Podcasting Tutorial - Video 3: Exporting and Tagging

Key Takeaways

Hey, what's up? It's Pat again. This is the third video in a series of videos I'm creating to help you get your podcast up and running. In the first video, we talked about equipment and software. Second video, I gave you 10 tips for making your show the best it can be and some tips for recording. And in this video, we're going to be talking about exporting and tagging your MP3 files. Sounds kind of boring, but you know, it's a little technical, but without this stuff, you're not going to have a podcast. And I'll try to make it as entertaining, fun, quick, and helpful as possible. So, come on, let's get started. [Music] Okay, so here we are in Garage Band. What I'm going to do is I'm going to show you my personal workflow here. You're actually looking at a recorded, finished, edited episode that I have coming out next week. This is session number 49 of the Smart Passive Income podcast. So, I'm going to show you exactly how I do it and kill two birds with one stone. And after this, I'm going to take the same files and show you how I export in Audacity to end up with an MP3 uh file just like I'm going to do with the GarageBand here. So, just to walk you through this file really quick, you know, I have my intro, I have the intro music, a little intro about what the episode is about. This one's actually an interview with a guy named Brendan Huffford. Uh you can see Brendan's track there and my track there because I split the tracks using call recorder for Skype. And then at the end, uh, I have an outro and then an outro music right there in the music track. So that's it. So at this point, after you have your podcast episode recorded and edited and exactly how you want it, you want to export as an MP3 file. So to do that in GarageBand, I go to share and go to export podcast to dis. And I'm going to save this somewhere on my hard drive. So there's a couple options here before you actually export as an MP3. You can compress in different versions. You can uh compress with an AAC encoder or an MP3 encoder. We want the MP3 encoder. That's the most widely read uh you know default standard uh file when it comes to podcast that's read by all audio players, right? Uh now AAC encoder that that has to do with what's called enhanced podcast. What you can actually do with iTunes here or GarageBand is create an enhanced podcast which means you can include images to pop up at certain moments of your podcast. Um but that's a little complicated. It's going to increase your file size. And if you're going to go to that link to add images at certain points in time, almost like a slideshow in your podcast, you might as well do a video podcast. It's a a little bit more uh compatible. But anyways, just moving on. We're going to select MP3 here. And then audio settings. This is going to determine sort of the audio quality and also the file size. The higher the quality, the larger the file size, of course. But for, you know, for what we're doing here, you can either choose uh spoken or musical. really that that's um that I I always go with musical because I have some musical components in my show, but if it's all purely spoken, you know, spoken podcast will do the job and it's going to cut your file size in half. Now, the difference between musical podcast and higher quality, it's it's really, you know, you can't really tell the difference at all. Uh, you know, unless you have a trained ear, so I wouldn't even worry about that. So, I' I'd either stick with spoken or musical. I always go with musical. So, so I'm going to click export. And then it it'll ask me uh it's not going to export as an enhanced podcast. Yes, I know that. Now it's going to export to disk. Now I'm going to show you a little bit what my uh file structure is like here. So I'm going to go to my podcasts folder here and show you what it looks like. I have an archive folder for old files that I just put in or whatever. Then I have episodes, which I'll show you in a second. Graphics, which has the uh artwork for my show. masters, which has a master template for the intro for uh an episode and also for outros and other things. Uh multimedia, just any sort of extracurricular sort of media that goes into some of my shows. Uh you know, uh voice over introductions and stuff like that. Ranking screenshots, that's actually I take screenshots of rankings I have in iTunes just to save them and you know, for social proof and things like that. Skype recordings, this is where I save the interviews that I do on Skype. So, let me go into episodes really quick and I'll I'll show you that I have a master copy one which I use to duplicate when I come out with a new new episode. I have episode 1 through 49 here. And in each of these episodes, I have a folder, actually two folders, one for GarageBand, which is where I save the working file. Uh, and I would do the same thing in Audacity if you're working off of off of Audacity. And I have a file for iTunes. That's where I'm going to export this particular session in. And this is session number 49. So, this is the iTunes folder in session 49 folder in my podcast folder. So, I'm going to save that. It's going to create a mixdown and it's going to take a few minutes. I'll fast forward uh for the sake of time here. Okay. So, after you've exported your file as an MP3, and I don't know why that turned black like that on that top track. That's a bug. Anyways, let's go ahead and find that file in the uh in my Finder. So, I'm going to go to podcasts, episodes, episode 49, iTunes. And there it is. Session49.mpp3. Now, you might think you're all done here with uh this file. All you have to do is upload it to a server. Then you're all good