AP 0722: How Do I Improve My Podcasting Guest’s Audio?

AskPat 722 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here. Welcome to Episode 722 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.

We have a great question today from Garrett, but before we get to that, I do want to let you know about my podcasting tutorial which Garrett mentions in this question which you'll hear in just a moment. If you are thinking about starting a podcast, you can check out my free tutorial. It's at PodcastingTutorial.com. Easy enough. It's actually helped thousands of podcaster get their podcast up and running from what mics to use to how to edit your show to how to get it out there in the world. Check it out again at PodcastingTutorial.com. Completely free. Not even any emails required or nothing like that. Six videos all there complete for you: PodcastingTutorial.com. Check it out.

All right, now here's today's question from Garrett.

Garrett: Hi Pat. This is Garrett from the Squad Room podcast. Thanks for everything you do. I really appreciate all the stuff that you put out there. I've been an avid listener/reader for a long time. When I started my podcast, I followed your podcast steps to get started and have been very successful with good sound quality on my end, but I struggle with the quality of my guest's recording when I interview people. I'm interviewing people that aren't professional sellers or have things to sell or have something that want to get out in the world. It's really a service they're doing for me. I'm trying to figure out how to make the audio better with that connection through Skype. Is there a better program to record in? Is there something that I can have my interviewees doing that might make their audio better? Thanks for everything you do. I appreciate your time.

Pat Flynn: Hey Garrett, thanks so much for the question. I really appreciate it. Your sound quality is great. Your guests' are not. Guess what? Most of the time if you're not interviewing other podcasters, the interview quality is going to be pretty low on the other end. The first thing I want to say is that that's okay. As long as you can hear the person, then that's okay. Your audience is actually going to be okay. Your audio quality is great which is really what matters in terms of how your audience perceives your show. The guest, they're kind of used to or don't expect those people to have the best sound quality.

When you, for example, hear a DJ on the radio, they sound amazing. When a guest calls in for whatever reason to talk about whatever they're talking about, it usually sounds like they're on the phone because in most cases they are. For you, your guests, most likely they're on a phone or a land line or whatever the case may be. It's just not going to sound great because they don't have a professional microphone with them.

Don't worry so much about it. As long as you can hear them, that's fine. Now, if you can't hear them, or it's very muffled, you might want to ask them to do a couple of things. Maybe keep their mouth not as close to the microphone. Maybe if you can't hear them as well, ask them to put the microphone a little bit closer to their mouth on the phone. Just doing that can help quite a bit actually. Having them call from another device or another phone can also help too just in case there's something up with their phone that they have. That could always work.

When you are . . . actually, this is coming to mind now. If you can get the other person on Skype, great. Not everybody has access or wants to get on Skype in which case you can pay I think $2.99 per month which is what I do on Skype to allow myself to dial any phone number. That allows me to call people and have them be able to pick up on their phone and I can record that using Ecamm Call Recorder for Mac or Pamela for those of you who are PC who want to record using Skype.

You were on Skype and you're recording using that software. How you connect them kind of matters. If they're on Skype and it just sounds terrible, ask them to adjust the microphone. Ask them to change the input microphone. They might have a good microphone, just their audio settings aren't set to that particular microphone for input. It may be using their system audio.

In most cases, Skype to Skype, it's going to sound okay. The issues typically happen in terms of bad sound quality when you are calling somebody who's on a cell phone or a land line. That just won't sound as good. Like I said, as long as  you can hear them, that's fine. I did a couple of interviews with people who were on cell phones. The quality was just very poor, but no body said anything about the quality because they were able to hear those people. My sound quality was good. Again, that's what people expect to be great.

Now secondly, I want to talk about a particular piece of software that may help you no matter what the sound recording is like. There's a tool out there called Auphonic, A-U-P-H-O-N-I-C. Auphonic is a great tool because that allows you to automatically do some post production with these mp3 files that you're collecting. No matter what kind of show you run, what it does, is it allows you to match audio levels, to maximize everything so it hears the voice better and gets rid of the background noise and all that kind of stuff. They analyze it. They just somehow have an intelligent way to normalize it, to increase the loudness of the voice but decrease the background stuff and noise gates and all this other stuff that I don't know what it means exactly. It just has this great way of allowing the audio to just sound much better after it goes through the processing.

It's free for two hours of monthly processed audio. You can actually just pay a little bit of money for a little bit more hours if you have more shows, but two hours a month, that may be enough for you. You can check it out. Or you can even just try it out for one episode and see if that works or not Garrett. That's Auphonic. A-U-P-H-O-N-I-C. Again that's Auphonic.com. Go ahead and check that out and that could help you with some of your problems that you may be having too.

Hopefully that answers your question, it gives you some good ideas there. Thank you Garrett. I want to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. For those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like to have potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.

Thank you so much and again check out PodcastingTutorial.com if you want best and quickest and easiest tutorial out there to help you start your podcast and cheapest because it's absolutely free. Go ahead and check that out PodcastingTutorial.com. No emails required or nothing. It's all yours.

To finish it off as always, we love to end with a quote. Today's quote is an Irish proverb which I love because I'm also a quarter Irish. That's where the Flynn comes from in case you didn't know. Here's the quote. “You've got to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was.”

Love that. Cheers. Take care and I'll see you all on the next episode of AskPat. Bye.