Please ensure your podcast is placed in the ‘Podcast Delivery’ Dropbox folder or sent to podcast@cambridge105.co.uk within a day of broadcast. Listeners expect us to be as sharp as the BBC and Netflix!
Cambridge 105 Radio podcasts appear at cambridge105.co.uk from where they are picked up by Radioplayer, TuneIn and your favourite podcast app such as Apple Podcasts (this used to be branded as iTunes Podcasts) and Spotify.
Unfortunately, restrictions on music rights mean we can only place speech-based shows on the website, but Mixcloud provides an alternative with the rights already covered.
We’re now using Mixcloud to share all of our music-based shows through the On Demand page of the website.
Can my Show be on Apple Podcasts?
Unfortunately, we don’t have a licence to include music in our podcasts, so the shows included are typically speech-only, or individual interviews from programmes such as Cambridge Breakfast. This also means we have to be careful with incidental music or theme tunes. Fair use would include a short 30-second clip of a guest’s choice of music or a track they have recorded. However, commercial music shouldn’t be used for theme tunes or long pieces of backing music. We may end up having podcasts removed if that’s the case.
Getting Your Podcast from the studio
The ROT (Record of Transmission) files are located on the various PCs around the studio. It’s part of the scratch or S Drive and is often found on the desktop.
Editing
You can use programs including Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/) and Adobe Audition (https://creative.adobe.com/products/audition) to perfect your podcast.
Identifying the Station
Make sure that the start of the Stream/Podcast clearly identifies Cambridge 105 Radio as the originator of the work. You’ll already have started your show/clip with a Cambridge 105 Radio ident. Don’t forget to also include any sponsor credits.
For information on how to identify the station on your Mixcloud page Click Here.
Technical Requirements
It’s unreasonable to expect the listener to wait to download or stream large files. So when encoding take care of the settings.
128kbps CBR should be fine for speech-based output and is used by the BBC; we should aim for a minimum of 192kbps for music.
ID3 Editor is a popular way of adding metadata to a podcast
Metadata
In order to help people find your podcast and information about it you need to embed information in the metadata file.
If it wasn’t for your ID3 tags, then someone who downloads your podcast would never see important information:
- the name of the episode,
- the podcast it belongs to,
- what the episode is about, or
- the podcast cover art (what displays when an individual episode is played).
Some of this is auto-generated by Apple Podcasts when it downloads your file from the RSS feed on the Cambridge 105 website. But it’s always best to manually tag every file so you can be the most compatible.
You can upload metadata within Audacity and Audition. Album art can also be a
A number of free and paid apps are available including ID3tag and ID3 Editor.
Upload to the website
If you have access to the WordPress backend of cambridge105.co.uk you can upload your Podcast from Shows/New Podcast.
Select the Name and Date of your show, and fill in the show information you will have previously entered for the metadata.
Under New/Media upload your audio file. When the transfer is complete, click Edit and paste the file info (top right) into Podcast episode (about two-thirds of the way down the centre column of your podcast page.
Press the Verify button to check the file is correct.
Change the Featured Image if you took a photo during the broadcast. We recommend a minimum of 900 x 675 pixels.
Your podcast will autopost onto Facebook and Twitter, so be sure to include a photograph of either 900 x 675 or 1,200 x 675. These are standard sizes. If you stray from these dimensions there’s a danger that someone might lose their head or the picture doesn’t post at all.
Album Art
Apple has upped their artwork requirements once again, as now the official iTunes Making a Podcast page states:
Create your cover art, which must be in the JPEG or PNG file formats and in the RGB color space with a minimum size of 1400 x 1400 pixels and a maximum size of 3000 x 3000 pixels.
We’ll normally provide something for you in house style. You should add your artwork either through your ID3 Editor or within WordPress (This is the page you see once the audio is uploaded, rather than the Post that promotes the podcast as this will have its own artwork.)