Supercharge Your Podcasts This Weekend

We love podcasts. If you love listening to them, you ought to have a system for managing them and finding new ones. This weekend, we’ll help you set that up.

Find Podcasts You Love

You may well have a list of podcasts you really like already, but if you want more to choose from in a variety of topics you need to set out on a journey of discovery. Here are some recommendations from popular blogs:

• Gizmodo
• Yahoo!
• Apple Top 10
• The Onion A.V. Club
• The Verge
• Splitsider
• PodOmatic Ratings
• Business Insider
• BuzzFeed

Those lists should help you discover a few fresh podcasts you haven’t heard of and expand into a variety of new genres. If you want a little more help, Android users can download Player FM for plenty of additional suggestions and anyone can use Podcastomatic to turn blogs into podcasts.

Choose The Right Apps

Managing podcasts well means having a solid app to do as much of the work as possible for you. That means keeping the right number of episodes, pruning old ones, managing space, and organising everything in a way that suits you best. We have great picks for Android and iPhone, and Mac users can also start syncing their podcasts with the OS X version of our iOS favourite Downcast.

Having the right app on your smartphone just serves as a starting point. What you do with it really makes the biggest difference. If you selectively listen to podcasts, you can just store, update and sync as you please, but if you have a lot you can create your own talk radio station. The best podcast managers allow you to create topic-based playlists that automatically populate with the latest episode of your favourite shows in a particular category. This way you can always have something to listen to and know new content will be ready and available on your device when you want it.

Make Your Own

When you’ve exhausted all your podcast consumption options, you don’t have to stop there — start contributing! You just need to set up an inexpensive home studio to get the ball rolling. If you can invest in equipment that costs around $200, you can record quality audio without much else. If you want to learn more about studio setup and mixing, check out our audio production lessons.

Once you’ve learned to record, you need to figure out how to submit your podcast so the internet can find it. While there are other outlets, that primarily rests on iTunes shoulders. Fortunately, Apple has a good guide to teach you how to create a feed and submit it to the iTunes Music Store for easy discovery.

Have a great weekend, and enjoy your podcasts!