Podcast Terminology

 

Podcast Glossary

Bed

A bed is usually a piece of music that you run underneath someone talking as background material.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation that regulates the copyright licenses on different creative works. This includes some licenses where you can freely use the creators work as long as they are appropriately credited. For more information head to CreativeCommons.org.

DAW

DAW stands for Digital Audio Workstation. It sounds complicated, but it’s really not! It simply means whatever software you’re using to record and mix your podcast, so that could be Adobe Audition, Audacity, Reaper, etc.

Directories

A podcast directory displays hundreds or podcasts to potential listeners so that people can find and listen to your show. 

Jingle

A short piece of audio usually used to introduce your show or to introduce different segments of your show. Most commonly a piece of music usually no longer than 20 secs.

Metadata (ID3 Tags)

Information attached to your mp3 file, such as the podcast title, episode title, your name as the producer, cover art etc. Your DAW should give you an option to fill all this data in once you’ve finished mixing it and go to export the episode.

Mix Down

Your mix down is basically the audio file after you have mixed all your audio together and you’re exporting it out. The final single audio file is your mix down of your episode.

Narrowcast

A narrowcast is referring to content that is aimed at a specific target audience, rather than a broadcast which is aimed at a wider, mass audience.

Room Tone

This is referring to the general noise in the room you’re recording in. Even if you think you’re in a completely silent room, there will always be some form of tone that the mic will pick up. It’s good practice to leave 5-10 secs of room tone before you start talking on your recordings. This should help with noise reduction.

Stereo

Stereo audio means that the audio is split across the left and right channel. Anything on the left channel will come out of the left headphone or speaker, and anything on the right channel will come out of the right headphone or speaker. This way you can have separate sounds on the right and left, creating a vivid mental image of a scene for a listener, but it’s not always necessary. For example, you would  probably Mono for a speaking segment, 

Stinger/Sting

A short piece of audio, usually used as punctuation to split up certain parts of the show. For example, at the start of a news program, you could read a headline and then have a short noise to separate it from the next one.

Timeshifting

The act of recording and storing data to listen, watch or read later on. Podcasting is the perfect example as you’re not live like radio broadcasts; you are just recording, editing and then setting the episode to upload at a later date for your listeners.

WAV File

This is the high-quality recording of your audio that sounds exactly as it was recorded. When you edit, you should always edit using WAV files, then export to the smaller MP3 file afterwards as in the conversion a little bit of the quality gets lost but this is barely noticeable.