Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

I have to commend Audacity for making a tool so easy to use that regular (but technical) folks can use it with no prior recording experience. It being cross platform and runnable on so many devices due to low hardware requirements is a big perk too.

I've recorded 70+ episodes of the Running in Production podcast[0] and to get the highest quality audio I can for the show I ask guests to locally record their side of the conversation with Audacity while I do the same on my end. Then we talk in real-time over Zoom to have the actual conversation.

Out of 70+ episodes there hasn't been a single case where something went wrong due to Audacity. These are shows where we're continuously recording for 60-90 minutes too.

All I ended up doing was write up a quick guide. Basically how to download it, making sure your "good" mic is selected and doing a test recording. No one has ever complained that the process was too involved or hard to follow. Most folks get set up in less than 2 minutes with no assistance and most guests have never recorded audio before.

[0]: https://runninginproduction.com/

Have you considered using Jamulus[0] for both talking in realtime and recording high quality audio? Jamulus server supports recording separate tracks to Reaper and Audacity projects. I suspect it will be easier for your guests to set up. Using Audacity is probably a better option unless something goes wrong for any of the guests. Using Jamulus will minimize the room for error.

I've also written an extensive guide for getting the best possible results with recording speech: "Voice recording and processing for talks, streaming and conferencing"[1]. Hope it can be of use.

0. https://jamulus.io

1. https://indiscipline.github.io/post/voice-sound-reference/

> I ask guests to locally record their side of the conversation with Audacity while I do the same on my end.

That's so simple and so obvious that I'll punish myself 1000 years for not having thought about it :-)

Hah, what were you doing before?

I thought about using 1 of many online services for this but they all came with very big warnings and potential issues like audio drift (tracks get more and more out of sync as time goes on), garbled quality or worse. It ultimately boiled down to not feeling like I could trust any of these services.

Love your podcast!

Hey, thanks a lot for listening to it.

Would you be able to share a copy of the guide?

Sure, it's all text based that I send in an email. The Audacity specific part of the guide is:

---

3. Locally recording our own individual audio tracks

Programs like Zoom and Google Hangouts are great for talking in real-time but their audio quality is extremely low for a podcast.

So we'll be recording our own individual audio tracks. Basically that means you'll want to download a tool so that you can press record on your own computer, record your side of things and then be in a position to send me the exported result of that. Then I'll combine our tracks together in the end.

Don't worry, we'll do an audio test and double check things together on the call to make sure things are set up properly before we hit record.

If you're not already familiar with tools to locally record your own audio track you can try using https://www.audacityteam.org/. It's free, open source and works on all major platforms. It's a fantastic tool.

After starting Audacity there will be a drop down box near the top of the toolbar where you can select your microphone. If you have multiple microphones please make sure your best microphone is selected.

macOS and Linux users can use the defaults for everything else. If you're on Windows there is a drop down box that says MME to the left of where you pick your microphone. You should change that to Windows WASAPI to ensure you get good quality audio.

Next up you can try recording yourself a few times to get the hang of the program. You can do that by pressing the big red button. After doing so when you speak into your microphone you should see a bunch of blue bars and lines scroll across your screen. That's good! It means your microphone is picking up your voice.

You can confirm if things recorded properly by pressing stop and then playing back your recording. You should hear yourself loud and clear. If you can't then make sure your headphones or speakers are selected in the drop down box to the right of your mic.

If you want to send me a sample that would be fine, but you don't have to.

After we finish our call, it will be very important to stop the recording, save the project and then export it to both wav and mp3 files (just to be safe). You can do that by going to the File menu and then picking Save Project -> Save Project. You can save it anywhere you want.

That will ensure your recording gets saved in case something catastrophic happens while exporting the files, such as the power going out or Audacity crashing for whatever reason.

Lastly, you'll want to do a File -> Export and then choose wav. Once that finishes you'll want to do the same thing for mp3. The default settings are fine.

Keep in mind the recording will be roughly 60 minutes long when we do it for real which will take up about 400-500 MB of disk space, so make sure you have at least 1 GB of space to be safe before recording.

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