Now that the dialogue parts of the podcast have been edited, it's time to focus on the music that will be used as part of the intro and outro. When making use of music in a podcast, it's important to be aware of whether or not you can legally use a song, as well as other copyright-related issues.
Music and Copyright Issues
Unless you happen to be a professional musician, with original music that you can use, it's likely that you'll be looking for music to incorporate into a podcast. This means you'll either need to purchase the rights to be able to use a song, or look for recordings that aren't subject to copyright protection.
If you have a good budget for your audio projects and podcasts, you may be able to buy licensing rights in order to use copyrighted music legally. There are many sources for royalty-free music, where you can pay a one-time fee for the ability to use a song in your projects without giving credit to the artist. For our podcast, however, you'll want to find music that is as close to free as possible. Music that is covered under a Creative Commons license is free to use, so long as you follow the rules set out in each song's license — for example, some songs are free to use so long as you don't make use of them commercially, while others request that you credit the creator of the song. ccMixter is a site that focuses on sharing songs that are licensed through Creative Commons, and can be used to find music for podcasts, movies, video games, and more.
Creating Audio Clips for the Podcast Intro and Outro
For the podcast's intro and outro, the song Jazzy Sax, Guitar, and Organ by Admiral Bob has been included in the exercise files — however, if you want, you can use ccMixter to find a song of your own to use for the podcast's intro and outro music.
Whether you're using the included song or choosing one of your own, the next exercise will have you creating brief audio clips for the intro and outro music. This process will involve copying part the chosen song and pasting it into a new file, which will then be saved as its own file. We'll want the intro clip to fade out at the end, to help transition into the main part of the podcast. We'll also want to fade in the beginning of the outro music clip, to help transition listeners into the end of the podcast. There are a couple of ways we could add the fade in and fade out effects to the audio clips — to make things easier, we'll use the Fade In and Fade Out preset effects in the Favorites menu.
Let's go ahead and make the intro and outro music clips.