to go with your podcast. But there's a couple things we have left to do with this file. Now, the first thing that we're going to do with with every MP3 file that you that you record, uh, is you're going to have to tag that file. Meaning you're going to have to include some data uh you know what's called ID3 tags in that file. Some information within that file to let audio players and and podcast directories know, you know, the the show title, the episode title, the host name, that's you. Uh the category that it's in and other pieces of data, you know, the artwork that goes along with it. That's all that's all what's called I, you know, you're you're tagging the file, you know, with ID3 tags. It's it's extra information that goes along with that file so that those players and directories can read that file correctly and understand kind of the uh you know who's behind it. But before we before we even do that, you know, not everyone is a perfect podcaster. We don't always record at the perfect levels. Sometimes different parts of our podcast are louder than than others, which is which is, you know, really one of the uh biggest kind of pet peeves that a lot of people have when listening to podcasts. when parts of your podcast are louder or at different levels than other parts because they're, you know, you're they're in their car and they hear a loud part so they turn it down and then there's a soft part so they turn it up and then another loud part comes and their ears hurt. Things like that happens. Now, if you were a perfect podcaster and you recorded at perfect levels, then you wouldn't need to do this step. You could just move on to tagging uh your file, which I'll show you later in this in this video after I do the uh Audacity export into an MP3 uh you know uh example. But if you feel that your audio levels aren't perfect, and I do this with a lot of my episodes because I'm not a perfect podcaster either, and this is actually not going to affect the sound quality uh as as far as you know, crispiness and and and um you know, just just uh how how well it sounds. It's not going to affect it too much. You know, you want to try to avoid doing this step, but if you have to, if your audio levels are different at different parts of the show, you can do this. A lot of people just do this automatically to make sure that their levels are are the same during the show. And there's what they do is you can actually drop this uh audio file um into a tool called the level. And what you do is you drop an audio file here. It has to be actually a wave file or an AFF file. So you can't unfortunately you can't drop the MP3 file. We have to convert it first. So it's a little bit of extra work here if you're doing it from GarageBand. I'll show you how to kind of mess and uh get it to an AIFF file from the MP3 and then back we'll have to convert it back to an MP3. Kind of a workaround. It kind of sucks, but you know, if your levels are off, it's it's worth doing it because it's going to sound so much better in the end. Now, to get this tool, you can get it for free. You can actually get it for free. All you have to do is go to conversationetwork.orgleator. Levelator. Uh yeah, I'll I'll have a link for you underneath this video. And again, it's such a it's such an amazing beautiful tool. It's it's good for Windows, for uh Mac, and for even Linux, too. So, going back to our Finder here, what I do with all of my MP3 files from this point, uh is I actually drop them into iTunes because I use iTunes for converting files and I use iTunes for tagging my MP3 files as well. So, we're going to basically use iTunes as a workhorse here to do a lot of the work that we would normally get thirdparty software to do for us. And iTunes is free and we're going to make sure our files ready to go in iTunes anyways because we're syndicating our podcast to iTunes anyways. So, I'm going to open up iTunes here and I'll show you I actually have a playlist that is cons that consists of all the podcasts that I have and and this is where I work in this particular playlist here. SPI podcast. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to drop that new episode uh session 49 into here. And you'll see that it says session 49. Now, I can play it here, too. Now, again, if I didn't need to change the levels with leveler, I could just edit uh my tags from here by right clicking, go to get info, which brings up this uh window here where I can edit all this stuff. And I'll show you that in just a second. But if you need to adjust the auto levels here, this is what you do. You go to iTunes preferences and you're in your general preferences here. And then it says when you insert a CD, ask to import CD import settings. Click on import settings. You want to import using AFF encoder and then click okay. And then click okay. Now what you can do is you can right click on that session. Actually, let me I move it up here so I can show you. Okay. So, I'm going to right click on that MP3 file, session 49. I'm going to click create AFF version because again, the Levelator needs that AIFF version uh to to work. So, I just heard a little ding that shows me that it's there. Uh, but it's not in the playlist because we didn't add it to the playlist. So, what you can do is you can go to your music library, scroll all the way to the top. Um, I would just click on the date added and scroll all the way to the top. So, you could see and you'll see there's two versions of session 49. This first one, if I click on get info and summary, you'll see that it is actually an MP uh meg file. And if I right click on the second one, get info, it is an AFF file. And you can see it's so much bigger. It's actually 525 megabytes large. And again, we don't need to tag yet. Um, but what we do need to do is run this AIFF file through the Levelator. