Turn Your Quarantine Video Chats Into A Podcast

Even though most of your coronavirus-quarantine video chats are probably dull, that doesn’t mean that they’re meaningless. In fact, some might be so interesting, you might want to turn them into a podcast (At least, that’s how I feel about my new virtual Dungeons & Dragons sessions.)

That, or perhaps you want to start a podcast and have no idea how. Well, we can fix that, too. And by “we,” I mean “Anchor,” a free service you can use to bring your thoughts to the masses in an episodic format. Anchor dropped a new feature yesterday that you can use to turn video recordings into podcasts, which makes it even more easy to transform your dorky Zoom calls into an editable (and publishable) chunk of audio.

To get started, sign into your Anchor account (or sign up for one, if you don’t have one) and visit the “Create your episode” page. Click on the appropriate link to upload your video file, per the following restrictions:

Anchor will start extracting the audio from your video. When it’s done, you have a bunch of options: you can rename the snippet you uploaded, split it into multiple segments, add This American Life-style audio transitions, or simply click on “Save Episode” to start finalising the details of the full podcast you’re looking to create. You can also trim and split your audio as needed, but you’ll have to be using Anchor’s iOS or Android app for that.

Me? I’d download the converted audio file from Anchor and process all my trimming in a third-party app like Audacity. I’d then reupload the files individually to Anchor and start building my podcast that way. This is kind of like the “advanced mode” of editing, but I think it would be even faster, ultimately, than using Anchor’s tools. However, if fussing around with waveforms isn’t your bag, stick with Anchor.

How to record your video chats

If you’re unsure how to even get started recording a video chat, don’t worry. It’s pretty easy to do, no matter what service you use. Anchor provided a handy list to the help pages for a bunch of video chat services, which we’ve lovingly copied below:

Note that Zoom and Google Meet require you to have a paid subscription to record video chats—free users need not apply. Though, I suppose you could also get fancy in this case and record the audio that’s coming out of your PC. That’ll defeat the point of uploading a video file to Anchor, but it will save you a good amount of space on your drive (and processing power). The things we do for personalised podcasts during a quarantine.

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