First set up your microphone. On a PC you can plug an external mic into the sound card, but on a mac if you opt for an external mic, you will need to make sure that the mic outputs a "line level" output. Most mics do not, and therefore will need to be pluggeed into a premap or a digital capture device like the $40 griffin iMic. If you are using a wireless mic, the receiver unit probably has a line level output.

If you are using Quicktime Pro you can check out Apple's on-line tutorials for mac and windows users. Otherwise the following instructions assume you are using Audacity.

In the Audacity preferences select your recording input device from the AudioI/O tab. Then you are all set to start recording. Just hit the big red "record" button in the main window to start and the yellow "stop" button to stop.

From the file menu select "Export as mp3…"

You can check out one of the many online video tutorials showing the detailed steps. I'll just mention here if you want to optimize your files to download quickly and still be decent quality you might use the following guidelines to "default sample rate" in the quality tab of the preference panel

• 48 - 56k Mono - lectures, audio books, talk radio
• 64k+ Stereo - music, music & talk combinations
• 128k Stereo - good quality music

Here are examples of recordings at different sample rates of 32 kbs, 64 kbs, 96 kbs, 128 kbs . The higher the sample rate the larger the file, so choose one that is just high enough to give you the desired audio quality.