLife Suite) for automatic integration within a web site. iWeb automatically generates RSS for podcasts if this is a feature you value. The podcast can be displayed within a web page, played within a computer-based product such as iTunes, or moved to a portable device (e.g., a video iPod).

Here is a sample project we created to show what a Garageband podcast might look like. Our concept is a series of podcasts based on the theme of "Share Something Local" and we offer one example of what a contribution to such as series might look and sound like.