 All right. All right, so me and Tony are here and Tony is the founder of the Sunday morning Linux review of which I co-host with Mary and Phil who are not with us today Because they already left they had dead stuff to do and we have all the podcast equipment set up and I figured I'd take a few minutes to talk about how we do the podcast and how this gets put together and It's less complicated than some people think it's And more complicated in other ways the best the first thing I can recommend for doing a podcast is Content content content. Make sure we have good content That's always the first rule of any of this YouTube or all that so you don't focus on the gear But we're gonna talk real quick about the gear because you do need some gear to do this. That's right. Yeah, so we have here What's this mixing board? This is a it's a Beringer 12 2 12 2 12 o 2 or whatever. So there's 12 inputs with a two-channel output so it's four microphones and then The rest are dual channel for four different Like inputs or something else like we have input from our mixer board or a k a Android phone Yes, so expensive. Yeah, really, but no, it's uh, this is how well This is probably like an eight or nine-year-old Android phone. It is. Yep. It's I think it's nine years old now Yeah, and what this is is so we can have drops in there So when we transition between the bits we have our drops Literally on an Android phone that's numerous years old with some sound recording bytes that we have on there So it's easier to think to edit and it's actually allows us to edit things faster Because a lot of things we have think about is we spend a lot of time doing the show We don't want to spend a lot of time producing a show after so We use this to insert those drops. So I don't have to like splice it later So those of you who have listened already to Sunday morning links review This is how all the audio inserts actually get done Unless we screw up and then I insert them later in post editing right like when we have a laugh We won't stop laughing. This is our this is our code word. He put this finger up That means he's going to press the button and it's going to put a drop in and that means we should shut up That's right, but sometimes we don't shut up So and then now the four mics is four XLR microphones the other ones are like your standard phone jacks. I'll do a close-up here to the board See what you're talking about now the microphones are using right now our audio Technica I think these were about 70 dollars each. I know they were well under a hundred dollars And that includes the microphone and cable that goes with the stand Yeah, and the stand the little rubber stand here because something important when you're doing a podcast now The good news is this is a heavy table. There's no shake to it. I mean, it's it's it's solid So you don't want to set things and bounce it around but microphones help isolate that with the microphone stands And they have rubber feet and this is really Flexible so the mic it it's all about keeping it. Uh, yeah absorbed Now I'm actually recording with an as-ton mic with its own shock mount And you may have seen microphones on a stand with a shock mount All that is to stop when you type on a keyboard all that vibration coming through Because these are sitting on the table that's because we break this up and set this down for each podcast Which we record every two weeks It's not as big of a deal for us to have a shock mount So it's not yeah, we just are real conscious of don't bang on the table Don't set your cup on the table and things like that Right and occasionally I seen tony cringe a little bit because he'll wear the headsets to monitor the levels And uh, one of us will bang something or we'll bump something and tony's like Yeah, but stop moving your mic. Why don't you move it in the middle of the show? Don't don't touch it. Yeah We do that under pre-show. We try to make sure everything's in position We do a mic check and the reason you usually have one person working the board and it's generally tony I'm the backup on x. I know how to do as well You sell the levels and you try to keep your head focused at the microphone when you're doing this Because when I turn from side to side you lose it So you kind of stare at the mic even though that that becomes tricky for all of us and we've been doing this We're just we recorded episode 257 a day It keeps I see Mary look away when she was doing something I'm like, I already know like there's gonna be a sound level drop when she did that Exactly. Yeah, and that's what's hard You know with the really any microphone that's stationary when you start turning around and look trying to look at other people Then it goes down So the only way to do that is either have lavalier or have one of those ear ones the ear mouth ones We've looked at those. We are still figuring out how to make all that work This works really well for this setup has great dynamic range and with the podcast you want to have good You don't want to go crazy on a gear like so we're not using anything that's thousands of dollars here But you want to have decent gear because if you don't have decent Audio it's a podcast The only thing they have is the content and the audio and if you're You have tons of hisses and noises and bumping in the microphone You will drive your listeners nuts. So we really we care a lot about that and that's That's something we