I began the MacHelp from Maui podcast with a Tascam PocketStudio and an old singer’s mic I had laying about. But when my Carmen joined-up we upgraded to a Behringer 4-track mixer, a Shure SM-59 and an AKG something mic which made it sound 100% better. For a while I recorded straight into GarageBand which is amazing but difficult for tight editing, so I switched over to Sound Studio for the pre-production work. I like Audacity, but it crashes if you don’t save often and Sound Studio allows me to add track marks, compress and normalise.

But my old G4 was always so loud I could hear it in the mix so we’re now recording to a tiny Edirol R-09 recorder patched directly into the mixer. This lets me turn the big Mac off when recording and use my PowerBook to browse as needed. The Edirol is just amazing! I get three hours recording at 330bits, or 45 minutes at 24-bit WAVE and it’s absolutely silent. It’s about the size of an iPod and has great headroom with built-in mics for doing interviews.

The R-09 is then plugged into my big Mac (USB) where the tracks are chopped and compressed with Sound Studio before being dragged into GarageBand for the final mix.

I wish I didn’t have to move the files around so much, but I like a real clear sound and the whole rig, except for the mic stands, fits into a  shoulder bag. If GarageBand had better editing I’d do everything there.

We’re going to try some phone interviews soon, Apple’s iChat automatically patches into GarageBand recording both sides of the conversation as well as the mic inputs on separate tracks. It’s a little fussy getting the programs to talk, you have to open everything in the right order but then the tracks just appear and you hit record.

Since all of our listeners are on Macs or listen through iTunes, we mix down to AAC with embeded graphics and links. A 45 minute mono show ends up at about 9-12 megs even with all the pictures attached.

The RSS feed is made with Radio UserLand which, except for it’s perfect RSS rendering sucks rocks.  I run the feed through FeedBurner where the header and iTunes tages are added. The podcast shows up at iTunes within 15 minutes of being posted.

Each podcast currently takes about an hour to record then two to three hours to edit. It would be nice to just record, edit, upload then put the kettle on.

Scott & Carmen