AudioShocker

It's harder than you would think. Recording the actual podcast, that is. Neal setup the blog and podcast web infrastructure with success over the course of a couple days. And he did it well. But getting the actual podcast product proves to be a bit trickier.

First off, there's the distance. Neal lives in Illinois and I live in Pennsylvania. That means this is going to be a "call in" podcast, especially if we decide to do interviews in the future. So Skype was my natural first choice for getting the damn thing done. Coupled with Sunflower - an application that allows me to reroute the internal audio of my computer into the recording program of my choice (in my case, Audacity) - I can do everything internally in my machine.

Skype is also a great choice because it allows me to make both domestic and international phone calls from my computer if I choose to do so. This would allow for interviews easily in the future. But alas, the free computer-to-computer calling program has serious buffering issues on my iMac G4, and making it record smoothly could take some serious work.

So next up was the option of recording my cell phone conversation with Neal straight out of the headset jack. Inspired by a podcaster who blogged his experience of rewiring his headset into a recording device, I split open my crappy headset to see if it would even work. Nothing. Not that I know much about rewiring that sort of thing, but I had no luck. At all.

Then there's RadioShack and their two cell phone recording options. I called up my local store to see if they had anything in stock. They did. But the RadioShack salesman warned me that many new versions of Samsung and Motorola phones have a different input than the traditional cell phone headset. Apparently they've flipped the mic and ground lines on the 2.5 mm headset jack, rendering things like RadioShack's wireless recording devices useless.

So that's where I'm at. I'm going to return to Skype and see if the issues can be resolved. Otherwise, Neal would record his end on his computer while I record my own voice. Then he would send me over his audio and I would mix it with mine. Not bad, but not the best way to make an AudioShocker.