Are you creating your own podcast, but feel the audio quality needs a bit of a polish before you send it out into the big wide world?
Audio2u.com offers a “podcaster’s mastering service” to give your podcast that professional sound.
Does it cost an arm and a leg?
NO WAY!
How does AUD$1 per minute-of-content sound?
If your podcast runs between 3 and 4 minutes, you pay AUD$4!
If your podcast runs between 29 and 30 minutes, you pay AUD$30!
And if you’re located in the U.S., you’ve gotta love that, ’cause the Aussie dollar is worth less than the greenback .
Plus you can pay via PayPal! It doesn’t get much easier than that.
OK, I need your help! What do I do next?
Well, first a couple of “don’t do” items.
When you mix your podcast down out of your multitrack software, don’t run any limiters across it.
Or, if you’re just recording a voice track, don’t hard limit that either.
Compression is fine, if that’s what you want (and you know how to do it).
If you’re unsure about how to compress audio properly, just don’t do it. We can add that in mastering.
It’s much easier for us to work with something that hasn’t been compressed and limited to within an inch of its life!
After that, it’s simple.
- e-mail the podcast to studio@audio2u.com,
- Calculate your cost (duration in minutes (rounded up to the nearest minute) multiplied by AUD$1),
- Click on the Donate button to pay via PayPal,
- We’ll master your podcast,
- We’ll place the mastered version on our server,
- We’ll e-mail you a link to your mastered podcast,
- You download it, tag it, and publish as you normally would.
What’s the turnaround time?
Less than 24 hours.
What format should I use?
Our recommendation is to encode it as a constant bitrate (CBR) MP3 at the highest bitrate possible.
So, that means CBR320 for a stereo podcast, or CBR160 for a mono podcast. If you’re just sending a voice track, then encode it as mono. The human voice is a monophonic instrument anyway.
The reason for the high bitrate is, we have to decode it, master it, then re-encode it. If we have to work with a source file that was encoded at too low a bit rate to begin with (say 192kbit or lower), then you may hear compression artefacts in the finished version (that’s data compression, not audio amplitude compression!)
Also, when you send us your file, let us know what bit rate mp3 you’d like sent back to you (ready for podcast).
I’m ready… where do I send it?
Right here.
Help, my file is too big to get out through my e-mail gateway!
Yeah, that happens. 
You have a couple of choices.
Your best bet is to try a free delivery service like YouSendIt.
They’ll let you send files up to 100MB for free, or for a small fee, files up to 2GB in size!
Alternatively, do you have a friend who could host your file temporarily, just until we download it?
Also, it’s possible that your ISP has already given you some hosting space with your account.
Can you upload your file via FTP to your own webspace?
If so, you could do that, and send us a link.
And how do I pay for it?
That too, is quite simple.
Click on the PayPal Donate button (we’re using the Donate concept because everyone’s fee will be different), and follow the prompts.
One last thing…
If you’re happy with our mastering service, please let other podcasters know about it.
If you’re not happy, please let us know about it.
And have a great day!
