Another tip for making your podcast sound more professional is adding theme music. If you're a musician, you can record your own. If you're musically challenged like me, you can get a friend to do it for you or you can visit a handy Web site called Pod Safe Audio. At http://www.podsafeaudio.com, you'll find a ton of free music created by artists under the Creative Commons license. This means you can use any of the music you find at Pod Safe Audio for your podcast, provided you don't take credit for the musicians' work (and, in most cases, you credit them appropriately).

Once you have your music picked out, you can open it with Audacity, then cut and paste the portion of a song you want to use as your theme music at the beginning and end of your podcast.

Look at Figure B and you'll see four tracks.

FIGURE B


You can add theme music to the beginning and end of your podcast by inserting extra tracks. Roll over picture for a larger image.

The top two represent the audio I captured using a digital recorder. The middle two tracks are the left and right stereo channels of the opening theme music to the podcast. The bottom two are the outro portions of the same theme song. Audacity lets you fade the theme music in and out, as quickly or as gradually as you want.

Exporting your podcast
OK, so now you've got your podcast sounding as professional as you can get it. There's one last order of business. It's time to export your podcast as an MP3. First, you'll want to select Project->Edit ID3 Tags. A window that resembles Figure C will pop up.

FIGURE C


ID3 tags give your listeners more information about your podcast. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Use the "Title," "Artist," "Album" and "Speech" fields to give your audience information about your podcast. These tags will show up in whatever MP3 player your listeners use to play your podcast.

If you installed the LAME MP3 encoder, you should be able to select File->Export As MP3 to generate your MP3 file. Now, just post it to the Web site of your choice.

That's basically all you need to know to start podcasting, except for the getting-it-on-the-Web-site portion. Where you take it from here is all up to you. Good luck!

Dr. Humayun Bakht completed his Ph.D at the School of Computing and Mathematics in Liverpool at John Moores University. Prior to his current course of studies, he has successfully completed his MSc Software Engineering and BSc Electronics Engineering from University of Liverpool UK and Sir Syed University of Engineering and Technology in Karachi, Pakistan. Humayun's research interest is mobile ad-hoc networks, in particular, the development of a new routing algorithm for this type of networking. He can be reached at humayunbakht@yahoo.co.uk and you can visit his Web site at http://www.geocities.com/humayunbakht/.