This is the show for creative entrepreneurs who have a message to share and want to live a life of freedom. Learn how to grow your network and net worth. Hear from exciting guests and more. My name is Dylan Schmidt and Welcome to Digital Podcaster. Alright, in this episode, I want to talk about the software I use for recording, editing and publishing Digital Podcaster. My own podcast, I get asked a lot by people like what I like to use what I recommend, and I try to kinda not spend too much time on the gear recommendations. Because once you have your gear, it's really easy to then start finding reasons to why the gear might be a reason for your podcast being successful or not successful or the gear helping you reach whatever your goals are, right. So one of the reasons why I keep the gear discussions to say I guess maybe 25% of the time of the topics I'm talking about when it comes to podcasting is for that reason, just to keep it focused on the growth, you could have the perfect gear, and you could also not reach the goals that you want to reach. But having great gear is nice. So I thought I'd walk through a little bit about what I use for Digital Podcaster and share with you why I use it. I'm not going to go super in depth on each one. But I do want to give you a reason of why I selected it. And one thing you'll notice across the board with all of the pieces of gear that I'm going to list out here is that they're on the higher end, you know, I work in podcasting, I work in content creation, this is my full time job, I don't have another job. So I invest in high quality gear to get a high quality result. And I use it every single day. Some people don't, you know, podcast every day, every week, every month, so you might not need to invest in the level that I've invested in. So I just want you to know that walking into it. You might find one or two new pieces of gear that I'm using that you didn't know about, or you might find. Like actually I want to copy all this stuff. So cool. All right. So first things first is the microphone. All of the content at my desk is recorded through the Shure SM seven B microphone. The company is sure the model of the microphone is the SM seven B and this is a microphone that's been around for years. I love the sound of it. It just has a good warm sound to me. Also, I like the aesthetic of it. It's simple in video, it doesn't stand out. And it is also when most people think of podcast microphone. It's what they think of now this microphone does run around $400 and it is on the higher end of microphones there are some microphones that go way expensive 1000s of dollars but for podcasting you don't really need that level the spin 1000s Right and it's not as simple as plugging it into your computer though you do have to have another piece of gear, which I'll talk about here in a second. So my microphone is attached to my desk using a mic boom arm and this one's weird. So the company is called OSI white and the model of this one is pro boom Ultima gen two ultra low profile adjustable. That's a mouthful and I don't remember it every single time I got to reference it I have to look it up on the website. This microphone arm cost around or more than the actual microphone itself. That's how expensive this thing is but it's durable and because I'm using it every single day I need something that's just like built solid and can you know stand the test of time and this microphone arm has been perfect for that. Now like I said sure SM seven B doesn't plug directly into a computer because it is an XLR connected mic and it needs power. So I plug it into the VO caster one from a company called focus right and what that does is the VO caster one acts as an interface so I plugged the VO caster one into my computer which is the MacBook Pro and then I plug my SM seven B into the VO caster one the VO caster one is simple to use. It's a new product from Focusrite came out this year, I believe it doesn't have a lot of features. But what it does do well it does well. And that's what you want. You don't need all of the features, you just need the ones that get you up and going. And like I mentioned a minute ago, I'm using the MacBook Pro to power all this stuff. It's one of the latest models. And then inside my MacBook Pro, I'm using an app called ECAM live and I use E cam live to record all the content at my desk. It just makes it easy. I don't record straight in logic or GarageBand or Audacity or any of these other programs, I just go to ECAM live I just open up the app, it identifies that I got my microphone set my cameras set which is the Sony ZV one and this is just always at my desk and so it's easy to just hit it open and start recording. Now after I'm done recording, I use descript to edit the podcast. And if you've listened to this podcast before, you know there's not a lot of heavy edits in there. I don't do remove all the filler words reducing the length of time in between sentences because it starts to sound really unnatural. So I'll just human edit it. After I make the edits in the script. I export it and then I run it through a web app called a phonic. Now a phonic is just the free service and it just gives a little bit of a more polished sound to the podcast after a phonic I'm using Buzzsprout to upload the podcast that's my podcast hosting service of choice. So the only final thing is and I use this but I don't have to manually do it. It's automated is I use pod page now pod page, create It's a website for Digital Podcaster. And that automatically syncs with Buzzsprout, the RSS feed. So when I release a new episode, it automatically updates on my pod page website for Digital Podcaster. Now, I'm pretty sure the last thing that I haven't mentioned is what I use for ratings and reviews and just relying on me give me a call to action, like, Hey, if you enjoyed this podcast, make sure to give a rating and review on Apple podcasts or Spotify. That's beneficial. I'm sure you've heard me say that before. But you've probably also heard me say a different link. And that is called rate this podcast. So if you go to rate this podcast.com/dylan dy ln, you can see it's a very simple landing page with just a couple of links on how to rate and review Digital Podcaster. And this is a paid service. But I find it's just been super beneficial to getting more ratings and reviews for the podcast. Because let's face it, most people aren't familiar with leaving ratings and reviews. It's one of those things that seems obvious and easy, but it's really not like it's confusing. So what they do is they just simplify the whole process and I have found the likelihood of people leaving a rating review when using rate this podcast is much higher. If you have questions about any of this stuff, feel free to send me a message and I hope this helps. Again, I don't think you need to spend all the money on your gear. But having quality gear that lasts you a long time is luckily an investment that you only need to make once in a long time. There are some monthly ongoing costs like descript or Buzzsprout that I you know pay for but those are relatively low cost when weighed against something like a microphone, for example. All right, I hope this helps. I will see you in the next episode.