Step-by-Step Guide to Recording and Publishing Podcasts with Backpack Studio and Libsyn (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Hey there, I'm Jen Eades, the head broad in charge at the Brassy Broadcasting Company, and here's a short video to walk you through the process of recording a podcast episode using the Backpack Studio app and then uploading it to Libsyn for immediate publication. I'm using an iPad, the Audio-Technica ATR2100 microphone plugged into the iPad, and the Backpack Studio app. This is an easy setup for recording on the go. To get started, tap the microphone at the bottom of the screen. You will notice that the space around it turns blue, and this activates the microphone so that you can record. Tapping the backpack icon at the bottom left of the screen opens up the mixer view, and this is where you can check your levels, and you want to make sure that those levels are coming up in the green. If they start getting orange or red, you're going to need to dial those down a little bit and then just hit close to close your mixer view. To adjust your levels, tap the settings icon in the top right corner of the screen. The first thing that comes up is the external mic gain, and this is where we adjust how much gain is coming into the recording from your microphone. As you see, we can slide it to the right, and as we slide to the right, if I look down and in the left-hand mixer view, it's starting to turn orange. So that tells me we want to dial that back until we are back into the green. As we start to scroll down, you can see other settings like pad size, auto ducking, and sound clip fading. You use those when you're adding music, sound effects, or other audio to your recording. That's going to be beyond the scope of what I'm talking about in this video, but be sure to look out for part two. As we scroll down, you can see that I do have the low cut filter turned on, mic compression, compressed audio, and the AGC for the automatic gain control. I also have the title for file name turned off because I want the flexibility to name this file whatever I want. Hit done to close out of settings, and to start recording, all we have to do is hit the record button. Hello, thanks for pressing play on this episode of the Brassy Broadcast. Now that I've got some audio recorded, I'm going to show you how to upload it directly to Libsyn for publishing. So we're going to swipe right on pause, hit finish, and we are going to name this test recording, and we're going to save that. And then when the next screen comes up, I can add my name as the artist, and then I can also add a short description. And then let's scroll down and look at file format, and I have the bitrate set at 96. We can always take that down, 96 is going to give us the highest quality recording. You can choose stereo. I'm going to go with mono, and you can see when we bump it up to stereo, then all of those bitrates double. So I'm going to go mono and 96 on the bitrate. If we go to file region, we can do a little trimming. So I can trim some of the silence by dragging this. So we'll cut a little there. And if there's silence at the end, you can just drag it to the left and get rid of that. All right, now we're going to export the recording. And this is where we upload it to Libsyn by pressing FTP. If I want to do some additional editing and don't want to go ahead and upload to Libsyn for publication, then I can just save the file and pull it into Adobe Audition or GarageBand or Audacity or whatever it is I'm using to edit my podcast. But since we are going to roll with this, we're going to hit FTP, then pay close attention to that FTP URL in the top line. You want to replace where it says your show with your show slug. So my show slug is Brassy Broad. And then you're going to enter your user and password credentials and hit upload. And that's it. That's how you record using the Backpack app and then upload it directly to Libsyn for publication. Now, as soon as you hit upload, that episode will publish and go live. If you found this video helpful, subscribe to my YouTube channel. There are more podcasting videos on the way. Leave your podcasting questions in the comments. Your question might be answered in my next video. Happy podcasting.