This is something I’ve wanted to put together for a couple months now, a step-by-step guide on how to create a music podcast with Audacity! There are plenty of guides out there to help people create regular (boring!) voice podcasts, but none of them cover the extra steps necessary to incorporate music (or simply merging multiple audio samples). I have a background in audio production from college, but most of what you’ll find in this guide I learned on my own through trial and error while working on The Entropy League podcast.

If you have questions or comments, feel free to email me. This is my first attempt at a tutorial, so go easy on me. I’m sure I’ll be updating this guide and improving it as time goes on.

Disclaimer: Make sure you get permission from the copyright owner for copyrighted music before playing copyrighted music in your podcast. Of course, there is quite a bit of “pod safe” music out there. Check out sites like the Podsafe Music Network, or this guide. I take no responsibility for the content in your podcasts!

Step 1: Download and install Audacity

Head over to http://audacity.sourceforge.net and grab Audacity for your system (it runs on Mac, Linux, and Windows!).

Step 2: Open a song

Fire up Audacity, go to File > Open and find your song.

It should look something like this:

Step 3: Import and align the next song

There are a few ways to do this, but this is how I do it. Open the next song in a new Audacity window by doing File > Open and select the next song. Go to Edit > Select > All, then Edit > Copy.

Now switch back to the Audacity window with the first song and do Edit > Paste.

Now the window should look something like this:

Clearly we don’t want both songs playing on top of each other, so we have to align the second song at the end of the first. The trick I use is to generate silence whenever the other song is playing.

Use your mouse to select an area on the lower track as long as the song above it, then go to Generate > Silence.

You should see something like this:

Now you’ll probably want to precicely align the second song at the end of the first. Click the “Zoom In” button

and find where the two tracks meet. Now you can remove the extra silence (or add silence if needed) to make the tracks line up. Just select an area and go to Edit > Cut.

Note: You can even play around with crossfades by fading out one song and fading in the next. Fading effects are in Effect > Fade In/Out.

Step 4: Import and align another song

At this point we’re just repeating step 3 pretty much. Select an area in the top track as long as the second song and go to Generate > Silence.

Open the next song in a new Audacity window by doing File > Open and select the next song. Go to Edit > Select > All, then Edit > Copy.

Now switch back to the Audacity window and place the cursor at the end of the silence you just generated

and go to Edit > Paste.

Repeat this process of importing songs and generating silence until everything is assembled.

Step 5: Mixing it all together

Go to Edit > Select > All, then go to Project > Quick Mix. It will take a while, but once it finishes you should end up with a single track.

SAVE!!! If you haven’t done it yet, this would be a good time to save your Audacity project, File > Save Project.

Step 6: To compress, or not?

All radio stations use “compressors” for the audio they send out over the airwaves. Compressors are used all the time in all kinds of recordings, actually. I won’t go into the details behind it, but basically, compressors add “punch” to the audio.

Feel free to play around with the built-in compressor in Audacity. You might not like what it does, if so just skip this step.

You can find the compressor effect in Effect > Compressor. Here’s what it looks like:

Here are the settings that I use:

Threshold: -9db
Ratio: 2:1
Attack Time: 0.1 secs

You should see a noticeable differance in how the audio looks:

Step 7: Export

Now we’re ready to export the audio to your desired format. This is where personal preference really has to take over.

Do you want to make an MP3, AAC, OGG, or maybe even an enhanced AAC file? I’m going to assume that if you’ve come this far, you probably know how to encode the file into the format that you want.

Personally, I like to export to WAV format first, then I use lame to encode it to MP3. There are lots of other ways to do it. Audacity can export directly to MP3 (File > Export as MP3) as long as you have lame_enc.dll (google it) somewhere on your computer. iTunes also has the ability to encode files into MP3, or AAC if you want.

Once you decide on an encoding format, then you’ll have to decide on a bitrate to encode it at. Personally, I shoot for a file size of 30MB. I create a “variable bitrate” (VBR) level 4 mono file. MP3 sounds pretty bad at low bitrates, especially for music, so to make a 45 minute show come in at 30MB I have to downmix to mono. There will always be a tradeoff between sound quality and file size, so you’ll have to experiment and find out what works best for you.

For more information on encoding, as well as how to create the XML feed for your podcast, I recommend this guide.