I stumbled upon a wonderful piece of software a couple of years ago that I’ve used for a whole host of audio purposes, including podcasting - it’s called Audacity (and it’s FREE).

Audacity is very powerful because it allows you to record multiple tracks which give you the ability to easily add additional audio clips to your main podcast file.  If you want to add some intro or outro music, you can put them on the two different tracks, separate from the main track.

It has an excellent editing interface which allows you to make all sorts of special effects modifications to your podcast file - echo, fade-in, fade-out are some of the ones that I use often.

Another benefit is that Audacity can be run on Windows, Mac OS X or even Linux - so if you use ‘other than Windows’, you are most likely covered.

Note:
In order to allow Audacity to record your audio and then export to MP3 format, you have to use a special plug-in called ‘LAME’.  Once you put the LAME dll on your system and tell Audacity where to find it, Audacity can seamlessly export to MP3.  It’s a one-time setup.

Okay, here is the link for Audacity’s Home:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Unless you need some bleeding edge enhancement, don’t bother installing the Beta version - just the normal stable version.

This is the LAME download/instructions page:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/faq?s=install&item=lame-mp3

Some additional LAME instructions can be found here:

http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~raa110/audacity/AudacityHelp.html#LAME

That’s it, enjoy Audacity - it’s a great podcast audio file creation tool.