From the course: Producing Professional Audio and Video Podcasts (2021)

Voice over IP software

From the course: Producing Professional Audio and Video Podcasts (2021)

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Voice over IP software

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- If you're going to be using a computer or a electronic device, like a tablet or smartphone, you're going to need some sort of voice over IP software, VOIP. This allows you to communicate with others using a data connection, and it's essential to the modern way of podcasting. Now, lots of manufacturers have tools for this out there, but there's a lot that you already know. Tools like Skype, FaceTime, or Zoom are very quite popular and they work well. Although you may need to add an optional piece of recording software that sits on top of the tool. Let's take a look here, for example, at Skype. I'll initiate a call with someone within my company, and I'm going to use the Call via Skype. (electronic ring tone) Once you've successfully connected you will see the ability that you can start recording here. So you'll notice that I can initiate a record. It will begin to record and keeps the conversation going. Give it a second to spin up to speed and then you'll start to see it counting down. Now, when you're all done, you can stop recording. This is fine, but there are other tools that can sit on top of this. For example, if you're on the Mac platform Ecamm offers a great alternative that works with Skype called Call Recorder. It's also available for FaceTime. Let's go ahead and reinitiate a Skype call. (electronic ring tone) It's connected. And what we're going to take advantage of now is Call Recorder. Now, you'll notice Call Recorder off to the side here. This is a Mac-only application, but there are PC equivalents. This'll give you some flexibility here to control what happens. For example, we can record uncompressed audio, and can also control how the video is recorded up to 720P. Let's go ahead here and check our settings. All right, let's go ahead and place that in. We're getting okay microphone levels. We'll just adjust our monitor there. Looks pretty solid. That's our input. And over here on Skype, we'll check the same thing. Let's go to our audio and video settings. I'll identify a video camera to use. Although I'm not using the video camera here. What I'm more concerned about is the audio input, and let's select the USB audio codec. There we go. We're getting good solid volume and I can close that. So now if I record, you'll see that I've got my input levels coming through. Rachel, can you go ahead and unmute and talk on your side as well? - [Rachel] Hello, my name is Rachel. Testing, one, two, three. - Good. Both levels are coming through. Now when I click stop here on the record, what's nice is that it actually recorded those as separate files. You'll notice that Rachel's audio and my audio are split apart, giving us independent control. So if she had a lot of background noise at her end I could independently equalize and remove sound for background noise, and there's mine. So this gives you some great control for flexibility. Now, we're going to take a look a little bit later at some other tools like Zencastr and Zoom, but there's a wealth of options out there. The point being is that these days the same tools that you use to have calls with business colleagues can also be turned into podcasting tools. You may need to add a little optional bit of add-on software to have greater flexibility like you saw here, but it does give you great options when it comes to podcasting.

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