I realize this may be a lost cause, but wanted to see if anyone has a possible fix.
This is from a phone recording, using Voicemeeter as the digital mixer; Reaper as the recording software; and Google Voice for the phone call.
I recorded a test which was fine; then reloaded the recording setting in Reaper, and this is a sample of what I got.
I do edit in Audacity even though I use the above software for the recording (though am thinking of going back to recording on Audacity after this).
Happy to pay someone w/expertise for their time who can fix it if it takes any more than offering suggestions to apply.
I’m out. I think that’s too far gone. I think you’re knocking on the door of Hollywood “magic.” Transcribe the voices to paper scrips and have actors read them in a quiet room or studio. If you are one of the voices, that’s one less actor.
Have you ever heard of simul-speak? You listen to the dialog in your headphones and speak the words one, two, or three words late. No script needed. It would seem that people who can do that are celebrity unicorns, but that’s relarkably easy for normal people to do and really easy for actors. It takes a bit of practice.
Given what you have now, you could gather around a phone with a sound recorder in a quiet room and be further ahead.
Nobody has yet talked me out of the rule that you don’t record the show on the machine doing the call. It’s not that it fails. That would be good. It’s unstable. Communication programs have to take over the computer to work right and they’re vicious about it. There is no gracefully sharing voice pathways with a recorder.
For a good seven to eight years I had a run recording with Google Voice and Audacity that was low-maintenance and essentially problem-free…
only then did the communication program (g-Voice) start taking over by messing with my levels…
so I got some assistance switching over to this new setup with Voicemeeter etc., and now this.
If you would be able to walk me through an Audacity-based setup for recording phone calls, from start to finish (in person if you’re in the L.A. area would be ideal), I’d be happy to pay you for your time…
I don’t think there is an Audacity-based setup. The latest communications programs take over the computer. It’s their computer, not yours. The only way for them to manage the good quality voices and transmissions is to manage all parts of the process. What you want is irrelevant.
And there are update problems, too.
The problem isn’t always getting a recording to work. It’s getting it to work reliably over the long haul.
This is pretty common:
“I don’t know, either. Recording just stopped working. It was fine all last week.”
The only way to avoid that is get the service to record the show, or you record it, but not on that computer.
I’ve recorded multiple successful sound tests with phones or Skype. In all cases I did it with either two computers, or separate sound recorder.
I thought I was the Weird Duck Outlier until I saw Stefan Drury’s video on how he shoots his videos. And there, recording his airplane cockpit conversations, was a small sound recorder and appropriate adapter.
Depending on content and show format, there is another way to do this. You get all the people in a multi-point podcast to record their own voice. This can work remarkably well, and it sounds like everybody is sitting in the room chatting, but it is a bit like marching cats.
“Albert’s microphone recording dropped out in the middle of the podcast and we had to kill the show.”
Shucks.
