Podcasting By Hand

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A couple of my friends (Scott and Dillon) and I recently started a podcast called The Bikeshed Podcast. One of the things that we did differently from other podcasts (at least from what we can tell), is that we decided to manage all the infrastructure around recording and distributing the podcast ourselves instead of offloading to services that manage the recordings and also manage distribution.

We did all of this by effectively reverse engineering other podcasts we follow in the wild (shout out to runtime rundown and syntax.fm), digging into their rss.xml feeds, and also just generally messing around until we found something that worked.

Here's a brief overview of our current process (this may change in the future):

Currently we record the podcast in a Discord voice chat using Craig - we had originally started by recording manually with OBS, but found that it was a pain to edit the audio because everyone was in a single audio track instead of split up. Craig is insanely good - it just works and gives us a variety of formats/options to export the audio files. I'm honestly amazed that its still free!

From there, we (meaning primarily Scott) edit the audio in GarageBand. I don't have a complete understanding of the steps involved here - maybe I can convince Scott to write up his workflow on his own blog as well!

After we have the edited audio, we run it through MacWhisper to generate captions for the episode, and also to summarize the episode that we show in the details page on the website (we use a Google Gemini model to summarize the episodes based on the captions).