Latest / Randy Unscripted / Behind the Mic - NaPodPoMo 2025 #17

Transcript

Behind the Mic - NaPodPoMo 2025 #17 · Randy Unscripted

• 0:02
  Randy Black: Randy Black.
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  Randy Black. Randy Black. Randy Black. Randy Black. Black. Randy Black. Black. He's a troublemaker. Welcome back to Randy Unscripted.
• 0:12
  I'm your host, Randy Black, and I'm so happy you've come back for another episode.
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  And welcome to another day of napod promo, national podcast post month.
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  I've been
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  all month long following this whole process. You know the drill. We do one episode
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  every single day. No excuses.
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  No hiding behind long production cycles. We just create, we publish, and we move forward. The goal is 30 episodes
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  in thirty days.
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  And
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  producing something daily
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  really puts your workflow to the test, and it it forces you to to tighten things up. It it exposes your inefficiency,
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  and it it makes you either quit
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  or get better. And thankfully,
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  and hopefully you think so, I've chosen the second option there.
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  So today, I wanna take you behind the mic. I wanna walk you through exactly how I make an episode from start to finish. We'll talk about my gear, my recording routine, how I master the audio, how I add metadata in chapters, and finally, how it all ends up on the podcast feed for you to hear in your podcast player.
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  This is the full process,
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  the real one, the one I use every day for Napod Pomo and for all my podcast episodes.
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  So let's get into it.
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  Everything starts with the equipment.
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  I have a Rode PodMic,
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  and it's plugged right into a RODECaster Duo. The Duo is really the whole centerpiece of this operation.
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  It gives me multiple audio sources if I need them so I can easily bring in sound clips from other pieces of software. Like, for example, let's bring in this one. I love Spotify.
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  Oh, you know, I I'm I'm I'm playing that through a channel on the RODECaster.
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  The the preamps of the RODECaster are clean. They're powerful. There's some really good gain, and the onboard processing lets me shape my sound before the file recorded
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  ever hits my computer.
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  Before I record, I almost always have an outline in front of me, usually just some bullet points that keep me on track, but some moments have to be fully scripted, especially when there's accuracy or clarity that matters.
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  But most of the time, I'm just kinda talking my way through the ideas.
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  That that balance kinda keeps this show grounded,
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  and it keeps it feeling more natural, and it goes right along with the idea of the name, Randy unscripted.
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  Now here's the part that that really surprises a lot of people.
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  The raw recording session,
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  it's usually the exact length of the final episode.
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  I don't stop a lot. I don't restart every five minutes. I try to hit it all in one go.
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  Over time, you you develop the skills, you get better at this, learning to speak clearly,
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  to better pace yourself,
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  and and rolling past the small hiccups without breaking down your flow.
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  I'm a big believer in the one and done approach.
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  Editing, yeah, it can polish your audio, but it can also polish the life right out of it. So for this show, I want authenticity.
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  I want the real voice, the real moment,
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  so so I try to get it right the very first time.
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  Now
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  I can edit.
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  And when I do,
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  I use Audacity.
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  But, honestly,
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  I don't lean on it very much.
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  Maybe I'll trim something at the beginning or at the end, or I'll remove a really serious mistake that's been made, but the vast majority of what you hear is exactly what went into the mic live during the recording.
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  The reason that works is because of how I've set up my RODECaster DUO and my other equipment.
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  I've recorded my voice clean on one day and ran it through a few tests.
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  I even used ChatGPT
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  to help me design a processing chain that fits both my voice and the acoustics of the recording space I have here at my house.
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  Those presets are saved right in the Duo, and I use them every single time. The compression, the EQ, the clarity, the noise control with a gate, it's all baked right in on the hardware side.
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  From there, when I'm finished recording, I drop the audio into Auphonic,
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  and that's where the mastering happens.
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  Auphonic makes sure the the the loud list levels are alright.
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  Everything sounds consistent.
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  The final file is balanced, and it's ready for listeners. And in some cases, does some great noise removal
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  to clean things up.
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  And I love it.
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  Once the audio is mastered, I take that file that it gives me, that m p three file,
