Track music and sound effects are podcast essentials. Without them, chances are that your podcast will sound really flat and lack the oomph needed to capture your listener’s attention during the entire podcast. Anyone who records podcasts know this and so put much effort in finding the right music and background effects for each episode.

When looking for the perfect music loops to go with your podcast though, make sure that you don’t just pick out music based on what blends well with your current episode. Before anything else, you should make sure that the music you pick is counted as “podsafe music”.

Podsafe music is simply any music or sound byte which license specifically allows its use in podcasting. Note that most of podsafe music you’ll find are distributed the Creative Commons licenses. Check for specific license details, especially as to the form of artist attribution required. Note too that not all music distributed under the Creative Commons licenses allow for commercial purposes, so find out if this is the case.

While you may reckon that a simple sound byte is not really that of a big deal, it is still better to err on the side of caution and not have to worry about being slapped with a lawsuit in the future. You also don’t always have to search for podsafe music every single time you record podcasts anyway since editing software usually come with a good selection of free/built-in sound effects. However, for those special music tracks and sound bytes, make sure that you only use podsafe music.

Image via PodSafe Twitter Account

While there are more types of microphones, the three useful for podcasting are dynamic, condenser and ribbon microphones.

Condenser microphones have been used for all kinds of applications for a long time, and quality varies a lot. They require some sort of power source, like phantom power. Dynamic microphones are often more directional than condensers (which can use different pickup patterns). Dynamics are also often more robust. They are the most common microphone for live use, but are used in studios as well. Ribbon microphones almost seemed to disappear for a while but have seen increased usage the last years. They typically use a figure-eight pickup pattern, meaning that they pick up both at the front and the back.

Side-chaining is when you use the dynamic levels of one source to control the compression of your signal. For podcasting ducking might be the typical use for side-chaining. But you can also use it with a compressor and an EQ to create a de-esser, or with a gate and create the opposite effect of ducking, i.e., letting sound through when the signal is sounding.

A multiband compressor is simply a compressor that can be set to operate differently on different frequencies. For instance, you could set it to a ratio of 4:1 on 500-1000 Hz and a ratio of 2:1 on 3 kHz. In the same way multiband limiters also exists.

An expander is in a way the opposite of a compressor. While a compressor uses the threshold setting to reduce the signal above the set value, an expander reduces the signal below the threshold value. This makes the signal more dynamic, and is thus expanded instead of compressed.

As with most audio tools, the parameters can vary between expanders. Typical controls found are ratio, threshold, knee, range and attack.

A gate is typically the same thing as an expander, but set to a such high ratio (I.E. high compression) that it doesn’t let anything past the set threshold. In other words, it is almost to the gate, what the limiter is to the compressor. Gates are perhaps most often used as a noise gate, that is, to remove unwanted noise from recordings.

Nothc filters, or “high Q notch filters” are basically EQ bands used to eliminate certain frequencies. Usually they have very high Q settings so that they only affect a very specific area of the frequency range. Notch filters are usually used to remove hum or other noise.