Before you begin considering publication, you need to create your content and make sure it is in the right file format. This article provides some tips for creating your content and making sure the files you produce will play correctly.

Tips for Creating Your Content

Content creation is more than just the technical aspects of managing audio and video files. You'll have to consider your equipment, like what kind of microphone is good for you. For recommendations from Libsyn about hardware, check out our recommendation guide. The guide is not a comprehensive overview of everything that's available, but it will help you to start thinking about how to set up your gear.

Also, before you begin creating content, you want to plan your episodes. For example, have you decided what kind of intro music you want to use? The Libsyn Blog is a great place to get more information about how to create content and how to set yourself up to produce a successful podcast. For starters, take a look at Libsyn's blog post about starting a podcast.

Tips for Preparing Your Audio and Video Files

After you've created your content, and you've edited the audio and video (if you have any) to make them look and sound how you want, you need to export the content and encode it. Encoding is the process of changing a file into another format. In this case, you'll want to encode your files into a format that is compatible with podcasting. 

Audio Encoding

Although Libsyn supports a wide range of audio files (including M4A), you should export your audio as an MP3 file because MP3 is the most widely supported format among podcast directories. Exporting as MP3 ensures the best compatibility with the greatest number of podcast directories.

In addition to file format, you also want to take the following guidelines into consideration when encoding your shows:

You can set your bit rate as low as 96 kbps. However, if using mono, many editors automatically cut the rate in half, so keep an eye out for this setting. If your editor does not cut the bit rate in half, you can set it to 96 kbps.

If your editing software provides a Variable Bit Rate (VBR) checkbox, make sure you don't select it. Doing so changes how different players and systems scan your file, and many are not compatible with VBR. Enabling VBR can cause your file to play incorrectly on many systems.

Video Files

If your podcast comes in a video file, you should export it as a .H264 file. We recommend MP4 to make it as compatible as possible with the greatest number of podcast directories. M4V is also widely used, but MP4 is more common.

You should encode the audio portion of your video as AAC.

The resolution you use for your video depends on where you plan to distribute it. However, as a general rule, we recommend you use 720P or higher.

For the most part, your listeners will tend to download your episodes, so it is important to consider the trade off between file size and quality. On the one hand, you want to provide good quality, but you also want to provide files that are small enough that downloading them will be easy.

Contact Us with Technical Questions

If you run into technical issues and need additional help, reach out to our friendly Support team at support@libsyn.com.