January 9, 2006

Upcoming Podcasts

I decided to change how I record interviews that I'm doing for my upcoming audio podcast. So I'll probably start posting interviews starting later this week or first thing next week.

At first I had this ambitious plan of conducting many of the interviews using VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) services - essentially making telephone calls over the Internet - and then recording these calls on my hard drive.

But my experimentation with setting this up with Skype ended-up being too much of a hassle and a waste of time. I like Skype and the voice quality is often excellent and the price for computer-to-computer calls is perfect - it's free. But I'm tired of trying to record high-quality interviews via Skype.

So I've gone back to the regular telephone. First I got the lowest rates I could get for International calls - I already have flat rates for all US calls. It's less expensive than I thought. England is $0.08 per minute, Germany is $0.10 and Japan is $0.10. And most interviews will be less than 10 minutes any way, which means that the cost will often be no more than $1.00.

Also, I have to buy a piece of equipment to improve the quality of interviews recorded by phone. If you've ever recorded a phone conversation, you'll have noticed that your voice is significantly louder than the person on the other end. If you want to broadcast this recorded interview, the results will not be very professional. What you want is for the sound levels of each person's voice to be the same.

So I'm buying a device from JK Audio called an Inline Patch Telephone Audio Interface. Once I connect this device to my telephone line, I can then independently control the sound levels for my voice and the caller on the other end of the phone, which means that the sound levels will be identical and the interview quality will be much higher. Then I'll output the voice to a portable digital audio recorder that I have or directly to my hard drive.

I should have this audio device this week and then soon start uploading interviews.

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