Do you have the Audacity to record a podcast?

Today’s word is audacity. I choose it for two reasons. One, it is a good word. Two, it is the answer to a question I got last week from Vlad – how do I record my podcasts?

First the word. Audacity is a noun that means boldness or confidence, often with a negative connotation. “Can you believe the audacity of that brick layer? Telling me, the architect, how to design this house.”

The word originates from the Latin audacis, audax and audere. All of which relate to bravery or boldness.

Now to answer Vlad’s question. I use Audacity, an open source, cross platform multi-track audio editor and recorder. Obviously the name is a play on the word audio. I record most of my podcasts on my 12 inch Apple PowerBook with a USB headset mic from Logitech. Occasionally I use Audacity on my Windows XP machine with the same headset or with a desktop USB mic. I don’t use any filters but I do try to get a quiet room and I usually normalize my voice track after recording.

I like Audacity because it is multi track so I can easily shift the intro and outro music and any clips I add play. A couple other pluses are it is free, it is cross platform so I can open my recording project on my mac or windows machine and best of all it has unlimited undo’s so if you make a mistake editing you don’t have to freak out.