Comments on: 8 Professional Podcast Production Tips

By: robbothegreat

robbothegreat — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 02:35:06 +0000

Hi Kevin – yes, well I’m a Pom living in Australia for the last 21 years – it’s paradise here!

Thanks for the concise article – picked up some more tips there myself!

I also use Audacity and rarely go beyond it, even though I have other paid apps. It’s so simple, I’ve taught my wife how to edit here audio for online purposes.

Re: USB Mikes – I’ve had a lot of success with the Zoom H2, it is standalone as well as use as a mike, so you can roam and use it for interviews, even music. It will record direct to wav or mp3 with excellent choices in the quality settings. It has FOUR mikes and will record surround sound if you wish. http://www.samsontech.com/products/productpage.cfm?prodID=1916 – it’s about $170 on Amazon and takes standard SD cards – I use a 2GB card. Tip: Use a decent card – the free one that came with it seemed to produce artifacts in the wav recordings and modulated the mp3s.

Re: Skype. We use it all the time for producing interviews etc – hear some at http://www.hotyogadoctor.com/index.php/site/tips/ (scroll down a little – there are a few up there). I use a nifty app called MXSkypeRec ($15 – free for up to 5min recording time) cos pamela is useless. MXSkypeRec allows wav, wma and mp3 recording AND – importantly given what you say about differences in volume – allows in and out channels to be recorded separately, removing that need for each to record separately, file-share, stitch together etc. I also use it to record some mastermind skype meetings/conferences – very handy.

Re: USB Mike – though not for professional podcasting as such, we use Logitech USB Pro headsets for the above skypre recordings AND we use these for making online webinars with excellent sound quality – exceeding most people’s expectations, especially with some Audacity tweaking!

Good point abut the tagging – of course, exporting mp3 from Audacity gives this option.

That’s it from me – keep up the good work!

Robert

By: Todd

Todd — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 15:07:27 +0000

Great article, and timely for me. My US Government department has just accepted podcasting as an educational modality and I need to let people know how to produce good quality podcasts (most are new to podcasting, some had never heard of it before we pushed to have it!).

By: jtresidder

jtresidder — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 23:20:57 +0000

Audacity is also a multitrack recorder, easily capable of editing podcasts – it can remove hiss, compress, normalise and add a tiny, almost inaudible dab of reverb (do all of these things, in that order). There’s really no need to invest in anything fancier until the clunky interface/workflow starts to get annoying.

When that does happen, I can’t recommend Cockos’s Reaper highly enough – it has everything the ‘big boys’ have, half the screen clutter, a properly unrestricted demo and is cheaper than all of them.

By: Nick Button

Nick Button — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 21:42:24 +0000

Hey Kevin,

Great post. You covered all the stickier areas of recording audio with newbies firmly in mind. Glad to meet another Audacity fan too – I love that program.

By: J. Scott Anderson

J. Scott Anderson — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 18:42:04 +0000

In step three, you mention Amedeus Pro for the Mac. Nice application, but you made a glaring omission – Garage Band. It comes with the Mac (thus “free) and makes it easy to do many of the things you are suggesting. It is not perfect, but is a great application that is very well integrated into the rest of the Macintosh environment, which brings its own benefits.