I was recently asked to help out in putting together the podcast portion of the NAR President’s Report blog. The goal was to make it as easy as possible for everyone involved. With a clever piece of equipment and some open source software I think we reached that goal.
To simplify recording, it was determined that Mr. Stevens would call an NAR staffer who would record the podcast on their computer. The first task was to get the computer hooked up to the phone. When I was brought into the process, this piece of equipment was already identified. It sits in-line on the cord going to the handset, and has a line out that you’d hook up to the computer. The staffer (Laura) assigned to this was out in DC, so once she got all the hardware she needed and hooked it up, we moved on to the next step.
I suggested that we try using Audacity as the audio recording program. Audacity is an open source cross-platform sound recorder and editor. I know that many podcasts from a family of podcasts I listen to use Audacity for their recording and editing, so I figured it would work here as well. We spend about 40 minutes on the phone and using Windows Remote Assistance so I could see what Laura was seeing on her PC in DC. We did some tests on audio level and did some sample recordings. I showed Laura how to do quick edits and noise reduction and how to export the file as an MP3 via the Lame MP3 encoder plugin.
All in all it came out very well, especially considering the content was being spoken over a phone. One mistake we made was we encoded the mp3 at 128 kbps. That is massive overkill for encoding mono spoken word. It results in a file much much larger than it needs to be. On the next incarnation we’ll be dropping the bit rate dramatically.
