As Cleve, John, and I were preparing for the recent Cincinnati SPJ Podcasting Workshop, I thought it was helpful to put together a quick reference on how I add media files to the blog. There are and have been a number of plug-ins in WordPress that let you do this, but my favorite and the most useful for me has been the Blubrry PowerPress plugin. They obviously have more documentation about their plugin at their website, but here’s the short guide I put together.

Add media to WordPress using PowerPress

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Today at the workshop participants used Audacity to edit their audio files recorded using the Zoom H2 Handy Portable Stereo Recorder*.  When we wanted to export the files as mp3, we realized that we were not able to, because the LAME encoder had not been installed on the machines we were using. Follow the instructions at the Audacity website, and you should be good to go.

* The Zoom H2 Handy Portable Stereo Recorder is very nice and probably worthy of a blog post in and of itself. I highly recommend it and have provided an Amazon affiliate link so you can check it out.

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Music: Derek K. Miller, “Dodging Buses”

Daniel Johnson, Jr. asks participants what they think we’re having for lunch.

Music: Derek K. Miller, “Dodging Buses”

Music: Derek K. Miller, “Dodging Buses”

Because of the controversy surrounding the legality of playing licensed music on podcasts, the podcasting community came up with the term “podsafe” to describe music that is specifically licensed for that purpose.

The WikiPedia page for “podsafe” provides a good understanding of the background, benefits to both podcasters and artists, and some helpful resources.

One resource that I’ve used in my own music podcasts is Mevio’s Music Alley, also known as the Podsafe Music Network, or PMN.

Canadian Derek K. Miller is one of my favorite independent artists who posts music on his website specifically for podcasters to use in their podcasts.

In our podcasting workshop, we’ll be using his track “Dodging Buses“.

Ohio River image from Wikimedia Commons

Click the map to hear Rivers in the Land from Ohio Bicentennial Minutes, a 2003 radio series John Hingsbergen and Cleve Callison co-produced for WMUB Public Radio at Miami.