How To Record A Podcast Interview

Let’s start with two important considerations before getting too deep into tools and techniques –
1. There is more than one way to record a podcast
2. The best way is dependent on you and your content

The best way to capture your recording really does depend on you and your format. Many of the podcasters I work with don’t have a background in audio engineering or production, so we need to use methods where the technology is not an obstacle that comes between the show host and what they are trying to capture.

Our end goal is to capture the best possible recordings that let the podcast producer do the best job possible to edit and create a listenable and captivating story for the listener. One that will also gain subscribers who return regularly to listen to new episodes.

Let’s look at one of the most popular show formats here and then cover others in later articles.

Remote Online Interview

If you have a specialised topic area where online interviews with invited guests is your way to create the podcast content, we have some great tips. There are a number of platforms that enable good quality recordings of online conversations – some better than others. Skype’s position as the defacto tool has heavy competition now by dedicated VOIP platforms like Ringr and Zencastr.

The important audio elements that we need to create for our podcast interview are:
1. Separate tracks of local/remote channels i.e your voice and their voice. With these two tracks saved as separate files, the producer will be able to EQ and treat each voice independently to get the best possible result.
2. Quality. (maybe not important for everyone but I’m an audio quality freak!) Let’s just use the principle of garbage in/garbage out. There are various other colourful expressions to cover this that sometimes get used at East Coast Studio. If your original audio is good quality, the production of your show can focus on a better edit rather than being a salvage job to make the audio listenable.

Being Here

All of the online recording platforms have layers of technology to compensate for the online delay and re-sync the conversation between the participants. They also then apply preset processing intended to automatically improve the audio quality.  It may sound good and be a triumph of engineering but the fact is it doesn’t sound great. This can often result in the voice of the podcast host sounding as remote as a guest from the other side of the world.

We need to produce a soundscape that makes sense to the listeners ear as well as provide conversation for their mind. If you imagine the representation of the conversation over distance, then the show host should sound like they’re “here”, while the remote guest can sound like they’re coming over a telephone or tincan attached with string, it doesn’t really matter . We already know they’re not “here” so audio quality is less crucial, so long as their voice is understandable.

Secret Weapon

There’s no need to accept the out-of-the-box recording of your online chat as the best you can do. With only a small amount of extra effort, we can take that “good enough” and make it awesome! And you do want to be awesome, don’t you ? Yes ? Good.

As an easy way to take control of your audio and deal with the shortcomings of the online podcast platforms we have an easy to use secret weapon to employ. We take a second recording of the podcast hosts voice that uses the online platform but also bypasses its shortcomings.

This is how it works:

Set up your call recording method as you normally would. You can use the built in mic on your headset, webcam or laptop for your conversation. We’ll come to downloading the files later.

Your second voice recording is going to bypass the vulnerabilities of the internet and all of the technology that is attempting to make your low quality, bitrate-limited, compressed and processed audio sound reasonable.

You’ll need to check on adaptors and connections on your phone, but the Rode SmartLav+ is a neat solution. The microphone is a good quality lavalier lapel microphone that connects to your phone, with an app that records full quality WAV format audio files.

With the new iPhoneX and later models that use Apple’s Lightening connector, connections to the phone have become problematic but a search like this should give you some options.

When you begin your recording on the VOIP platform, also hit that nice big record button or the Rode Reporter app.

When you download the files of the conversation from your call recording platform later, you’ll also have a full quality 24bit WAV file of your voice to sync with them later. Your podcast producer will then be able to mute the lower quality recording of your voice and replace it with this version.

You will now have a voice recording that sounds far better than any internet VOIP call using a low quality computer microphone.

File Formats

Most recording platforms will provide pre-processed mixes of the conversation in several lossy formats (.ogg, mp3 etc). But what we’re really looking for is quality and flexibility for post production editing and assembling. So the two download options that are ideal are WAV of FLAC i.e. lossless file formats that contain all of the audio data that was there while the recording was happening.

With the example here, taken from Ringr in this screenshot, you will need to dive into the custom settings to get the ideal files to download. We want Raw Tracks, individual files of each caller with no processing, saved as 44.1khz FLAC files.

Zencastr works in a different way and records full quality WAV files on your computer.

NEXT ARTICLES

Recording A Podcast Interview On Location 
How To Lead The Best Podcast Interview