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Technology

My Podcasting Setup | March 2012

My friend Philip Wels and I have been recording This One Podcast for almost two months now and just pushed out Episode 6. We’ve been having a lot of fun, but I thought I’d go ahead and post a little bit about my own podcasting setup that I am using in March 2012.

Microphones

My main microphone is a Blue Snowball with the generic stand and The Ringer as well. The Snowball is a decent USB mic and I simply plug it into my 13″ MacBook Pro and I am good to go right away.

For Episode 6 of TOP I went ahead and tried out a USB headset for recording. I went with the Sennheiser PC 36 USB headset and it worked out … okay I guess. The sound quality was definitely not as good as the Snowball, but that was to be expected. It worked well enough and in a pinch I’ll probably use it. The nice thing about the headset is that I can move around a little bit without losing volume.

The Snowball is definitely the better choice.

Recording Software

Both Philip and I record our own audio so that we have source audio to work from. I use Audio Hijack Pro and he uses Piezo. I also use Piezo to record the Skype call between the two of us.

Recording the Skype call serves two purposes.

  1. Emergency backup in case either of our audio did not get recorded
  2. Source material for me to sync our two sources up to in post

The Skype quality is usually quite poor, but it would work as an emergency source. Luckily, since we switched to both grabbing our own local audio, things have worked out really well.

Editing Software

I have a MacBook Pro — I use GarageBand.

We don’t do a ton of editing, but it gets the job done. I have a separate track for Philip and one for myself and that allows me to pull out any terrible sounds or dead parts from our separate audio. Sometimes the longest part is me syncing up our audio to the Skype call.

Closing

There is just the two of us so far, so we are not doing anything crazy. One thing I would like to add to my own setup is a boom mic arm on the desk in my office so that I can keep the Snowball just a little bit closer even if I am sitting back or up or … standing even.

That’s for the future.