Tips for Avoiding Audio Leakage When Recording Your Podcast

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For the best results when recording your podcast, you want to have a clean and distinct audio recording of each participant.  This allows for the most flexibility during postproduction and ultimately a great sounding podcast.

What is Crosstalk?

A common problem when recording remote guests is crosstalk (aka audio leakage or bleed).   This is when one of the voices from the podcast leaks onto one or more of the other recordings where it doesn't belong.  Essentially, the same voice gets recorded on multiple tracks with a slight delay.  When the separate tracks are combined, this results in an unsettling echo effect.

Here is an example:

I'm sure many of you have dealt with this issue in the past, It can mean hours of time editing each track manually in postproduction.  The best option is to completely avoid it in the first place.

What Causes Crosstalk?

The most likely cause of crosstalk is when one or more of the participants in a show don't wear headphones.  What happens is that the voices of the other participants plays out of their speakers and immediately gets fed back into their microphone.  This contaminates the audio track with the voices of all the other guests.

Crosstalk can also happen when wearing headphones under certain circumstances.  Some earbud/mic combination microphones like the ubiquitous Apple headphones can leak quite badly if the volume is too high.  Any headphones where the earphones are ported can have this issue.

How to Prevent Crosstalk

Headphones - Having every participant in your show wear headphones will solve this issue most of the time.

Lower Volume - If you are all wearing headphones and still encountering a crosstalk issue, have everyone lower the output volume of their headphones as low as they comfortably can.  This will help prevent the other voices in the headphone output from reaching the microphone.

Avoid Mic/Headphone Combos - Headphone/Mic combination earbuds or headsets can leak badly even with the volume turned down.  The Apple earbuds are notorious for this.  Try using a microphone that is completely separate from your headphones.

Higher Quality Gear - You don't need to break the bank, but spending a little extra money on a good quality microphone and headphones will go a long way.  I personally use the Audio Technica AT2020 for my microphone and the Sennheiser HD 518s for my headphones and love them.  You can get them both for around $100 each.  Obviously you can't always control what your guests use but it doesn't hurt to ask them ahead of time if they have something better then earbuds to have ready for the recording.

How Can I Tell if Crosstalk is Happening?

It is easy to spot crosstalk after the recording is finished, but it is much more helpful if you can know before you record an entire show and end up with useless audio.

Zencastr provides each participant with an audio monitor visualization to help out with this.  Here is a quick test can do before you start recording that can help you determine if there is a crosstalk problem.

1. After all guests have join the project and allowed access to their microphones, each participant will see a visual monitor of their own microphone's input before the recording starts.  It looks like this when they are talking into their microphone:

2. Take turns having each participant go silent while you, the host, speak loudly into your mic.  Have them silently watch their microphone monitor.  If it is jumping and responding to your voice, then there is a crosstalk problem that needs to be addressed.  If there is no crosstalk happening then their microphone monitor should look completely flat when you talk like this:

3. When in doubt you can always just do a quick thirty second test recording and listen to it before you jump into your full length show.  Zencastr has no limits on the amount of recordings you can do, small or large, so take advantage of that to ensure you are getting the best quality sound possible.

Automatic Postproduction

Zencastr's newest feature, Automatic Postproduction, works great when the tracks are free from crosstalk.  Now that you have ensured your recordings are clean, give it a try.  It automatically syncs your separate recordings into one final mix and runs a series of audio enhancements to get rid of noise, adjust your levels and more, to make your podcast sound like it was produced in a studio.

What are Your Tips for Preventing Crosstalk?

Do you have any tips that I haven't mentioned here?  Please leave them in the comments and I'll try and integrate them into the article so everyone can benefit.

You Don't Need to Be an Audio Engineer to Have a Studio Quality Podcast

Photo by Anthony Brown/iStock / Getty Images

I'm happy to announce that we've got some new features available on Zencastr.com that will make your life easier and your audio sound better than ever.  Here's the rundown.

Final Mix Track

Once you are finished recording a show, you will see an option for Automatic Postproduction.  This generates a final mix track out of the separate audio files that were recorded and places it in your dropbox account next to your other project files.  But thats just the beginning.

Curated Audio Enhancements for Amazing Sound

In addition to mixing the tracks together, Zencastr will run a curated set of battle-tested audio enhancements over your audio to ensure that your final mix sounds great.  Here are some details.

High-pass Filter - Filters unnecessary and disturbing low frequencies depending on the context (speech, music, noise).

Adaptive Leveling - Corrects level differences between speakers, music and speech, etc. to achieve a balanced overall loudness.

Loudness Normalization - Adjusts the global, overall loudness so that all processed files have a similar average loudness.

Noise Reduction - Classifies regions with different background noises and automatically removes noise and hum.

