Last week we discussed the nuts and bolts of using RSS (Really Simple Syndication or, as some call it, Really Simple Stealing) for publishing a podcast, and we also looked at a service that generates a first pass at generating RSS feeds.

So, let's assume that you have recorded your podcast, probably in WAV format. Before you do anything else you absolutely have to use The Levelator. Published for free by The Conversations Network (TCN), a nonprofit organization set up to help "people capture, produce, preserve, find and share recordings of spoken-word events", the Levelator adjusts the audio levels within a file to correct for audio variations from one speaker to another.

This TCN claim is true: "The UI is dirt-simple: Drag-and-drop any WAV or AIFF file onto The Leveler's application window, and a few moments later you'll find a new version which just sounds better." The Levelator runs on Windows, OS X (universal binary), or Linux (Ubuntu) and I award it a rating of 5 out of 5.

Now that you have a leveled file you're going to need to transcode it to another format. While there are a number of formats you could use, MP3 is pretty much the gold standard when it comes to a format that most playback systems can handle.

As most corporate podcasting will be primarily people talking, you can use a sampling rate as low as 22kHz at a bit rate of 48Kbps. Speech with some music (more than incidental intro and outro music) or just high-quality speech should be sampled at 44.1kHz at bit rate of anything from 64K to 96Kbps, while a podcast that is mostly music would ideally be recorded at 44.kHz with a bit rate between 128K and 192Kbps.

That said, the best choice no matter what settings you use for the sampling rate will be a variable bit rate, which usually produces better sound quality than a podcast recorded at a constant bit rate but with a slightly large file size.

Now we come to decisions about the RSS feed we're going to create.  One of these is whether we're going to provide a "truncated" feed or a "full" feed of the text accompanying our podcast. The value of this text is directly related to the degree to which you feel the podcast needs explaining and or promotion.

In a truncated feed each item contains only a summary of the content the feed item links to. Someone reading the feed will need to follow the link in the feed to get the rest of the content. Conversely, a full feed contains the entire text and thus the person reading the feed doesn't need to visit the publishing site.