Podcasting with Odeo

Updated on 14Nov, 2006

Odeo is a free and easy to use web site where you can create audio recording of your voice. You can email these audio clips to your friends. If you want to publish audio on a topic on a regular basis then you can publish your recording as podcasts too. Maybe you are traveling in Thailand and you want your friends to follow your trip by listening to your audio clips every couple of days, you can hop into a cybercafe, log on to Odeo and record your audio. Maybe you are a Chinese language teacher and you want your students to listen to audio clips of your lessons every week for practice. I am sure once you start using Odeo, you will discover several uses for it.

Step1: Signing up

a) Sign up to Odeo at www.odeo.com. The sign up is pretty simple, all you need to input is your name, email and password.

Once you are signed on you will see this page.

Step2: Creating a Podcast

a) The first thing we will do is to create a podcast. Think of podcasts as a radio show. You can have a podcast called “My Travels” that might have episodes on your travel stories. You might have another podcast called “Lunch with Me” where in each episode you might talk about a new lunch place you discovered. Later on we will create individual episodes and add them to our podcast. Right now I am just creating a podcast. Look at the My Podcasts tab on the right hand side of your page and click on “Create one!”

b) Odeo will ask you for some details about your podcast. Try to be as descriptive as possible. Enter the description

c) Once you have submitted you podcast details, you will see the following screen.

We are done with podcast creation. I am calling my podcast “Thailand Travel Podcast” . Next we will add some audio or individual episodes into our podcast.

Step 3: Recording and adding audio to your podcast

a) From the My Audio tab on the left, click on Record Audio

You get this new screen - Odeo Studio. Odeo is now loading a recording utility. This might take a little bit of time so be patient here.

b) You will get this window that asks permission to access your camera and microphone. Make sure you have connected a mic to your computer (or your computer has a built in mic). Click on Allow.

c) The recorder is now ready for you to start recording. Click on the Record button and start speaking.

d) When you are done speaking, click on the Stop button. You can click on the Play button to review your audio. If you are not happy, you can click on Clear Audio button to cancel the recording and then record again. But if you are happy then you can click on the Save Recording button.

It takes a little while to save the audio depending on how long your audio is.

e) On the next page you get this screen.

Type in a Title. Make sure that your titles are descriptive enough. You can type in a longer description too. If you have a blog post of some other pages relating to the topic you recording, you could put the address of that page in the Link area. You might also want to add in an image of the things you are talking about.
You can make this audio a part of your podcast by selecting your podcast from the “Place in:” option right at the bottom.

Step 4: Letting your friends know about your podcast

a) Go the My Podcasts tab and click on the name of your podcast.

b) The next page shows you the subscription link for you podcast. You can copy this link and email to your friends or display it on your website.

Step 5: Listening to your podcasts on iTunes

a) If you or your friends are new to podcasts, you can refer them to this section of the tutorial. Your friends may need to download, install and run iTunes (from www.itunes.com) in order to subscribe and listen to podcasts. Once iTunes is running, they will need to go to the Advanced menu item and choose Subscribe to Podcast．

b) A small window will open up asking for the address of the podcast. They will have to copy the address of your podcast feed (from the email you sent them or from your website) and paste it over here.

Click on ok after pasting the address.

c) iTunes will start downloading the individual episodes.

From now on whenever you have a new episode, the iTunes on your friend’s computer will automatically download the new episode.

Technorati Tags: odeo, podcasting