What it takes to put a podcast together

I'm a life long Apple Mac user, have been since I first used a ][e in school in 1981 - admittedly that was to play defender and some helicopter rescue game - but it was my first taste of computers - that year I talked my parents into buying a ZX Spectrum for me to have at home -and I think it was a £300 investment that has really paid off.

Back to the podcast - I use a Cannon Digital Dictaphone and a lapel mic to record my interviews - ok maybe my voice isn't picked up too well but it's enough to have a clear recording of the artist - if the background noise is low enough - outside it finds it very hard to make a clear recording - but I conduct all my recordings at the Royal Festival Hall so have a great indoor space to record in.

I usually spend about and hour and a half with the poets on a Saturday morning, over coffee and croissants, then get them to perform their poetry - I'm looking for about ten minutes of material to put out - so I try and record for fifteen twenty minutes.

The interview itself - I have a set of questions, which really form a guideline for the interview - in which I ask the poet to describe how they got started, what and who are their influences, and how they write and edit their work.

This usually takes about forty minutes,

I like to have a bit of a safety net of recordings, and I have about twelve weeks worth of material that I can put out - which means it can take twelve weeks from recording an interview before it goes out on the net.

On the Sunday I sit down at my Mac and transfer the recordings to the hard-drive - the Cannon produces a .WAV file which I convert to a .MP3 using software called Switch and Flip 4 Mac. I launch Garageband and drop the files into a basic track I've created with the music from Lyman Mediros and the Lower Level, and the ident from the Association of Poetry Podcasters as a intro and outro. Then I play through the recording, editing out any mistakes, coughs, things the poet wants removing, striping it down to the time limit I'm looking for - I've set a constraint of 30 minutes for the show, and cut down any sprawling interviews to that - or make a decision to put them out over two episodes.

I usually alternate an interview show with a poetry show, putting out the poetry of the interviewee the episode before their interview. I fill the rest of those shows with poetry that has either been emailed to me, sent by CD or from a CD I've bought from the artist at their performances.

The thirty minute limit for the show means I can't put out as much as I'd like to in an episode, but it does mean I have to be tight with my edits, and my choices of artist that appear.

In the end I spend about eight hours at the weekend recording and editing the thirty minute show that you hear - I hope it shows!