Recording Telephone Calls for Podcasts

Pro Quality for under $1000 - Now, about that content.

Well, my audio editing guru Jerome has helped put together a selection of equipment to record telephone interviews for podcasts using standard telephones. We want to make it easyto interview someone without having to worry about the technology, letting them concentrate on the content.

The challenge with any phone recording is separating the audio between the two people, but this setup allows that. While I have set up a pretty servicable telephone interview recording setup using Skype and Pamela in the past, it was always subject to the idiosynchratic nature of Skype - and made for embarassing problems at times.� � The audio stream from our setup uses the left-and right audio channel for the two people. The caller is on one channel and the callee on the other. Of course you don’t broadcast it this way, it’s strictly for the audio editor. By separating the channels, you can do a controlled mix - equalizing the levels and tonal quality. You won’t get the harsh difference between voices that make some phone interviews so hard to listen to.

Telephone interview podcast equipment

• $469 JK Broadcast Host —� separates the audio between the caller and the callee
• $60 Audio-Technica ATH-M30 headphones
  $100 Shure SM58SLC dynamic microphone
• 1/8” stereo mini to L/R 1/4″ phono cable –found at
  Atlas desktop mic stand
• $15-20 XLR mic Cable�
• Zoom H4 recorder .� � it operates on 2 AA batteries or an included power supply.� It uses SD memory cards (comes with a 128MB but I use a 1GB)

The Zoom H4 could be replaced with a laptop, but we found that it� was very hard to remove “buzz” from the system with laptops.� The H4 suffered no such buzz and made really clean recordings.� If you want to use a laptop, you’ll need a high quality sound card - probably an external system and appropriate USB cables.

Another alternative now is a hosted solution called FreeConferencing� - We have not tried their calling solution, but since it will record everyone on the same channel, it will suffer the same weaknesses as Skype.

I’m checking out a new software called castblaster shortly, it looks promising - but a little bit pricy given Audacity is out there.� I’ll report back and link to them� if it works out.� I was disappointed in RecordForAll.

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2 Responses to “Recording Telephone Calls for Podcasts”

1. Feb
   26
   2007
   At 10:03 am Robin Says:

   Why didn’t you like RecordForAll?I love it, so easy to use!
2. Feb
   26
   2007
   At 10:55 am Scott Clark Says:

   I was disappointed because it didn’t save me time or make life any easier than Audacity. I’m going to be using Castblaster for my next podcasting project. While I’m not able to “really” endorse it yet (not enough experience banging on it) I am impressed that it has such nice publishing and sound-effects features. I’m a big feedforall fan, use it all the time, by the way, and had hoped that recordforall would integrate at least loosely. With castblaster you can insert segments, which is awesome for putting together multi-segment podcasts, or putting in sponsor messages. Why mess with individual components when it’s all in one place.

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