I recorded the second episode of feathercast this afternoon. The interview (with Geir) took 25 minutes and the subsequent editing another 3 hours. That’s a lot quicker than the previous one and setup I used worked a lot better this time. The quality seems better and I’ve been more careful with the editing. Audacity is also starting to feel more familiar and I’m getting more adventurous with the editing. That said, the day could have gone smoother!

As I was using a different setup of mics and headset, I wanted to test out how Skype sounded before the interview. I tried using the echo service – which I’ve used a lot before – and it repeatedly failed to connect. Without being able to test I felt a little uneasy going into the interview, but the setup worked better than the previous one.
I’d also adjusted the laptops volume a few days ago while listening to some music, but had forgotten and so it was set very low – so low I did wonder if the recordings would be OK, but in the event they were fine. (Knowing geir meant that had it all gone wrong I was reasonably sure he wouldn’t have minded repeating, which is one of the reasons I asked him!).

I think I’ll try and construct a short checklist of things I need to check/setup before recording an interview for future use. Learning these lessons now is useful and hopefully the output will get better and better. The setup I’m using (HotRecorder on Windows) seems stable and certainly works well with little effort. It might be nice to have seperate tracks for each person, but with my limited editing skills having them combined is probably a good thing 🙂