Turning Teleconferences into Podcasts

I once worked for a teleconference company as an operator, so I’ve got years of experience eavesdropping on the most irritatingly mundane business calls you can imagine. I’m still doing teleconferences, but now I do them with whoever I want as a way to create online content.

Not only can I host a teleconference with zero advanced notice, I can record them and, if I’m also at a computer with a web browser, I can even mute out callers on the line and unmute their lines individually, allowing for question and answer sessions.
At my old job, this would be called a premium operator-assisted call, and would cost something like $2.50 a minute plus an additional 7 cents a minute for each line that was connected beyond some base figure.
Those charges represent an insane financial hurdle for most private individuals who could otherwise fully exploit their telephones as note-taking devices, recording devices, and tools of mass communication.

Right now I do all of this for free, thanks to a company/website out there called TheBasementVentures and open-source software.

Between this free conferencing service and the free audio editing software Audacity, there’s absolutely no reason why you couldn’t have your own podcast up and running in just a few hours.

I discussed these free services a few months back when exploring alternative book promotion tactics, but now I want to take you through how I’ve used this service to create professional content with no production costs.

I’ve been using this method to create podcasts since last year, both for my portions of The G-Spot and the interviews I’ve done on this blog, as well as the 16 episode run of Occulterati and a few other podcasts here and there along the way. (I’ve also used this service for online gaming, as it’s a hell of a lot easier to coordinate a group of supervillians or a team running through a dungeon when you can do it with speakerphones instead of pausing to type up text chats.)

Anyway, I wanted to put together this guide so those of you who want to do your own independent podcasts can do so with no financial investment up front other than a long distance phone call, without the need of a teleconference operator or corporate expense account.

To start, you’ll need to sign up for a bridge number and a moderator code on TheBasementVentures website.
You’ll sign in to access your recorded conversations using the bridge number and moderator code, and the site will also provide you with a dial-in number to call, so be sure to write all this shit down.

Try it. Call in, play with the features a bit, and get a feel for the process. When you’re ready, give the dial-in number and the bridge number out to the people you want on the call and have everyone call in at the same time. You’ll want to dial in first, as the moderator has to open up the line before the rest of the callers can join the teleconference.

Once everyone’s on the line, start the recording, do the interview, carry out the conversation, then hang up. A few hours later the audio file will be accessible by signing back into the site with your bridge number and moderator code.

It’s easy enough to create the raw file, if you’ve recorded the conversation you’ve already got the raw mp3 and if you wanted you could just pass around the file as it is. However, if you’re going to do editing to the file, there’s a few things you might want to take into account. Download the file and follow along.

When you first open the file into Audacity, you are going to want to adjust two settings so that the end result has the best possible clarity. Telephone conversations don’t have stellar recording quality to begin with, and often I find that the files I download are in dire need of amplification. To make matters worse, the file format of the mp3s is set to a much lower sampling rate than the standard 44100hz you’d get on a normal cd quality recording.

So adjust the project rate, which is at the bottom of the Audacity project space, then go to Edit/Preferences from the top bar and adjust the Bit Rate to 320. This way, if you’re importing music before or after the conversation, everything will sound more or less cd quality.

Once you’ve set the project sampling rate and the bit rate, you can begin amplifying the audio levels, generating silences to slot in whatever musical cues or other elements you might want, and just generally cutting and pasting the conversation. There’s plenty of information about Audacity out there as to how best to accomplish this. Once everything’s in order, export the mp3 and upload it to your server or blog.

Have fun, and let me know in the comments if you found this helpful or if you’ve got a podcast you’ve created using this teleconferencing technique you think I should check out.

TheBasementVentures.com

Audacity.Sourceforge.Net