Mark Drew (Redux)- cf_etc...

So finally, after the whole being ill and Christmas holidays hiatus, I finally managed to edit the CFDocs podcast from December (Follow the link above to get more details on the episode).

One of the things that has been concerning me was how to record the damn thing! I have a Yamaha 8:2 Mixer but still the mic's that we got for the first podcast turned out to be unpowered so we couldn't use them. This left me with a problem... how to record four people (and the audience) and keep the quality at *some* acceptable level.

What we did was put two MacBooks (one Pro, one not) and record the whole session down using Audacity and the built in Microphones. This worked well, and to get the synching of the two tracks at edit time I simply banged my finger sharply on the desk (to the hilarity of other people present) to get a nice spike that I could see in the track.

After editing both tracks, removing the "erms" and "arrs" and "so..." as well as some idle chatter I rendered down the recording and moved it into GarageBand to make the actual podcast and mix in the music track.

I would love to hear people's opinions if it worked or not, as well as any suggestions on (cheap!) setups to hopefully improve the sound quality. Remembering of course that there are usually four people speaking as well as maybe questions from the audience.

Otherwise, just enjoy the podcast!