Hi there. I just got s second Rode Podcaster mic set-up for my studio and want to be able to do in-studio interviews.
I could not figure out how to set things up so that my two mics record on separate tracks.
Of secondary importance, any idea on how to have a guest in-studio doing an interview with me of a third person that would be on the phone? I suppose, in this case it would be best if the person in-studio with me shared a track with me and the person we are interviewing over Skype was on the second track…unless there is a way to do three tracks at once?
Audacity can only record from one device at a time.
On a Mac it may be possible to create an “aggregate device” in the system sound set-up, then select that as the recording device for Audacity. I don’t use Macs so I’m not able to give detailed instructions.
Actually, it’s Rode Podcaster USB unless you have another variation and that’s important. In general you can’t run two USB microphones on one computer, but under Mac OS (and Linux, I believe), you can force two USB microphones to appear as one in Utilities > Audio MIDI Setup > Aggregate Device, but once you do that,you can never split the two voices apart again short of going in word by word and editing. You also can’t individually control the microphone volumes during the performance. They are, as far as the computer is concerned, one microphone.
You hit the magic wall where going from one microphone podcast to a full blown production doesn’t scale well – you can’t just double the microphones and call it good. For one thing you can’t run Skype and Audacity well on one computer. Skype takes over both the record and playback system and Audacity needs both. There are ways to force that to work, but then Skype’s graceful, effective echo cancellation goes into the toilet.
For another, you can’t feed the show to the person on Skype to listen to and answer questions. The Skype interview voice will fold back to their own ears about half-second or more late and you can’t talk when that’s happening, but you can’t turn it off because that’s where the questions are coming from. Worst case, they’re not in headphones and it will start feeding back, MUM MUM MUM MUM.
We went through all this with another poster. I’m looking for the thread.
Believe it or not, the most effective way to get around all this is something I did a couple of weeks ago, the double-ender tape sync. Each person records their own very high quality voice in their own house and you call each other on cellphones or regular phones for the interview. They send their high quality voice file to you and you fold it into the show in Audacity. The ratty cell voice never goes into the show.
The only (so far) way to do shows like this is analog microphones and a moderately large sound mixing desk with an effects send bus. Also remember both of you are going to need to be on headphones and you need a way to control your own volume. The other poster was going to do the interviews on cellphone, and short of using two computers (which would work), that’s not a terrible way to go.