For many people who start dabbling with audio recordings or podcasting, there comes a point where you want more professional results. But, where to start and how much will it cost?

Upgrade number one: your recording environment

You may have started your recording career by grabbing that headset that came free with the computer, plugging into the sound card on your computer and firing up a free program like Audacity (or one that came with the computer) to start recording.

There is a very good chance your computer is not in an ideal sound recording environment. It may be in a loud office space with hissing air vents, ringing phones, and packs of wandering colleagues discussing last night’s American Idol.

You may be using a home computer in your living room and have to contend with kids or roommates making noise.

If your computer is anything like mine, the cooling fan is making a pretty loud noise too!

And finally, the room you are in often has many hard surfaces that cause sound to bounce around adding subtle echoes into your recording.

The ideal fix: Build a sound recording booth that is isolated from the rest of your environment, has special wall and ceiling treatments to absorb and diffuse echoes, and place your computer gear outside the booth and run extension wires to bring the monitor, keyboard, and mouse controls into the booth.

This fix won’t be quick and easy, but it can be done by a do-it-yourselfer!

If you are not prepared to go all out with your recording environment, there are a few fixes you can do to improve your current one.

• Move your computer as far away as possible to reduce fan noise
• Hang heavy blankets over hard flat surfaces to reduce echoes
• Schedule your recording time during low traffic times to reduce outside noise
• Get as close to the mike as possible so that your voice is much louder relative to the background noise

Upgrade number two: your recording equipment - specifically your sound card and microphone.

That cheap little headset that came with your computer is never going to capture the rich tones in your voice like a higher quality microphone will. Radio announcers use a type of microphone called a ‘large diaphragm microphone.’ These microphones are suspended in a ’shock-mount holder’ that isolates the mike from vibrations. And, they often have a device called a ‘pop-screen’ in front of the mike to prevent those explosive breath sounds that happen when you say a word like “Promo.”

These microphones can cost thousands, and the cables and connectors will not be the same as your low-end consumer gear - so you will need to buy more than just a mike to get it all working.

Samson makes a model (the C01U) that is less than $100 and has a USB port so you can connect it up without going through your soundcard. It’s not the high end of the quality scale, but it will be a lot better than the free headset.

You can make a home made pop-screen by bending a wire coat hanger into a circle and stretching a pair of old nylons over the loop. Place this between your mouth and the mike and your ‘plosives’ won’t explode anymore!

Your soundcard is another problem. Most computer soundcards are cheaply made. They do a good job for most purposes, but they don’t have sufficient electrical shielding to keep the electrical interference in a typical computer from ‘polluting’ the audio circuits. The electrical signal from a microphone is very weak, so it doesn’t take much to mess it up. Also, they generally have consumer input connections (those little mini-plugs.)

Another problem crops up when connecting professional level microphones. Many require power to be provided through the cable (called ‘Phantom Power.’) Professional gear is set up to provide this with a flip of a switch, but not consumer gear.

One solution to the soundcard problem is to get an external audio interface like the Tascam US122L. These boxes have professional connectors, phantom power and more. They will convert the microphone signal into a digital signal and then send it to your computer via a USB wire and are well shielded from electrical interference.

A secondary bonus to the external interface is that you can easily move it between computers to provide professional connections to any Mac or PC.

The Go-To Guy!

P.S. If you are strictly podcasting, you might want to consider a stand alone digital recorder like the Marantz PMD660. It has professional grade connectors, phantom power, and other pro features built in. It’s also small, portable and will run off batteries. Because it records to a compact flash memory card it has no moving parts and is silent. You can just find a good place to record and go!

Podcasting and the steps needed to set up a podcast came up in a recent conversation.

I’ve been working with a friend/client on the promotion of a book he wrote. Recently I was advising him to start a weekly podcast that incorporates portions of his book and then directs people to his website (were he sells the book, of course!)

He has already posted MP3 audio excerpts from the book (www.AllenPaulWeaverIII.com) and wanted to know what the difference is between these recordings and a podcast. I thought the answer would be a good addition to this site.

So, What is The Difference Between an MP3 and a Podcast?

Short answer, not much!

The audio file in a podcast is just a plain old MP3 - nothing fancy. But, the content of the audio file will be different.

The content of the file will probably have an opening segment to the show, maybe some commercial breaks, and a closing segment - like a radio show.

The resulting MP3 file is loaded onto your server, like any other file.

What distinguishes a Podcast from other MP3 files is the way in which it is promoted and distributed.

Podcasts use the RSS technology built into blogging software to create a ‘feed’ for people to subscribe to. This feed gets promoted at places like Apple’s iTunes store, iPodder.com, Odeo.com, and other places dedicated to tracking and promoting podcasts.

When a subscriber adds the RSS link to your podcast into a program like iTunes, the software will automatically download your podcast MP3s when a new one is posted and synchronize it with the subscribers iPod or media player.

There is one special distinction between a regular RSS feed and the RSS feed required for a podcast. The podcast feed must include enclosure tags around the link to the MP3 file. These tags tell the feed reader that a link to media is present.

Some blog software adds enclosure tags automatically and some does not. Wordpress handles it automatically. For those blogs that don’t do this automatically, take the feed from the podcast category and use feedburner.com to ‘burn’ a new feed. Feedburner will add the enclosure tags and then you can submit their feed link to the podcast directories. (Bonus - Feedburner will also give you lots of great statistical traffic data about your feed subscribers, so you might want to go this route anyway!)

