Recording at Elizabeth’s gorgeous house. Two hosts, two in-person guests, and one on a computer through Zoom.
Just produced another new episode for Elizabeth and Leigh over at Austin Enneagram. There was a new challenge this time since one of their guests was on Zoom. After doing some research I decided at the last minute to just allow Zoom to record the call on the computer while recording the guests in person with my equipment. Zoom allowed me to choose to save the audio of the remote guest on its own track. Luckily the audio had the same timing as my local recordings and matched up perfectly. It ended up sounding pretty good!
I’m already maxing out the capability of my Zoom H4N Pro recorder (not the same company), by recording 4 people at once using two XLR Male to Dual XLR Female Y-Cables connected to two Shure SM58 Dynamic Microphone’s for the guests, one Audio-Technica ATR2100x-USB Cardioid Dynamic USB/XLR Microphone for Leigh, and an Audio-Technica BPHS1 Broadcast Stereo Headset for Elizabeth. Essentially recording four separate voices onto two tracks. Adding another element I thought might be too much, but it worked out. Looking forward to a likely upgrade to a Zoom PodTrak P8 soon.
As I have stated previously, my goal and responsibility with any production is to make sure that I capture the best audio possible so a quality episode can be created and shared. With the recorded audio in hand, I first use Audacity to split the stereo track created by the H4N into two mono tracks so I can edit the different voices separately. Then I drag those files into Garageband to do the second by second editing, and then finally run the full-size AIFF audio file through web-based Auphonic for algorithmic leveling, normalization, and encoding to a 64 kbps mono MP3. Makes it sound great and fixes a lot of voice level issues.
In the case of Austin Enneagram, I then add the final episode MP3 file to their Squarespace website by creating a new post, writing a title and episode summary, transcribing a quote, and customizing all of the back end settings so that the episode will broadcast properly and look professional. I even provide photos taken during the recording for use on social media. If you have any questions about this process let me know. I’m not an audio engineer but I will do my best to share what I know.
If you’ve ever thought about having your own podcast, but don’t have the time or inclination to buy all of this equipment and deal with the technical learning curve, let me know. Check out my post from October 20th for more about this podcast.