What do I actually need to start a podcast?

The barrier to starting a podcast is very low and the barrier to continuing one is high. The equipment list below is deliberately short so that the effort goes where it decides the outcome.

What you'll need

• A microphone for each person
• Headphones for each person
• A quiet, soft-furnished room
• Recording and editing software
• A podcast hosting service

Step by step

1. Decide the format before buying anything.Solo, two hosts, or interviews; scripted or conversational; twenty minutes or an hour; weekly or fortnightly. This decides how many microphones you need, how long editing takes and whether you can sustain it. Almost every abandoned podcast was abandoned because the format was too much work.
2. Buy one good microphone per person.A dynamic microphone used close is the forgiving choice in an untreated room. Two people sharing one microphone always sounds worse than two modest microphones, because neither person can be at the right distance.
3. Get headphones for everyone.Closed-back headphones for each participant, so you hear problems as they happen and so a remote guest's voice does not leak back into your microphone. This is not optional for recordings with more than one person.
4. Choose the room over the equipment.A small room with a carpet, curtains, a sofa and books sounds dramatically better than a large bare one. A wardrobe full of clothes is a genuinely excellent recording booth. Echo is the single thing listeners notice and the hardest to fix afterwards.
5. Record remote guests properly.Do not rely on the call recording. Have each person record their own audio locally at their end and send you the file, or use a service that does this automatically. Call recordings suffer compression, dropouts and lag; local recordings do not.
6. Record a test and listen to all of it.Five minutes, with everything set as it will be, listened to end to end on headphones. It catches a dead cable, a clipping level, a fan, and a guest who is far too quiet — all of which are invisible until playback.
7. Keep the editing chain short.Cut the mistakes, level the voices, remove noise, compress gently, normalise to about minus sixteen LUFS. Save the chain as a preset and apply it every time. Elaborate editing is the second commonest reason podcasts stop.
8. Get a host with an RSS feed.A podcast host stores your audio and generates the RSS feed that the directories read. You submit that one feed to the major directories once, and every subsequent episode appears automatically. Hosting on your own website is possible and adds bandwidth and technical work.
9. Write the metadata carefully.Show title, description, artwork at the required square resolution, category, and clear episode titles. Artwork is displayed very small, so it must be legible as a thumbnail. This is what people see before they hear anything.
10. Record several episodes before publishing.Three or four in hand means the first weeks are not a scramble and gives you the chance to hear your own format before anyone else does. It is the single strongest predictor of a podcast reaching episode ten.

Tips

• Publish on a rhythm you can hold in a bad month, not a good one. Fortnightly and reliable beats weekly and abandoned.
• Listen to your first episode a week later. Everything that needs to change will be obvious, and it will not be the equipment.
• Keep the raw recordings. Re-editing an early episode later is often worthwhile and impossible without them.

Common mistakes

• Buying equipment before deciding the format — The format decides how many microphones, whether you need remote recording and how much editing each episode takes. Buying first routinely produces a setup that does not suit the show.
• Relying on a video call recording for guest audio — Call platforms compress heavily, drop packets and add artefacts, all of which are permanent. Local recording at each end costs nothing and sounds incomparably better.
• Recording in a bare room — Echo is the first thing listeners notice and cannot be removed convincingly. Soft furnishings matter more than the microphone.

If it doesn't work

Questions people ask