Audacity Forum

most of the skype recorders lose the quality of the headset I'm using (Audio Technica BPHs1). Does Pamela record high quality?

I assume it's fine... Most audio quality issues are on the "analog side" or related transmission quality.... The local sound should be much better than the sound transmitted over the phone network. Of course, that mic requires that you use your mixer which has the proper XLR balanced, low-impedance, microphone interface. (It's not a "computer mic".)

So there is no solution for the audacity glitch?

I don't think it's fair to call it a or glitch (or bug). Audacity works with the regular Windows driver protocol which only allows recording from one sound source/device at at a time.

And as others have said, Skype "takes over" your computer's audio. That's a good thing if you want Skype work easily and reliably, but it might be a bad thing if you want to run another audio application at the same time, especially if the other application needs different settings.

There was one posting from someone who went into The Dreaded Windows Registry and forced the recordings to work, but that's not something I would wish on anyone and it's not clear Skype continued to work right after he did it.

That's usually the problem. You can get either Audacity to work, or Skype, not both. Some celebrity Unicorns do manage to luck into a particular combination that works like this one:

Reel Life Podcast
http://reellife.podomatic.com/

I think Chase has given up the good fight and is doing something else now, but his simple install and podcast worked perfectly right out of the gate and I think still works. Multi-point Skype with music, stingers, theme and local microphones. He's looking at all of us like we're crazy.

We're not crazy. It's much more normal for a recording to do what yours is doing. The local microphone is just a local microphone, so Audacity has no trouble with that. The far side, however, is a Skype service with echo cancellation and environment suppression, so that one is seriously magic. Typically, if you can force that to work, the far side stops hearing you clearly because the echo management falls apart.

This isn't for the easily frightened.

So unless you get lucky and find the one setting that solves your problem, you are now normal and yours works just like everybody else.

You can totally go with one of the lower tier offerings, or try Pamela on one of their lesser plans to see if it's going to work. You may not need Business or Professional if you don't care that the show is split with you on one side and the far side on the other. That's so you can apply filters and corrections to their voice without affecting you. Many of the other offerings just jam everything together and what you get is what you got.

Automatically saving as MP3 is not a good idea because MP3 compression distortion gets worse each time to have to do production and you can't stop it. That's why the better packages use WAV or one of the other uncompressed formats.

Koz