Adaptive Noise Gate - If audio is recorded with multiple microphones and all signals are mixed, the noise of all tracks will add up as well. The Adaptive Noise Gate decreases the volume of segments where a speaker is inactive, but does not change segments where a speaker is active. This results in much less noise in the final mixdown.

Crossgate - If one records multiple people with multiple microphones in one room, the voice of speaker 1 will also be recorded in the microphone of speaker 2. This crosstalk (spill), a reverb or echo-like effect, can be removed by the Crossgate, because we know exactly when and in which track a speaker is active.

Now you don't need a degree in Audio Engineering to make your podcast sound professional.  Simply click Automatic Postproduction and let us do the heavy lifting for you.

Future

Currently these audio enhancements are only available on the final mix track and are not configurable, but that will change.  Depending on demand, these will be available for processing the individual audio tracks for those of you who still want to edit your final mix yourself.  Also we will soon be adding a configuration panel so you can customize the process.

Podcasters differ a lot in how hands-on they want to be with their audio.  Would you use the Automatic Postproduction and Final Mix generation?  Are you more interested in simply having the option to run some enhancements on the individual tracks?  Let me know in the comments.

Comcastro wins the ticket to Podcast Movement!

A big thanks to everyone who shared their love for Zencastr on twitter this week.  The selected winner is Comcastro.  They have been helping beta test Zencastr and have been spreading the word like champs!  Maximus (@comcastrMax) from comcastro will be attending the conference as our guest.  If you are attending, be sure to give him a warm welcome.

Comcastro is very entertaining show that covers a wide range of topics surrounding geek culture. It is a relatively new podcast but it has already managed to bring in some top-tier guests.  Their recent interview with Neal Goldsmith is a must listen.  Also they just had a long-time hero of mine Stanton Friedman on the show.  I've got that one queued up for this afternoon.

If you didn't win this time, don't worry.  We'll be holding regular giveaways.  Stay tuned to the blog and sign up for the mailing list to get the heads up when the next one comes around.  

Happy Podcasting!

Join Zencastr at Podcast Movement for FREE!

I'm happy to announce that Zencastr will be attending Podcast Movement, the largest podcasting conference in the world.  Over 1000+ podcasters will be there and it has a great line up of speakers and presentations.  It will be an awesome time all around.  We'll have a booth in the lobby are looking forward to meeting everyone.  Come by and say Hi!

Be Our Guest

If you don't yet have a ticket and are interested in attending, We've got an extra ticket to give away.  All you need to do is tweet something nice about Zencastr.com.  Please include @zencastr or a link to zencastr.com and then tag it with #zencastrPM15.  You will need to be signed up for the Zencastr Beta as well.  Over the next few days we'll select a winner and you will be our guest at the conference.  The tickets to Podcast Movement cost $597 at the door so don't pass this opportunity up!

It is a bit of short notice so we will notify the winner by this Saturday so you will have time to book travel if necessary.

Zencastr - The Easiest Way To Record Your Podcast Guests In High Quality

Podcasting is Getting Crowded and You Need to Stand Out

Now that the podcasting space is heating up, there is a lot of opportunity for podcasters to be heard and make money.  There is also a LOT more competition.  In order to stand out, you don't only need great content, but a great sound.  

It is pretty basic to get a decent recording when you and your guest are in the same room.  But what about when you have guests over Skype or Hangouts?  Your audio sounds great, but they sound distant at best and can completely cut out at times.  This is the problem that Zencastr can help you solve.

Current VOIP Recording Solutions Don't Cut It

While there are many solutions out there to record your VIOP calls, all of them rely on recording your guest's audio at your end AFTER it has already been compressed.  VOIP programs like Skype optimize for real-time conversation, not for quality.  This means that if your internet connection slows down, Skype compresses the life out of your guests audio.  This can cause artifacts in the audio stream that are very noticeable to your listeners.  Many listeners stop listening to podcasts because of bad quality an never tell the host why.  All of your time and effort put into making great content and scheduling interesting guests can go down the drain over the recording quality

Enter Zencastr

I'm happy to announce Zencastr, the easiest way to record your Skype/Hangouts/VOIP guests in high quality.

Zencastr works in your browser.  This means that all you have to do is send a link to your guests and hit record.  Their audio will be recorded on their end before it gets compressed and garbled.  Then it is automatically streamed to your Dropbox account.  No more junk audio and no more trying to teach your guests how to export and send you audio.  Just crystal clear audio that sounds like you were sitting in the same room.

Try it Now Free

Zencastr is currently in beta and is free of charge to use.  Why not give it a shot?  You won't regret it and neither will your listeners.  Get started today at zencastr.com.

PS - If you have any suggestions for how Zencastr can be better please let me know at josh@zencastr.com