Well having had gotten a few solo shows under my belt I decided last night to get down to doing a test recording with my co-host on the MacCraic Podcast Dave. I wanted to wait until I had a better microphone than just the built in one on the MacBook Pro which I had been using before. This week my lovely Plantronics Audio 650 USB arrived. So last night we sat down and fired up Skype and Wiretap Studio (from Ambrosia Software) and went about recording our conversation.
Well the first mistake was that I let the recording go on for over 30 minutes before I decided to check it. Boy oh boy was Dave coming in hot. The audio was flatting out everywhere. Now Dave has a good booming voice so I should have expected it. I knew there was a way to correct this and get us both sounding good. What was that piece of software called again? Oh yes the Levelator (love that name). I threw the recording at the Levelator (not really expecting miracles) but it only made minor changes. The difference between our two recordings was too great to fix.
I went back into my sound preferences and played around with a few sliders and had Dave do the same. We tried another couple of minutes. No I am still getting that flat spot at the top of the audio. Back in and tried another few sliders but to no avail.
I knew it could be fixed so I told Dave that we would abandon testing for the night and I would go back and listen to Allison Sheridan’s wonderful series Podcasting on Podcasting in which she describes how to do what we were trying to do. (You can find Allison at podfeet.com)
Sure enough the solution I had been looking for was right there in front of me and I hadn’t noticed it. I had done everything except this. On the call window in Skype is a volume slider which allows you to reduce the volume of the caller. No let me say I had noticed this but in my infinite wisdom concluded that that could not be the solution. How wrong was I?
In addition I had my microphone turned down too low so you can imagine the contrast when I listened back to the audio. The content was good however, even if I do humbly say so. 
So it’s back into testing tonight hoping to get some better audio. Thanks ever so much to the wonderful work of Allison over at podfeet.com. I would encourage you to go and check out her site and subscribe to the NosillaCast.
