Happy to report that we’ve just recorded a special-edition first episode of the Driverlesscroc podcast and it went off without a hitch.
Recording between Jakarta and Buenos Aires meant that we couldn’t trust the VoIP connection (in fact, Skype held up really well), so we made two separate recordings.
Setup
Stu: Skype with headphones on my Android phone, with a separate wired mic (the sub $20 Boya BY-M1 – amazon) recording to Audacity. (see incredibly important note below)
V: Used a mic-and-headphones headset for both Skype in Windows 10 and Audacity to record the input from the mic.
Lessons Learned from recording
- Recording the introduction is the hard part – once we got into the conversation it was easy.
- Keeping it concise is harder than we thought. We tried to keep the conversation tight but still ran almost double the length of a normal Cool Tools episode. Mark Fraunfelder and Kevin Kelly manage the balance between going into technical detail and keeping things moving really well, and I couldn’t have seen this until I’d tried to record something similar.*
- Another time I might try Cube Call Recorder to record audio from skype as a backup.
- It was fun and worth doing for the conversation alone (a good sign?)
- Done is better than perfect!
Lessons learned in post production
- It turned out I plugged the mic into the headphone jack and recorded the whole thing with my laptop’s built in mic. It could be worse, but the proper mic makes a big difference. The noise reduction made a huge difference improving the sound.
- Noise reduction takes quite a while for a longer file – several minutes.
- Outtakes are hilarious
*See also: Doing to see