The second part of our salute to the tricks and techniques of podcasting.
In this episode we talk about our experiences podcasting with a special eye on the hardware that we tried and on what worked and
didn’t work.
Like many neophyte podcasters, we started out by simply using our computer; in our case a MacBook laptop. The first, very experimental and thankfully never published episode of Art/Geek was kicked off by simply hitting the record button in GarageBand .
Since we weren’t happy with that built-in mic, we decided to take a step up in quality – a very small step. So we went out and bought a couple of Logitech Playstation 2 USB microphones These are very inexpensive: About $30 US, but for the money they produce pretty decent results. These microphones are made for use with Playstation Karaoke games, but they are really just plain old USB based microphones which will work fine in any computer. If you don’t want to spend a lot of money and you want to do a one microphone podcast. Perhaps its just you, or its you and someone with whom you don’t mind sharing a microphone, then one of these $30 microphones is not a bad bet.
Whatever microphone you pick, you are going to need something to hold it in place. While more expensive mics have special fittings for purpose built stands, our cheap Karaoke came with neither stand nor fittings. The solution was surprisingly simple: It turns out that you can bend a wire coat hanger into a perfectly good microphone stand in less time than it takes to ask for extra starch at the dry cleaners.
Another, somewhat more expensive alternative that solves the microphone and stand problem in one visit to the BuyMore would be a headset, which combines the microphone with headphones in a very ‘air traffic controller’ setup. Russ played around with using his Logitech Premium Notebook Headset (can you tell that someone likes Logitech equipment?) but he was never very impressed with the results. To Russ the headset mic always sounded a thin and flat.
Of course we aren’t doing a single mic podcast – there are two of us and while we are friends, we do draw the line at sitting close enough to use the same microphone for hours on end. What we did was run those two Logitech Karaoke mics into Chris’ computer and mix or combine the sound coming from the two mics using some software trickery.
It turns out that buried fairly deeply inside of Mac OSX there is a little utility to create an ‘aggregate microphone’, a sort of imaginary, software microphone that combines the input of two or more real microphones. You can configure an aggregate microphone by launching Audio MIDI Setup program, which you will find in the /Applications/Utilities folder. Click on Open Aggregate Device Editor you are well on your way to a two microphone podcast.
Except that the aggregate microphone setup never really worked that well. Chris’ voice is quite a bit softer than Russ’ and left untouched, resulted a recording that sounded a bit like a shouted conversation with a neighbor on the other side of the fence. To balance things out a bit, we tried upping the volume of Chris’ voice inside of GarageBand. The trouble with this is that the amplification also amplified the various background noises from Chris’ side of the room, along with the unavoidable electronic hiss that you get from inexpensive microphones. Even worse, sometimes Chris’ mic would pick up Russ’ voice, which the amplification turned into a sort of ‘voice of the gods’ reverb. Still more horrible, sometimes, for reasons unknown, Russ’ mic and Chris’ mic would get out of sync with each other, resulting in a really horrible
mess.
Which brings us to the set up that we are using today. For microphones, Russ is using an audio-technica AT2020 , (about $75) with an XLR microphone cable something like this one (about $10). You will also need a stand for you microphone, for example something like this The mixer is a Behringer 1202 (about $90) although the smaller 802 model (about $50) would work just fine. To hook the mixer to our computer we are using Behringer U-Control (about $30). You will need some RCA cables to finish things off, some thing this which you can buy online or from your local Home Depot or RadioShack.
Happy PodCasting!
Chris and Russ
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