A short glossary of podcast terms

Production

Run sheet

The ordered plan for a recording: segments, who speaks, roughly how long each part should run, and where the breaks fall. It is a guide rather than a script, and a good one leaves room for the conversation to go somewhere unplanned.

Double-ender

A remote recording in which each participant records themselves locally and the separate files are combined afterwards. It produces far better audio than recording the connection itself, because the connection's compression never touches the kept files.

Room tone

Thirty seconds of the recording space with nobody speaking, captured deliberately so that an editor has matching silence to patch gaps with. Digital silence dropped into a gap is audible as a hole; room tone is not.

Plosive

The burst of air on hard consonants that arrives at the microphone as a thump. Reduced by speaking across the microphone rather than into it, and by a screen between mouth and capsule.

Headroom

The distance between the loudest part of a recording and the point at which the signal can go no higher. Without it, the loudest moments are flattened permanently.

Distribution

Feed

The machine-readable file that lists a show's episodes and where their audio lives. Apps read the feed rather than the site, which is why an episode that is on the site but not in the feed reaches nobody.

Enclosure

The entry inside a feed that points at an episode's audio file. One episode, one enclosure; changing the file it points at changes the episode for everyone who has not yet downloaded it.

Chapter marks

Timed markers embedded in the audio file so that a player can offer named sections. They do the same job inside the app that a timed topic list does on the page.

Prefix

A redirect placed in front of an audio file's address so that a third party can count requests before passing them on. It is how most measurement is done, and it is also why two providers rarely agree on a total.

Backfill

Adding older episodes to a feed after the fact. Done without care it announces a dozen episodes to every subscriber at once, which is generally not the intended effect.

The written layer

Show notes

The page that accompanies an episode: summary, topic timings and the links to anything referenced. It is the part of an episode that search engines can read.

Transcript

A written record of what was said, with speakers marked. Lightly corrected for names and mishearings, not rewritten into prose.

Pull quote

A short extracted sentence used to represent the episode elsewhere. Anything said in a recording should be able to survive being extracted this way, because at some point something will be.