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  and I upload it to pod chapters. And we talked about pod chapters here on the show just a few days ago.
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  This is where I get to add the details that make the episode feel complete.
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  I add the title, the show name,
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  tag myself as the artist, put in the year it was recorded, the copyright info.
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  And the one thing I really like about pod chapters is the ability to build out chapter markers.
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  For longer episodes, especially chapters make the experience so much nicer for the listener, and they can jump around or revisit what they need.
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  Pod chapters then embeds everything right into the ID three tags of the m p three file. I start with a WAV file. When I upload to Auphonic, I take the 128 kilobit per second m p three they give me, upload it, to Daniel's service with pod chapters, and I get a completed product that's small enough for fast delivery but still sounds great for spoken word.
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  That m p three is the exact file that then goes onto my website and goes into the feed.
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  Now comes the part where we publish.
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  A bit unusual here.
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  I try to self host everything,
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  and I'm doing that on my WordPress site. And I use PowerPress from Blueberry to generate my RSS feed.
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  But I have bunny.net
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  set up as a CDN on the back end so the audio and the images and things on the site all load quickly no matter where someone's listening from.
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  My routine for getting the episode published, after the file is finished goes a little bit like this.
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  I upload the m p three file into WordPress. I upload the featured image for the post, which is different than the the artwork
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  that's in the m p three file for for the for the episode.
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  I then load a saved post pattern when I make a new post, and that inserts the structure I use every single time. There's a section for the notes. There's a media player there ready to put the info in, and I even have had to build custom blocks to take that in that media player and block it from appearing in the RSS feed so that that garbled HTML that shows up when you look at the raw
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  post in the, typically in the feed is not there.
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  It's pretty cool.
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  Then I'll paste in show notes and some SEO tags, and those notes is really just a, like, a paragraph summary
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  for this show.
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  And those tags,
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  both those, the tags and the notes are generated using ChatGPT. I'll give it a transcript or the m p three file and have it to summarize it for me.
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  PowerPress does need some extra info, though, once we get going here
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  to get the show published out. So I have to get the URL for the media file, and I paste that into the field where it needs to be. You know, I have to get the URL for the artwork and paste that in where it needs to be.
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  I use transcripts,
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  and the great thing is those transcripts are hosted over on pod chapters. So I can just copy the URL from there and paste it right into the the field in power in PowerPress and WordPress.
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  Same thing with the URL for the JSON file for the chapters because there's different forms of chapters. We won't talk about that right now, but I have several different ways that I do it. And all those details then get saved and get published in the feed.
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  Once everything looks good,
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  I might publish immediately,
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  but doesn't happen very often.
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  But like Napod Pomo where I'm recording things and getting them up every day, I'm actually a few days ahead. Like, I'm recording this on November 13,
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  and I believe it doesn't come out till the seventeenth.
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  So it's a couple days ahead of schedule, but that helps me. And then once the episode is published,
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  I take the link for it, and I share it onto my personal Facebook page. It's the only real social media I use,
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  and I post them there so the people who I follow or follow me or friends with me on Facebook, they can see, hey. Randy's put this out. This is kinda cool.
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  Well, that's that's it. That's my workflow and a quick synopsis.
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  You know, it's the real behind the scenes process of how Randy unscripted,
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  along with some other shows I do typically get made.
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  You know, it all comes from my Rode PodMic all the way down to your podcast app.
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  Napod Pomo has a way of exposing every weakness in your system,
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  but it also can sharpen you.
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  You find what works.
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  You simplify what doesn't,
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  and you learn to trust the process a little bit more each and every day.
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  So, again, thank you for joining me on this journey
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  for napod promo, 30 episodes in thirty days. I'm having a fantastic time producing some pretty good content, I think, just to help
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  hone my craft just a little bit more to keep things improving in my podcasting space.
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  So there's more episodes coming. We're on day 17.
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  We're gonna go all the way to day 30, so that gives us, what, thirteen days left. So 13 more episodes coming here for napod promo. So come back tomorrow.
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  I'm Randy, and this has been Randy Unscripted.