Recording software

Audacity – Starting podcasters’ most popular sound recording and editing software. Mac and PC versions. Open source = free. Fairly easy to use. Highly recommended, at least to start. Need “Lame” encoder to make MP3s

Garageband – Mac only. Part of a suite of media software called iLife. Free on newer Macs and about $100 dollars for registered Mac users. Reportedly very easy to use and certainly popular with Mac-owning podcasters.

Audio Recorder 3.0 – Mac only. Free. Very flexible and easy. Highly recommended by CBC podcasting guru, Tod Maffin.

Castblaster – Designed specifically for podcasting, quite simple although there are a distractingly large number of buttons on the interface. Poor editing functionality. Free to download, test out, and create podcasts of up to ten minutes. Record more than ten minutes, and you are asked to pay for the software.

Adobe Audition (Formerly Cool Edit Pro) Used by professional broadcasters. $350 U.S.

Freecorder – Very simple free recording software, although you can upgrade to a $20 version as well. Sound quality with the free version is not wonderful since it limits your sampling rate. It also severely limits your options for labeling the files - you can define the file Title but Album and Artist are set to ‘Freecorder’. Fittingly, perhaps, it labels the genre as ‘Blues’.

If you are ready to pay for software, names and reviews of various audio recording software packages available on the ‘Electronic Musician’ website: http://emusician.com/editing/