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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

>And please, do get all the people in the same room!

Often easier said than done. As I wrote elsewhere, I definitely prefer to be in the same room as the person I'm interviewing for both technical and conversational reasons. But it can really limit the number of people you can get on a show--even more so if it has to be in your studio.

Lots of people record podcasts and videos at events like conferences (partly for this reason). Sure, the audio isn't pristine but IMO it's perfectly listenable if done right. I gave up stressing about getting perfect studio sound years ago.

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is there software that can do multi track recording on everyone's computer / phone and later combine the high quality local recordings after the fact? Because it's hard to guarantee enough bandwidth for real time high quality centralized recording.

I don't know how to automate it but you can have remote guests make a separate recording using a USB mic and then email you the file. Of course, the more complicated you make things for a guest the harder it is to get them to go along and the more mistake-prone it is.

That does add to the work but it's not bad for a 15-20 minute interview.

The thing I'd like to see which I guess falls into the "seems easier than it is" bucket is software that automatically stripped out common verbal tics like "umm" and "you know." Cleaning up at least some of those and equalizing all the volumes probably takes most of my time editing a podcast.

What software do you use for equalizing volumes?

Usually I do it manually with Audacity. There is a free (but not open source and apparently no longer updated) program called Levelator (Mac) that will do this automatically. It's by no means perfect, but I'll sometimes pull it out if I just can't get someone to speak up or the volumes are all over the place for some other reason.

I haven't looked recently to see if there's anything else out there as I don't have a podcast at the moment.

Any compressor or (rarer) leveling plugin will do.

On the Mac for example, Garageband comes with a free compressor plugin -- and even EQ presets for "spoken voice" like material.

But you can also find free VST compressors -- you'll then need an audio plugin host. Audacity can do that too.

I host the Kubernetes Podcast from Google and we use zencastr.com for this.

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