M-Audio Fast Track Pro

Over the post 6 months or so, I’ve become heavly involved with recording audio for a number of projects we work on, over at Fictionshed. If you listen back to the earlier podcasts (Fictioncasts), you’ll here me say, that you don’t need any specialised equiptment to record your voice, and a standard PC, with cheap mic will do…..the rest of this post will be me eating my words.

Due to getting a not the quality I wanted from the cheap headphone/mic combination, Tony kindly lent me a mixer and a couple of mics. This did improve the quality, however gave me some hard background noise.

In January, and with the ScutterCast in mind, I decided to splash out and get myself a MacBook Pro, as this was the only way I could find to do an enhanced podcast. The sound quality with the MacBook was a massive improvement, however the internal mic gave me a “roomy” type sound to my voice, which has been ok, however I needed something a little more direct.

After weeks of looking at the Samson C01U, the SL300 USB Studio Microphone and even the Samson G-Track, however Tony suggested I get the same as him, which was the M-Audio Fast Track Pro, as I already had the mic

Well Friday it finally turned up, and due to spending my Friday evening editing together the latest ScutterCast, I’ve only had chance to get to play with it today.

All I can say, is this thing is MINT ! It’s exactly the sound I’ve been wanting, it’s crisp, it’s clean, and NO background noise !

I now feel I’m set up to record the machinima project, this will also mean a lot less editing on the ScutterCasts, as I usually spend an age increasing the volume on my voice.

My setup is now as follows

MacBook Pro
M-Audio Fast Track Pro
AKG D650S Microphone
Stand & Pop Shield

I’ve included a small audio clip so you can hear the quality

maudio_test.mp3

Tags: amp, audio, background, background noise, crisp, eating my words, editing, equiptment, fast, fast track, Fictioncasts, Fictionshed, Friday, friday evening, headphone, internal mic, lent, m, M-Audio, mac, macbook, massive improvement, mic, mint, mixer, noise, number, podcast, post, pro, quality, recording, rest, S Microphone, Samson, samson c01u, ScutterCast, sl300, sound, sound quality, studio microphone, tony, track, voice

ScutterCast

Apologies for no posts for a while, however I’ve been mad busy on one of my other projects.

About a month ago, myself and a couple of my resident posters over at Red Dwarf Forum decided it was time to do a Red Dwarf based podcast. We’ve been discussing who will do it, what we’ll talk about for a while, and last Monday we recorded the first episode.

The podcast itself took about 5/6 hours to edit together, which for me was quite good, as I’m still quite new to all this podcasting stuff.

Below is the software I’ve used to put the whole thing together, there are probably a lot quicker and smarter ways, but open to suggestions

Initial recording was done using skype, and a piece of software on the mac called “Skype Call Recorder“, which does the job well, however recorders all inputs as 1 file with no channel separation. This although good for the job, makes editing a bit of a pain, as we found Antirealism was too quiet, and Ori-Studfarm was too loud. I’m pretty sure this can be fixed quite easily by using hardware, and probably something I will look at as the episodes come along.

Once I had the audio file, it was editing time. I ran the file through Adobe Soundbooth, to hopefully clean up the background hum of a 4 man skype conference call, and attempt to increase Antirealism’s voice, and lower Ori-Studfarm’s. I then went to town on the editing, we recorded around 90 minutes worth of audio, however in the end, there was only around 35 mins used.

Once I had the cleaned audio, it was then time for GarageBand to work it’s magic. Dropped it into Garageband, chopped the audio into sections, then added stab music in between the little breaks. It was time then for the intro music, the intro message from Kyten (thanks to Tony Lunn), the outro music and the background track. I was planning on having just the clean vocals without a backing track, however there was still quite a lot of background humm, and thought the best was of applying a “sticky plaster” was to attempt to mask it out with an audio track.

The final work that needed to be done, was to add the images, I’ve always wanted to do an enhanced podcast, and was the main reason I bought the mac in the first place. This then meant listening to the podcast, listening for key points in the episode review and getting screen shots from this point. This was done with a peice of software on the mac called Snapz Pro X, which allows you to take a screen capture of anything on the screen, as the Cmd+Shift+F3 doesn’t allow you to take screen captures when you are running a DVD.

The final peice of the jigsaw was hosting. As we plan to do all 55 episodes of Red Dwarf (currently 52 + the 3 Easter specials), I made the assumption that these would be around 50Mb each x 55 which would be nearly 3Gb of space, and if only 10 people downloaded, we would need 30Gb of bandwidth.  I took the advice of a fellow podcaster (CarBozman), and went with podbean, as this is a dedicated pocast hosting site, and I can’t describe just how happy I am with this. It gives more stats then I know what to do with, and after a discussion with Tony, we will probably be moving all the other projects to podbean.

That’s it, episode 1 in the bag, and everything set up for episode 2 and the other 53 episodes.

If you wish to have a listen yourself, you can find them either on Itunes by searching for scuttercast, or by going to the podcast site for the Enhanced version or the MP3 only version

Also please check out the newly WordPressed version of www.reddwarfforum.com, many updates on the new Red Dwarf episode.

Tags: adobe soundbooth, antirealism, apologies, background, background hum, background track, backing track, call, call recorder, cast, channel separation, conference call, dwarf, editing, episode, garageband, humm, intro message, intro music, job, last monday, lot, mac, music, open to suggestions, plaster, podcast, posters, red, Red Dwarf, screen, scutter, skype, software, stab, Studfarm, time, Tony Lunn, track, version, while