You would think with all the postings we have made on this and similar subjects we would have a solution ready to go. All the other postings have been from people who already doing it badly and we supply Disaster Recovery. Nobody asked to start from the beginning before.
How are you calling each other? Pretend there’s no podcast, just a conference call. What kind of computers do people have? Are you using computers at each location?
I had breakfast at a cafe counter with someone who said they were going to have a business conference call shortly. I asked him how and he handed me his iPhone and earbuds. I assume he wasn’t going to record it, though.
If everyone is on a laptop, I’d be tempted to record each voice on their own laptop with the built-in microphone. Modern laptops are designed to do this job as business communications machines. People get into trouble when they try to force modern laptops to record music.
You, too. Forget the mixer and microphone and additional stuff. Do a first pass with just the built-in microphone and see what happens. If you’re all on Macs, this is a no-brainer. If not, it’s harder, but should still work.
Here’s where I get into trouble. I believe you an get away with Skyping to each other. Typically, Audacity can record the local microphone, but not both sides. Everybody wears headphones (required) and at the end, everybody exports a sound file and ships the files to you.
There was a recent poster who was doing something like this. I don’t remember why he posted a question.
You import all the different voices one above the other in Audacity and use the Time Shift Tool to move them slightly sooner or later to make the conversation timings match. Audacity will play them all at the same time unless you SOLO or MUTE each voice.
This has the advantage of almost no cost except for headphones. You can use earbuds, but I’m not a fan of those, and each location has a first-person, perfect quality, performer voice. No Skype fading, bubbling and gargling. Each location has their own noise and room sound problems, but you’re going to have that no matter what you do.
However, each location performer is an Independent Production Producer and if anybody’s recording fails, their voice will drop out of the show.
It was depressing that recently we had a poster trying to one-man-band a recording like yours (everything recording at his house) and it just wasn’t working. Turns out he had tried some of our normal software recommendations and they didn’t work very well with conferences and Windows 10.
Not good news.
Koz