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually, how am I going to do this so I can show you? I'm going to put the levelator there. I only have so much real estate to work with here in ScreenFlow. I'm going to drag session 49 right on top of there. And you can see it start to work. It says 5% 6% and little bars moving up and down. Okay. So, after Levelator does its thing, uh, we have to go find the file and put it back into our iTunes library here because then we're going to convert it back to an MP3. So basically what we did is we took our original MP3, converted it to an AIFF so we can put it through Levelator. Now it's still an AFF, but we have to put that new one back into iTunes so we can convert it back into an MP3. So basically, we'll have our original MP3 and then our new MP3, which will be leveled out and sound much better. So let's go ahead and find that other one. And sometimes it's kind of difficult to find. The best thing to do is just go into your finder uh type in the name of the session session or the name of the file that you put in uh on this Mac and you'll see the one that says output that's the one that came from the levelator. So what you could do is you can just uh drag that into your library in iTunes and then if you scroll up you'll see that there. Now, what we're going to do is actually before we can convert it to uh an MP3, we have to go back into iTunes preferences, change that import setting that like we did last time from AIFF to MP3. And then we'll keep it at 128. Okay. So, now I can click I could right click and uh do an MP3 version. And now it says converting to MP3. Okay. I heard a ding. If I scroll up, there it is. Just to make sure, I will rightclick get info. That is an MP3. It's the same file size as it was before. It just sounds leveled out now if it wasn't before. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag and drop it into my SPI podcast folder. Um, and I'm going to delete the other one. So, the other one I moved up here so I could show you. I'm just going to drag and drop that into my trash can. Am I sure I want to remove it? Yes. Don't ask me again, please. And there we go. So, now I can play this one. and you might hear that the sound quality or the levels are a lot better. Now, again, if you were good at recording and you you were okay with the quality and the levels sounded fine to you, you didn't you don't have to do any of that. But if you just I mean that's how you do it if you want to know how to do it and that's how to do it with GarageBand. Now, if you're doing this with Audacity, it's a little bit easier because with Audacity, you know, there is a way to export as an MP3 and then you can use iTunes and do what I just did there, but you you'd be wasting your time because you can export with you can export to awave file in Audacity and it's really easy. So, let me do that for you right now. Okay, so here we are in Audacity. It's going to look similar to this whether you're on a Mac or PC. And what I would always do here is, as you can see, there's a couple tracks here and I have more down below. This is this is my episode. I mean, this is actually not my episode because I do that in GarageBand, but this is just uh for example. And what I would always do in Audacity is export as a wave file. You know, it does they do have their own MP3 encoder. It's called the lame encoder. And it actually doesn't come default with Audacity. You have to download it separately um and install it. But I wouldn't even bother because I would always export as a wave. Why? Because the lame encoder is lame compared to the iTunes MP3 encoder. So, what I would do is I would I would export as a wave, drag it and drop it into that uh playlist that you set up for your podcast in iTunes, rightclick it, and then convert it to an MP3 from there, just like I showed you. Uh, make sure the import settings are MP3 and it's going to be so much better. Plus, if you are going to use a Levelator, the Levelator accepts wave files. So, if you export with a wave file in Audacity, if you feel like it or if you want to or just want to make sure that your levels are correct in your audio, you can just drag and drop that file from Audacity uh that you've exported into the level and then go and find it and then convert that which uh comes out on the other side as a wave if you've done it this way and then you'll have an MP3 file. Well, there you go. So you know if you want to export in Audacity all you have to do is go to file export and then from there uh you can save as session49wave uh if that's the format you selected. Uh there are no options for that. So all you have to do is click save. Um I have a file there already named that uh already but I'm going to say yes. And now it's going to give you this edit metadata screen. And I wouldn't edit the data here because you're going to convert the wave file to an MP3 anyways. And you might do some other things with it like burn it through level and stuff. What I would actually do is use iTunes to edit the the metadata anyway because that's what's you know you're going to put your podcast onto iTunes anyways. There's some other things to include such as artwork and and things like that category. Uh so I would just click okay. I wouldn't worry about editing metadata there. And that's it. Okay. Okay, so after you export your file, whether you export it through Audacity, through GarageBand, whether you go through Levelator or not, again, you just want to end up with a finalized MP3 file, and at this point, we're going to have to tag the file to give that file some extra data so that audio players, people, and