I have had many subscribers write and ask the best way to create and publish a podcast, so I have decided to create a series of Mac Tips to walk you through how to do this, beginning with this one. For now, I will assume two things: 1) That you are new to podcasting, and 2) that your podcast will be audio-only.

Once you have decided what your podcast will be about, it's time to create the audio file. To do this, I recommend using GarageBand (at least to start with). Not only is it free (part of iLife), but it has a lot of useful tools built-in to help make it sound exciting. Before diving into the features, let's look at the GarageBand interface:

It may look slightly daunting at first, but don't be scared off too quickly. It's quite simple to understand once you know what you are looking at. First of all, it's important to understand that GarageBand is a multi-track audio editor. That's a fancy way of saying that you can have multiple tracks over top of each other. For example, your voice and some music in the background. These tracks are shown in the top portion of the interface. The wavy or "squiggly" lines in the purple and blue bars represent the volume level of the audio. Over time, you will be able to look at these and almost know what is being said. It's critical that you practice knowing how to read these for editing purposes.

The first thing you need to do is create a new track for audio. To do this, simply click on the [+] button at the bottom of the track list. It will ask you what type of track you want it to be. On the "Real Instrument" tab at the top, choose "Vocals", and then "No Effects". This gives you a standard voice track. Once you have done that, it's time to record your podcast. Keep in mind that when you do record your audio, you will want to use a headset microphone. I personally prefer the Plantronics ".Audio 70 Headset". It's about $30, but works really well in most environments.

After you are done recording the podcast, it's time to slice and dice (edit). There will always be things that happen during recording that you don't want to end up in the podcast. Caughing, sneezing, burping... whatever. To go into edit mode, click on the edit button in the bottom left-hand corner. It looks like this:

This will open a new world for you, but keep in mind that's it's basically nothing more than a magnification of what the track is showing you in the top portion of the screen. In the sample below, I decided to take out a small portion of a podcast I had previously done (for some reason, I like to say "Uh" a lot, and I try to take some of them out):

Notice that to select an area, the cursor must first turn into a cross-hair sign. After you have selected the area you want, you then need to click on it. This will essentially separate it from the rest of the track, which ultimately allows you to re-select it and delete it. Once you have deleted it, simply move the rest of the track over so that they touch (if that is what you want).

I won't go into the rest of editing and recording right now. This will be left up to your creative mind. After you have finished recording and editing, though, there is one final step... converting your audio into an MP3. To do this, go to File | Export to iTunes. It will take a minute or two to render and convert the file. Once it's done, you will have a brand new file in your iTunes library. The best way to find it is to go to your library, and search for the file name (which will be the same name as your GarageBand file... "0013" in my case). As of now, it's still not podcast ready because it's in a AIFF format. To convert it to MP3, first you need to make sure that your import format in iTunes is set to MP3 (click here for more information on this). To convert from AIFF to MP3, right-click (Control+click) on the AIFF file, and choose "Convert Selection to MP3". It will create a second file with the same name. This new file is an MP3 file, and your audio file is now ready to publish!

Tomorrow, we will talk about taking this MP3 file and publishing it to the web. Stay tuned!