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With the recent runaway success of Serial, which presented a serialized account of a 1999 murder case, interest in podcasting has never been higher.
Indeed, now that Serial has pushed “DIY radio” into the cultural mainstream, anyone with an opinion to share or story to tell has probably thought about stepping behind the microphone.
One option: do your homework, starting with the excellent CNET tutorial, “How to podcast, Part 1: Getting started.” From there you can move on to recording your show, editing your show, and eventually posting your show online.
On the other hand, if you can’t wait and want to unleash your inner Ira Glass right now, or just need a way to capture some audio when you’re away from your home studio, you could try an app like Opinion (iOS).
Opinion makes podcasting as simple as tapping a button: once to start recording, again to stop. Granted, it’s little more than an everyday voice recorder in that respect, but the app was created with podcasting in mind. Thus you can perform simple edits on your recordings, taking out any errant “ums” and “ers” with just a few taps.
Screenshot by Rick Broida/CNET
It works like this: You tap the big red dot to start recording, then tap it again when you’re done. To edit that recording, you tap it, which takes you to zoom view.
You then scroll up and down the waveform for that particular segment. When you want to insert a cut, you tap the scissor icon. Each time you do so, you’re creating another clip that can be deleted just by tapping the trash can icon.
In a nutshell, then, you create a bunch of audio clips, edit them as needed, reorder them as needed, then publish/share the whole thing. Bam, that’s your podcast.
Opinion allows you to import audio from your music library, though you can’t add it “behind” your recording (i.e., there’s no multi-track support). At best, you can insert it for, say, the top of your podcast, but the lack of any kind of fade option may make for an abrupt cut between music and speech.
As for output, Opinion can save directly to Dropbox, audio-sharing service SoundCloud and various other cloud destinations, and it lets you message and email podcasts as well. The free version limits you to 10 minutes’ worth of recordings. If you need more, a $3.99 in-app purchase opens the door to unlimited sessions.
For basic podcasting, it doesn’t get much easier than this. Obviously there are far more sophisticated tools available, but for anyone just getting started, this Opinion counts.
