Record Mic and Computer Sound Simultaneously

[kozikowski]

Briefly, I have one machine playing back music/effects and recording the finished show. That's the two major natural sound pathways. One in and one out.

The other machine manages Skype. This seemed to be a graceful way to split the tasks. Everything goes through the mixer. You want a louder Skype, you reach over and turn it up. If the music is too loud, that's knob number three. Balancing your voice does take some getting used to since your ears are getting your voice in two pathways, through your head conduction and through the headphone signals. In my past life I was a board op, so I never had to worry about that.

I think you ran into the problem of "ducking" the music after the opening theme (should you want to get overly fancy). You have to find the Windows playback slider in real time.

I should post a picture of the mixer. I used to think it was wimping out to print Magic Marker and Masking Tape labels under each knob explaining what each one was until I saw the woman mixing a major television news show doing the exact same thing.

I'm not a particularly quick learn, so I want to read through that -- probably more than once.

We're going to send you a basket of fruit or something. Nobody ever wants to hang around and help with projects like this. And I suspect you are doing as well as you can possibly do while using one machine.

Do you have anything else that will record high-quality sound? You don't need the second computer if you play music from your iPod and record the show on Something Else. I borrowed a Zoom portable recorder from a friend currently working multiple time zones away and doesn't need it. So you can have "broadcast versatility" without two computers.

Koz

[Chaseisfdr]

I have an iPod and iPad....

I am going to plug them in and mess around with that. It might be easy to do on the iPad for sure. Part of the shows purpose though is being able to do things "on the fly" so I may think of a certain sound effect thats appropriate for the time and need to play it in a hurry. Ultimately I will have a ton of little sound bytes that I have captured from different movies or whatever. I feel like I might as well do it from the same PC, because I am going to have to use stereo mix to record skype and myself at the same time anyway...

but I am going to plug my iPad in and mess around. Should be fun

[Chaseisfdr]

Tried it....works great! I can adjust the volume all the way with no feedback either. Which leads me to believe this (or a 2nd computer) could be a viable option.

Allow me to brainstorm

I could use my PC to record my voice only. (It would also be conducting the skype call, but not recording it)
I could use another PC to play and record all music and sound effects in its own track.
My brother could record his voice on his own PC from his side...

Then I could merge the 3 tracks together, this would allow me to be able to edit and EQ each one individually if needed.....

It;s a loft goal, and one that I probably would not attempt right now, but I think it would work. Yeah?

[kozikowski]

That's nearly the broadcast version, except you need to stop recording Stereo Mix. In your current config, that will always give you your voice and music premixed.

So both sides record their own microphone (Line-In in your case) and that will produce a very high quality local voice for each location and it does not violate the sound pathway restrictions. No Stereo Mix. Export as WAV and email or FTP one file to the other for mixing into the final show.

All The Music Happens in Post Production. All of it. Since you're stuck with post production anyway, mixing live during the show is a complete waste of time and very difficult to do if you insist on splitting feeds like that.

That's how we did the NPR "Double Ender" I shot several months ago. I was at the far end, but it was interview voices only. No production or music. This is the Very Serious Overkill version, but that's exactly what we were doing. We double recorded it for even better overkill.

http://www.kozco.com/tech/audacity/pix/ ... dShoot.jpg

Your goal is an odd mixture of completely live, real-time like Rush Limbaugh or locally, Larry Mantle, and a completely post produced show like This American Life. TAL goes out and gets interviews or sometimes calls up from the studio and constructs the finished, polished show over the next week adding pauses, music segments, stingers, interstitials, etc. etc. That sounds a lot more like what you're trying to do.

At the risk of designing your show for you, there are really valuable web sites on how to do it -- how to tell stories.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/about/make-radio

Scroll down to Glass's Manifesto. It's a cute video.

Koz

[kozikowski]

They did this before there was any provision to chain videos, so here are all four segments:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/about/make-radio
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW6x7lOIsPE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI23U7U2aUY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baCJFAGEuJM

Koz

[Chaseisfdr]

This is very cool, thanks!

I'll keep you guys updated on my adventures in broadcasting!

[kozikowski]

Post a URL when you get a show.
Are you still on Win7?

[Chaseisfdr]

Still on Windows 7, yeah.

I'll post a link as soon as we get a show up. Gotta hammer out a few of the actual content things. Hopefully it wont be too long

[kozikowski]

Prepare for: "how did you do this" and "how did you do that?" Is the bro in another city going to be a regular?

If you're good at bouncing off each other that could be seriously cool. A radio station in Washington DC lost their afternoon drive time team and they went through all of the employees at the station one pair at a time until they hit one. It was way at the end of the employees and it was the worst imaginable combination. A young squirt and a veteran broadcaster. Somewhere in the first two hours of the show, one cracked the other up -- for real -- and they've been mopping the floor with the other stations ever since.

Oh, right. Content. That's what scares me about doing a show. I think I could hold up my end of a printed blog and I may try that, but weekly would be pushing it. 'I publish weakly.'

Koz

[darsk]

I know this thread is nearly a year old now, but I help with The Morning Stream and have been in Scott's studio. In fact, I have a somewhat more versatile setup similar to Scott's.

I also do a podcast and can tell you all you need to know if you didn't find what you needed a year ago. Email me: thetipgiver (at) gmail (dot) com.

Thanks,
Darrell