Capturing audio
There are four typical ways to record a podcast. The first, and the easiest to get professional results with, is to invest in a separate recording device( see the Essential Kit box out at the topofthepage) which accepts multiple microphones. It’s also the most expensive.
The other three ways all involve recording directly to your laptop or PC, and are a little trickier to set up. It’s easy to record sound directly into Audacity, you just open the program up and click the big red record button. In the dropdown menus above the track timeline you can choose
the input source and the output speaker, the one with the microphone icon is the one that will capture your recording.
The challenge is that you’ll want to use a separate microphone for each guest – we have tried using those big omnidirectional bubble mics and the results aren’t always great. The other problems is that Audacity can only record from one source at a time. That means that if you’re using two microphones you need to mix their signals together before you can start recording.
The best option for this is to use an external mixing desk (see the Essential Kit box out on the previous page) into which you plug all the microphones and then take a single stereo out to record to your PC. This is simple to set-up and inexpensive if you go for an entry-level desk. It gives you physical control dials to change levels and tone while recording, but it does mean lugging extra kit around.
Alternately, and as a last resort if you’re desperate to record but don’t want to spend any money at all, you can plug two microphones into your PC – it’s highly likely you only have one sound card inside your machine so at least one of these will have to be a USB mic. Also, a USB mic will likely be better quality than one which can fit the 3.5mm jack on your laptop. Mixing the input from all the mics together before it reaches Audacity is a bit tricky when doing everything on one, but it’s not impossible.
The most professional way to record your podcast would be to use the JACK audio server, and it’s well worth reading up on this if you plan to make a habit out of podcasting. JACK is built for real and virtual devices together in much the same way as an audio engineer strings cables between different instruments and amplifiers.
You can even go as far as installing an audio-specific distribution, such as Ubuntu Studio, which will include advanced recording tools and a realtime kernel. But it’s overkill just for getting started, so we’re going to use the default Pulse Audio Server instead.
Pulse will only let you direct sound from one physical input (a microphone) to a virtual sink ( Audacity). But it is possible to loopback two or more physical inputs into one ( seethe Tricking Pulse box out below ).
The final way of recording a podcast is if your guests are in another location, and you’re speaking over Skype (or a similar VOIP application). You can set-up a loopback channel as above and link it to your call software in the Recording tab. If you’re using a VOIP app on your smartphone, you’ll need to connect the headphone jack out from your handset to an input on your computer.