Podcasting on the go
Who needs a studio when you have a microphone, an ipad and someone to talk to?
The Yeti is too thirsty for the CCK if you want to create podcasts in the wild with your iPad – unlike the Snowball
So far, we’ve been looking at ways to directly feed audio into your Mac. That’s not the only way though, and not even necessarily the best. If your Mac is in a poor recording environment for instance, you might be better off doing your podcast elsewhere, but dragging the whole machine and all the wires isn’t going to be much fun. You don’t actually need it there, though. A digital recorder such as the Zoom H1 will work just as well for recording a podcast, with the files then transferred for editing. Or, of course, you could use an iPad. You’ll need a couple of things first though, notably the Camera Connection Kit (CCK). While its main use is to copy pictures from an SD card, it comes with a USB connector that can more or less handle most of the popular podcasting microphones on the market, including the Rode Podcaster, Blue Yeti and, as used on our own shows at youtube.com/macformatuk, the Blue Nessie (see right). This is an especially effective model for recording in the wild, because it tries to control and improve your sound quality rather than simply sitting back and recording, as well as being sensitive enough to be ideal for interview situations without a multiple microphone set-up.
The first big catch is that the iPad doesn’t provide enough power for most of these, so you’ll need to provide a powered USB hub to add the necessary juice. Snowball? No problem. Yeti? Too thirsty for the CCK. The second is that you’ll at least want to plug the iPad in, because the battery is quickly going to be devoured by recording. In fairness though, you also should always plug in your device, unless it’s rated to last hours and hours like a basic digital recorder. Trust us, the only thing that’s worse than running out of power mid-record is finishing it, thanking the guest, and realising you have an hour’s worth of silence.
For most podcasting, just plugging in the microphone is more than enough. It is possible to go further though, with audio interfaces like the Alesis iO dock (two inputs, phantom power) as well as cutting out the middle-man with microphones designed to plug straight into the iPad/ iPhone. Always double-check the ports though. Not everything has been upgraded to Lightning, and even if it has, there won’t be a quality jump from going through the dock versus a wire and the CCK. (If anything, the iPhone’s signals may cause a problem unless switched to airplane mode.)
On the software side, Garage Band would seem the obvious tool. In practice however, its focus on songs is a problem – you can’t record long enough for a podcast. So, let’s look further afield.
All you really need on the go is audio recording, and a tool that can access the microphone and display the information you need (the waveform, in particular, so that you can keep an eye out for clipping). Good tools for this kind of thing include Rode’s Rec (though as the App Store reviews show, it’s currently not handling bigger files particularly well…), Recorder Plus HD and RecPad, which offers the handy feature of loading in a script so that you can read along and record simultaneously.
For editing, the precision of a mouse is always going to beat swiping, and your Mac is going to handle large files and complicated effects far better. That said though, you absolutely don’t have to wait, with tools like Hokusai (free, in-app purchases) and Twisted Wave (£6.99) ready to give it a shot.
Load up the effects
Most of the ones out there on the gimmicky side of the scales aren’t worth bothering with, but every now and then an interesting app that pops up and surprises us.
Most recently, that app has been bossjock studio (£6.99). It treats your podcast recording very differently to most tools, making it more like running a live radio show. Before recording, you load it up with music, audio, sound effects and other components that you might want to include. Then you start recording and trigger them on cue, so intros, music, stings and other bits all get out of the way of the microphone. It’s a great tool for making podcasting more of a performance than an engineering exercise, with the goal that once you’ve done the record, you’re done and can get on with your life. It won’t be to everyone’s taste, however, and is best for those who are already microphone-confident, but it’s a clever alternative to taking a full studio out on the road. It’s also possible to export the finished mix and edit it elsewhere if a few things do need fixing up, though bossjock itself doesn’t have any tools for doing that on its own.
Uploading from iPad
Whether or not you can upload your completed podcasts directly from the iPad depends on the service you’re using. Thanks to sandboxing, official service apps can’t necessarily see them, forcing the use of tools such as Dropbox as a go-between. Some tools do however offer other options, like email, which can work, provided that the final file isn’t too big (as an uncompressed wave, it will be; as an MP4 without lots of music, it’s probably going to be fine) or FTP, which Lib Syn at least offers as a way of getting a file onto its servers without going through the web. Even given the worst case scenario though, it’s rarely going to be long until you’re back at a Mac or PC and can copy the file out the old fashioned way.