so the skype plugin destroys the audio quality,
Nope. Pamela does an excellent job capturing the conversation. Skype is destroying the quality.
If your goal is broadcast quality conversations, many people use split recording. Each person at each location uses a very high quality (but simple) recorder to record their voice. At the end of the show, each person sends the high quality voice recording to one person “in the middle” for editing into a final high quality show. The people talk to each other on Skype or telephone or cellphone or whatever. That voice quality can be trashy since it never makes it into the show.
I shot a split broadcast at our company that way.
This looks way too complicated because we double recorded it for safety. So that’s actually two sound shoots. Our interviewee called the station with that phone on the desk and they chatted for a half-hour. I recorded everything with that Audacity computer to the left and used our FTP service to ship the sound file out. We could have used DropBox. The station said they did little or no corrections to my shoot and it went to air like that. It sounded like the two people were sitting in the living room talking to each other.
That’s similar to how this musical piece was done. This was not a live shoot.
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I have also created a very high quality Skype capture with two computers and a mixer.
In this case both parties (at opposite ends of the US) had headphones and good quality microphones so Skype didn’t have to do echo cancellation or volume management. Echo cancellation can cause all sorts of problems. The machine on the right did all the Skype heavy lifting and the one on the left played theme, bumper and interstitial music and recorded the show in Audacity.
Both of those computers have Stereo Line-In, so they interfaced perfectly with just connection cables.
It helped a lot that both ends of the call had good to excellent internet service. Low or intermittent internet will kill you on shoots like this. If you start having connection troubles, drop the video.
I have a sample of that shoot here somewhere…
Koz