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So in the first 5 articles we have looked at the hardware, the software needed to record your audio, and the process to get it out to those wishing to listen to it. In this month's article, we will look at how we record the audio for a multi-host podcast when you are all in different locations, and the process of putting that audio together for publication on the internet. For the purposes of this article, I will talk about how we do this on the mintCast podcast as this was my first experience of being on and being part of the post-production team editing the show audio. I am by no means an expert, and others may have different methods that would make the process easier or the final product sound better, but this is what we have found works quite well for us. If you have any suggestions or comments on what I discuss here, please write a letter or another article outlining your process for audio editing; Ronnie is always up for more content for the magazine.
First let us talk about how we record the show. On mintCast, we use Mumble to meet up both to plan and record the show. We record every two weeks on a Sunday evening at 8pm UK local time, 3pm EST in the US. During the periods when the clocks change in the spring and autumn (fall for our US friends) things can get a little complicated, but that’s just the way these things happen. As mintCast is now a weekly show, you may have gathered (and it is no secret to those who listen to the live feed) that we record the show and split it into 2 episodes; this is so we can be weekly without upping the recording commitment, which, if you start your own podcast, you will need to think about. On Distrohoppers, we chose to be monthly, partly for better show content, and partly to reduce the time commitment needed for the recording and post production process.
Back to the recording. As I have said, we all use Mumble to record the show, and within mumble you have the facility to record the audio; while this is not the best option for the final edit, we do this as a backup in case the local audio of one of the hosts recorded in Audacity fails for some reason. To do this, we record Mumble using the multi-track function and change the mode to .flac. One of the advantages of recording the Mumble tracks is that Mumble automatically syncs the audio, so, if a host drops out and rejoins while their audio would now be on 2 separate tracks, they are in sync with the rest of the show audio and you can merge these down to a single audio track that is easier to edit back into the final recording. Just one other point to note is that each episode of the show is also live streamed on YouTube, and, if we have a total disaster, we also have the audio from this as a further backup.
So that is Mumble and how we can all talk to each other, and record audio. But, to give a better quality final edit, we also all record our own audio track locally using Audacity. For those who are not aware of Audacity, it is a fairly powerful audio recording and editing program that is still reasonably easy for a novice audio editor like myself to get to grips with. The latest version is 2.4.2 but the Ubuntu repositories currently have 2.3.2, although, if you wish to install the latest version on Ubuntu or Mint, you can install the Snap or Flatpak.
So before we start to record the show, we all start audacity and save a mono audio track as our initials and the episode number. Example: THEp340.aup this is the raw audacity format. Then the person leading the audio recording will do a countdown of 3,2,1, record, and we all start our Audacity recording at the same instant; at this point we record 25 seconds of silence to record the background noise at each person’s location for later editing of the audio. Then shortly following the silence, we will do another countdown of 3,2,1, Zero, where the audio lead does the countdown and we all say zero together; this is later used as a way of lining up the individual audio tracks to account for lag over the internet.
At this point, if I am the audio lead, I will hand back to Leo as the show’s lead host, and we will start the recording of the show. At the end of the show recording, we all stop our audio and the first thing we do is save the track as the raw audacity file by going to file – save project. This ensures we have the audio as an audacity file if the export goes wrong. We then export as a .flac by going file - Export – Export audio, choose a location to save the .flac file to, and select the best quality 24bit for future editing. Once we have all done this, we each send a copy of our audio file of the show to a folder in our drive account so the editor can download all the audio for the post show process.
So that is how we get the audio; next month, we will look at putting all those tracks together and producing the edit that you, the listener, hear each week. If you wish to contact me for more information you can get me at: distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com or th@mintcast.org