Really good question here and I'll try to answer it as well as I can considering podcasts are a labor of love and after 3+ years I still have no idea what I'm doing 1/ https://twitter.com/maha_ranis/status/1305719843786821632

Firstly, you need time, a vested interest, and a lot of work. And you’re doing it for free (really at a cost with Sound, domains, etc) without an expectation of reward. The market is saturated with content and you really just have to want to be heard for something. 2/

You're going to fuck up, you're going to fail, some stuff will hit and some stuff won't and that's fine. Trust me, someone is listening to you talk about your niche interest for 2+ hours. Maybe it's just your mom, or you hate-listening to your own voice at 3am. That's alright. 3/

You'll need co-hosts. I met mine by 1) randomly DMing via tumblr to credit them w/ my dinosaur familiar in Pathfinder & 2) talking about which brand of cheap red wine to get at a bodega. YMMV but find ppl you trust with your life and views who will call you out on your shit 4/

But really, @Ohtze_O is an incredible artist with a deep understanding of story and SEO, @holocroning is a wizard for organizing, taking up the reins on audio/editing. Both manage so much it makes my head spin. @metamashina is a communal project but they deserve all the credit 5/

Nitty-gritty for audio: Audacity is free, it's what I still use, along with Levelator. For recording we started out with a mix-minus setup where I analog recorded myself and Skype into a Zoom H1n digital recorder. We switched to Cleanfeed for ease of use and multi-channel 6/

You can record through any medium inc. Zoom but there's a few things that will help you not want to die in editing: reduce background noise for all parties (fans, large rooms, squeaky chairs), learn mic etiquette (move away to laugh, move into mics)
& S P E A K S L O W L Y 7/

I'm not going to give actual mic (or audio engineering) advice bc I'm a newb and some guy will "well, actually" me but if your guests are recording through Skype, etc. they'll be gated by default. I'll add the recs to this later when the chorus chimes in 8/

I honestly have no qualms about saying that my only soundtesting lately (with two remote cohosts and bad internet) is just making sure they're micced at good levels and the background sound isn't too much to cancel out. We live in this world now, we'll deal with it in post 9/

Before you even start recording, and long afterwards, learn how to just talk aloud to yourself. Explain things to the ghost haunting your shower, attempt dictation, read a book aloud. And record it. Hate yourself thoroughly when you listen to it. This is important, trust me. 10/

OK now open your recording in Audacity or an audio editing program of your choice. Your voice will be there, along with your noise. Ideally you want your waveform to be at about .75 of 1 so if it's not there you were probably too far away from or input was too low 11/

If you're in Audacity workflow starts with noise reduction (hopefully you recorded 10+ secs of ambient noise but just grab whatever "silence" you can find) and kill it dead w/ get noise profile and then select and run noise reduction 12/

Your workflow after that will be much more interesting based in how you record (single track, multitrack?) but there’s a few key things: normalize, truncate silence, dynamic compression (an addon, just use Levelator at the end if you're lazy) and ofc more noise reduction 13/

Now the real fun begins. For every 15 minutes of audio you record expect a min. of an hr of "fixing" it, multiplied by cohosts. This can all be to your own level of comfort but you'll find yourself removing breaths, uhms, likes, maybes, etc. I use fade in/fade out a lot. YMMV 14/

This is not a conducive guide to podcasting and people who actually audio engineer will (rightly) despise me for it. But if you want to get yourself out there and heard, it works! Just expect a time sink, little to no reward, & to hate the sound of your own voice 15/

Anyway, podcasting is dumb but I would like to see more people do it who have more motivation than I do and who aren't generic white dudes who talk over eachother (and guests!) and am willing to provide any help in that arena, thanks for listening 16/16