Jake Ludington at Oreilly Network provides a guide on creating podcasts under Windows. It covers recording (including preparations before you record) and publishing the podcast. He relies on open source or freely available software to get to the goal:
I recommend starting out with Audacity, an open source audio recording application. I like it so much, I bought a T-shirt from the company to show my support. Audacity offers a solid complement of editing features with an interface simple enough for a novice. It outputs MP3-format audio for distributing your podcast once you download the Lame MP3 encoder. From here onward, I’ll assume you have Audacity and Lame installed on your PC.