Here is a sample method for distributing a podcast using WordPress:

1. Record and Upload your audio files
2. Create a new Category on your blog for the podcast
3. Post a new entry into this category that has a link to the audio file
4. Submit the RSS feed from your category page to the podcast directories (run it through Feedburner.com if you want the added stats)
5. Brag to all your friends about your cool new podcast
6. Record and Upload More Episodes

To create a link to the RSS feed on a specific page on a Wordpress blog, you just need to copy the address of the page from your browser and add “/rss” to the end. Here is a non-podcast example of a feed from my website as an illustration:

http://www.andrewseltz.com/category/bookbinding/rss

The hardest part of the whole process is coming up with great content for your podcast. The tech isn’t as complex as it may appear at first glance.

Did I leave something out or give an answer as confusing as the question? Just add a comment to this thread and I’ll do my best to clarify.

I haven’t set Allen’s podcast up yet, so I may discover a few new issues along the way. If I do, I’ll update this post.

The Go-To Guy!

In an earlier post called Record Your Voice for Fun And Profit, I had mentioned my recent purchase of an Olympus VN-960PC Digital Voice Recorder. My goal was to replace my dead micro-cassette recorder and possibly find an inexpensive solution for recording audio content that I could post on the web and maybe even sell as part of an educational audio series or audio book.

I knew from the product descriptions and reviews that this recorder compresses the audio pretty heavily and stores it in a proprietary format. My hope was, given the narrow dynamic range of spoken voice recordings, with a little tweaking in post production I could get an acceptable quality recording. I figured a close mike would also help by creating a strong input signal.

Digital Recorder Testing Procedure

My test was very simple. I recorded a short clip of myself talking into a low-cost headset (a likely recording scenario) and also into the built-in mike. The recorded was set to its highest quality settings. I also recorded a short clip on my laptop at high quality 48khz 32bit using the headset mike.

I created a processed version of the first two recordings in an effort to improve the overall quality of the sound. (I’m not a sound engineer, so I’m sure it is possible to do a better job with this. Mostly I normalized the levels and adjusted the EQ to boost the low and midtones a bit and roll off the highs where noise seemed most distracting.)

Finally I converted everything to 44khz 128Kbps mono MP3 files for posting on the web.

Listen to the sample audio recordings from the Olympus VN-960PC Digital Voice Recorder

Conclusions

The Olympus VN-960PC Digital Voice Recorder is a very compact and easy to use device. The controls are simple to operate and intuitive. I could start and stop recording, and playback recordings without having to look at the device. This is great for taking notes while driving and during other multi-tasking situations.

The recorder has long available record times (5 hours in HQ mode) and other nice features like voice activated recording that stops during the dead space in a recording without the user having to ride the pause button.

Functionally speaking, I was impressed with the recorder. But my hopes were deflated when it came to the quality of the finished recordings. As the samples make clear, they don’t cut it. They are acceptable for creating free podcasts, etc., but I’d be disappointed if I paid for a recording that sounded like that. It would undermine my impression of the value of the content. I was surprised to find that the built-in mike sounded so much better than the headset.

I think this device will be great for note taking and for snagging unexpected interviews, but my search for a high quality compact recorder goes on (Why doesn’t my Palm Tungsten T5 not have a mike jack and recording software… the previous version did?) In the meantime I’ll be transcoding audio bits through the USB connection on the Vn-960PC. That brings me to a pet peeve.

Everybody and their uncle uses MP3’s for high quality compressed audio. It does a good job of holding the important bits of sound while keeping file sizes low and every audio editing package and player can read and write MP3’s. It drives me a little nuts whenever companies (Sony, are you listening?) insist on proprietary compression formats. Olympus does this for their whole voice recorder line. This means everything must be transcoded as you transfer it to the PC before it’s useful anywhere else. And that brings me to another irritation.

Why must I be forced to install another audio program to connect with the recorder? It should show-up as an external storage device with files and folders. I should be able to plug in to the USB cable and open up a file for playback. Instead, I run more software to handle this one task. Maybe it’s incredibly useful and intuitive for fortune 500 executives and their personal assistants? Not for me!
In spite of these drawbacks, the Olympus VN-960PC Digital Voice Recorder is a nice piece of equipment that works as advertised - I was just hoping for a little more.

If you are taking notes or recording a meeting or lecture, the audio quality is much better than a tape based micro-cassette recorder. The recordings are intelligable and the built in mike does a remarkable job. But, if you have an Ipod or Pocket PC that you carry around anyway, get a microphone adapter and record to that. That way, if you ever need it, you’ll have a clean recording to sell.

The Go-To Guy

I’m putting the finishing touches on a fundraising video this week and am down to finessing the soundtrack. The range of quality on the source material I have is pretty wide - some excellent and some barely useable.

I recently upgraded my editing software at work with the Adobe Production Studio Bundle and I’m learning the ins and outs of Adobe Audition and the new audio tools in Premiere Pro. But, I needed a quick and easy piece of audio editing software to do things like remove/reduce breath sounds and trim a little off of some dialog.

Open Source to the Rescue

I found Audacity. This is a great opensource software package that does exactly what I need. It took me about 2 seconds to figure out how the envelope tool would allow me to adjust the volume on a track - it’s all visual, you just grab the envelope and drag it up or down. The output sounds great.

There’s a lot more here than what I’m using. Audacity will do full fledged multitrack recording and uses VST plugins.

If you need a great little sound utility, check it out! It’s cross-platform Windows/Mac/Linux and works great.

The Go-To Guy!