Sonibyte Podcasting Blog

Tools for Creating Your Own Audio Files--Microphones and Headsets

As promised, we are now going to offer advice on what tools to buy if you want to create your own audio files for your podcast.  Please note these two caveats:

1. Personal taste matters.  The human ear is a strange, picky, idiosyncratic device.  Wine experts will argue for years over the merits of a certain vintage--audio experts do the same about audio equipment.
2. This is a technology area, so everything changes, all the time.  New products come along every five minutes and a certain model of equipment can disappear from the shelves, overnight.

Because this area is so plastic, we hope you will chime in with your comments and ideas. Our goal is to help people start producing audio files that will be cleaned up and distributed using a tool such as Sonibyte.

If you were planning to become a professional voiceover artist, you would buy a high-quality condenser microphone.  You would then work in a sound-proof room and feed your signal into a high quality pre-amplifier.  You would do things like put filters into the system to adjust the sound, use different microphones for different jobs, and would worry about little things like keeping things that have fans (like your computer) outside the room.  If you are in this mode, you'd visit sites such as Recording Hacks and its "How to use a microphone database" or Nurple.com's great post on microphones.

In contrast, we will assume that you just want to record a telephone interview with a guest who works from home.  There will be an ocassional door slam, some dog barks, and a few long moments of silence when one of you is trying to figure out what to say.  (Hopefully no crying babies and neither of you will have a cold!)  A basic choice that our staff likes is the MXL 990.  It will cost you about $60.  You can find more good suggestions for less expensive microphones on the Musician's Friend Web site.

Once you've recorded your sound, you need use a good set of headphones to listen to what you've done, so you can check and be sure it is OK.  Our staff likes headphones from AKG (the AKG K240 is good), AudioTechnica (such as the ATH M20) and Sony (such as the MDRV250V).  They haven't tried Sennheiser's headphones (such as the HD 201), but suspect they will be pretty good, based on how well Sennheiser's other microphones perform.  You can also buy a combo headset and microphone.  Our staff suggest you look at the Yamaha CM500.  They cost only about $50.

We've linked above to Amazon for each microphone and headphone we mention above.  You'll see that the prices for these components range from $16 to $90.  You may be able to get better deals, newer (or older) models, or other headsets that work just fine.  These headsets should all work OK with either Macs or PCs, but take a good look at the jacks on your computer to be sure they are standard minijacks.

Podcasting continues to look pretty inexpensive, doesn't it?  In the next post, we'll look at audio capture software, some of which is even cheaper (free!).

Tools for Creating Your Own Audio Files--An Overview

You don't need any tools or special knowledge to create a podcast, if you use our Sonibyte toolkit.  We'll help set up your feed and take care of distributing it to iTunes, Zunes, etc.  You don't need an audio file--our voiceover artists can convert any text into great-sounding audio.  You don't need a sound engineer--our engineers will put everything together into a professional package.

However, some of our customers like to do some or all of their audio production, themselves.  Their reasons for doing this include:

• They want to use their own voice for their episodes.  This is most often true when the feed is about the personal experiences or views of the author OR when the author already has some experience with acting, radio-hosting, or voiceover.
• The episode is centered around an interview or other type of audio content.  Interviews and discussions make great material for podcasts.  However, it may help to have the "intro" and "outro" done by one of our professional voice artists.
• To save a small amount of money.  Our voiceover and sound engineer fees are modest.  Still, by doing your own voiceover and/or sound engineering, you can cut the cost to do a podcast episode with our service from $50 to under $20.

To create your own audio, you need two things:

1. A good quality microphone and headset.  You need the microphone to be able to capture sound properly and then you need to be able to hear your sound well enough to detect any problems.
2. Some kind of software to capture your sound.  Podcasts are distributed with relatively low quality sound (mono at 44 KHz is typical), so you can capture your sound directly into a file on your computer.

Once you have your audio on your computer, you will need sound manipulation tools if you want to do your own sound engineering.  You'll want to take out pops and hiss, trim "ums" and "uhs" from the conversation, and make sure the "level" of the sound is constant.  This stuff is tricky to do well, and you need to know what you are doing!

The basic stuff--microphone and capture software--is cheap.  You can get a good microphone and headset combo for as little as $50 and some of the available capture software is free.  Higher end sound engineering software costs $300 and up.  But, whether you do none or all of the production work, podcasting remains a pretty inexpensive and effective way to distribute your content.  In our next post, we will offer some advice and info on how to select these tools.