How Jason Snell podcasts

February 10, 2015

Jason Snell creates wonderful podcasts on popular culture for The Incomparable and technology for relay.fm. He's not only great at what he does, he's generous in sharing how he does it. First, Jason wrote about how he records podcasts, including multi-enders, where each person records their own audio separately. From Six Colors:

Another approach—and the one that I use—is to record conversations via the $30

Call Recorder for Skype

by Ecamm Software. This plug-in for Skype records your own microphone input and the output of your Skype call as separate tracks in a single QuickTime movie. (An included utility app allows me to split that file into separate files for each track and convert them to various other formats.)

More recently, Jason wrote about how he edits podcasts. Also from Six Colors:

Then I use a Logic feature called Strip Silence, which takes a selected item—at this point a single block of one person's conversation for an entire hour or two—and removes all the silent bits, leaving behind dozens or hundreds of smaller blocks. Having described this technique to other people, I'm starting to get the impression that most people don't edit this way.

Jason also describes built-in options like using QuickTime to record audio and GarageBand to edit it. Whether you're interested in podcasting and want some tips on getting started, or you've been doing it for a while and looking for ways to improve your workflow, you'll find both of Jason's posts valuable.

I don't do everything exactly the way Jason does, but I'm totally taking some of his Logic tricks.