podcasting directories know who the host is, what the name of the show is, the name of that particular episode that you're editing is, and things like that. So, there are actually a lot of thirdparty programs that allow you to edit the ID3 tags for your MP3 files, but my favorite one is just simply iTunes. You can actually use iTunes to edit your ID3 tags. So, what I do is I put that file into a playlist uh to or nicely organize these things. It's nice just to have these other tags um available from previous episodes so I can just copy and paste, but I'm going to go into this one just like I uh ju just pretending like it's my first one to show you how to do it. Now, to edit these tags, all you have to do is rightclick on the file and click get info. And you'll see that the uh if you go in the info tab, the name of the session is just simply the file name. If you go to summary, there's no artwork, just simply says the file name. That's not what we want. So, to edit the tags, you go to info and we can update this information here. So, I'm going to change the name of the episode to to that, which is SPI049, uh, which denotes the 49th episode. And that's the name of the episode there. For artist and album and things like that, I actually have a handy master file that includes two things. One, the host name or the show, you know, the host of the show, which is me. And then I include a couple keywords after that uh about who I am. And then also the show name. So host name, show name. Make sure you have those handy before you do this. And we're going to include each of those things in several places here. So, I'm going to take the artist name or the host name and include that here in artist, album artist, and composer. I don't know if iTunes cares about composer or album artist, album artists for podcast, but you know, it doesn't hurt to put them in there. Now, I'm also going to include the show name in album and grouping. Album is the name of the show and grouping. I don't know if iTunes uses that either, but it doesn't hurt. And in the comments, I'm just going to add uh one little, you know, 150 character comment about this particular episode. And if anything, it's just going to help for SEO. And then genre, this is very important. You want to put it in podcast. There's a bunch of different ones to to select from, but make sure to include it in podcast. And then the track number, that's the number episode that you have. This is my 49th episode. And so all the tags are updated there. Now, there's one last thing you need to do in addition to tagging with all this data is also tag with your artwork for your specific show. So to do that, go ahead and go to artwork and then click add. And then you're going to add your artwork that you have for your file already. Uh which uh is going to be 1,400 by,400 in size. That's pixels. And you want to make sure that it reads well at this size. This is actually pretty large size. It's larger than than the size that you're looking at now, this particular video. Uh but also it it should read well at like 73 by 73, which is a size of the icons used in in on the iPhone. So you want it to read well at large size and a small size. So make sure to keep that in mind in your design. But I'm just going to include this artwork here now. And you'll see if you go to summary, actually if I click okay and then right click and get info again, you'll see that now it includes the artwork. It includes the name of the episode here, SPI049, etc. The host name, Pat Flynn, online entrepreneur entre online entrepreneur, business strategist, and blogger. And then the show name here. And that's exactly what we want. And you'll see up here in the audio player as well, it's updated with all that information. So that means it's working. This is exactly what we want. And we are ready to take this file and upload it to a server somewhere to host it. So that when we put it on our blog, it it'll read from that server and it'll play nice and you won't have to worry about uh taking bandwidth from your own site. And we'll get into more of that stuff in the next video. But really easy from iTunes here. All you have to do is click, drag, and drop it on your desktop. You'll see there it is. There's the icon we just added there. Again, this is even smaller than 73 by 73, which just shows, you know, you could still read it, which which works. Now, the file name is going to be a little long. So, what I like to do here is just shorten it up a bit and make it SPI049.mpp3. That's it. Now, this is the file that I'm going to upload to a server to host. And there you go. So, that's how you start with a recording. you export it as an MP3 or a wave and then you uh take it through Levelator if you need to. Then drop it into a playlist in iTunes, rightclick, click get info. That's how you can edit all the tags. Again, make sure you have handy your host name, the show name, uh the name of the episode and things like that, and also the artwork for that show. And then once you're done editing it, you know, just click, drag and drop it to your desktop, change the file name, boom, you're ready to go. So, I know that was a little technical, probably a little bit boring uh than I had hoped, but that's okay. Uh it's just all necessary stuff. Now, when you create episodes in the future, if you're here in iTunes, you can see that all you have to do is uh click here to copy and then you can click here on the new episode to paste. It just makes it really easy and that's why I like using iTunes as well. It's uh it becomes a lot faster after you do this the first time. So, good luck to you. I'll see you in video number four where we talk about hosting your audio file that you just created.