As it stands, I’m getting the audio using Audio Hijack and editing in Audacity, but I’m running into some quirks with Audio Hijack and I’m looking for some tips!
I’m using the Voice Chat preset on Audio Hijack.
However, with this setting my output audio comes out a little odd. I get a single track of audio with two of my colleagues on one side and myself on the other. I then have to split to two mono tracks in Audacity. The result is two mono tracks, one with my colleagues, and one with me. I’d love to have us on individual tracks from the jump, but I’m not sure if that’s possible with this setup.
How would you record this? I’m guessing the best option would be to have everyone record local audio and then I combine them? That seems like a hassle to me…
This is definitely a “baby’s first podcast question” but any insight is appreciated!
This is by far the best option as the audio quality is much better. Zoom does strange stuff to the audio—I’m guessing to improve clarity at the expense of quality.
For my podcast, we record our audio separately and the Zoom audio. I use the Zoom audio in post to sync the two audio tracks and then delete it. It takes less than a few minutes to sync up the audio tracks, which is worth it to me so we can use the highest quality audio.
I sync up the audio in Logic Pro by moving the audio for each track around to match Zoom’s reference audio track. But you don’t need Logic; any multi-track audio editor, like GarageBand, will do.
FWIW, before I export the final, combined episode audio file, I check the levels of each track, apply some light compression, insert a noise gate on each channel, perform some minor EQ adjustments, and create chapter markers. After that, I do the final episode transcode and set its metadata using Forecast.
Very much. I really need to move on from Audacity, lol. It’s just been the thing I’m most experienced with so even though it’s clunky in the immediate moment it’s faster for me to use it than learning something new.