try to make sure we're not doing kind of the final recording Unit is the zoom. This is a zooms at uh, it's to end to end You've had this for a long time. We've had it. Yeah, we had it for a while we started looking around a different little individual recorders and This one it's a two channel input or you can use the built-on microphones and there's four microphones to do or is it six Four four microphones four microphones to do surround sound So it's possible to do surround sound like if you have it setting in the middle of the table and having a lot of people Sitting around it and we've done some live shows on site at the linux conventions We'll just take this zoom on its little standard here set it on there and bring two people close to like a cocktail style table And you can just go at it and have an interview kind of impromptu It's uh, the microphone's in this is really good. And I think you can find these used for under a hundred dollars Yeah, yeah, I think we paid new a couple years ago was 200 bucks or something with all the little accessories and everything Yeah, but uh, what's also nice about it is there's a bunch of features in there that you can turn on like um compression and and noise canceling and stuff so um It's not as easy as like running a youtube hangout where it all does it in the background for you, but um, you know You go through and figure out which settings there are and i'm sure somebody's done a youtube video of how to To configure it, right? Yeah, and once you have it set. I don't touch any settings. I just turned it on I hit record done. It's I got a nice big record button That's right And it's got a red light and occasionally we may have forgotten to press that like as long as you remember to hit the button Then you're good record. It's great. I'm done. Yeah, and back to the mixer board So all of these other inputs besides doing we have inputs and outputs And these are like so we can get the drops in and the feed coming out of the mixer board You balance now you see a lot of knobs on mixer boards This one's got knobs Some of them have a lot of sliders But they're really not as daunting as you might think because they're really just setting the levels to make sure That they're there We don't really pan any of us into any side some people will do that when they're in podcasts like Okay, we'll put tom on the right channel and toni on the left channel We blend them all to stereo But that's all these knobs really do is set some of those little parameters If you looked at most of them, they're mostly straight up and down other than the level We kind of adjust that to the loudness of their voices And this has compression doesn't it? No, this one doesn't have compression, but it has a equalizer built in It does have equalizer So if you always have like a hiss that's going on you can turn down that frequency a little bit and then that'll Filter out most of the problems Yep And then the other so the most important thing is you want to have clean audio coming in first So you can you don't have to do as much post-auditing auto editing in the end Yeah, the less I'm actually the one who does most of the post-production right now So the I've got it down to a very fast science as long as all the inputs were good No problem on the outputs makes it that much easier Which is odd because when we were at the microsoft event They gave us the audio track and a audio plus video track the audio track. They gave us was really bad Good news is the video track had the audio in it at high quality So each one of the videos we posted for our microsoft interviews where we post them to youtube as well We I had to just use the video audio because the separate audio track they created was just bad It was the levels were like even the more I boosted them you could hear the background noise. I'm like This was recorded by professionals Yeah But the xlr mics help really keep a nice clean It's kind of weird to be thinking because these have usb But when we've tried them they work good usb, but the uh mixing and balancing with xlr Still really the quality can't be matched yet and here it is 2017 xlr is a forever old standard Right, you know it's been in the audio and music industry for a long time Yeah, if you're doing multiple people in one location, then it's it's easiest to use a mixer board that way you can Set the the levels and and be and go from there If you're going to be doing everybody remote like on google hangouts or skype or something then You know, it's all done within the software and you can have just the one microphone plugged in usb into your pc and be good to go Yeah, pretty simple, but I figured I want to cover some of the audio users We're not using anything high end super high end headphones, but simple stuff Uh, if you want to get into podcasting, you don't need to spend a fortune on the hardware First make sure you have your idea your content your layout, which We I feel so, you know, tony set up a nice structure that we follow for here like the drops and everything else It's also important tony helps when we go down the rabbit hole of discussion something and we get off topic tony Well, all of us we try to keep each other in check on that So focus on a lot of that aspect when you're starting a podcast before you go I want the most expensive mic most expensive mixer boarding gear I want the best of the best If you don't have the good content no matter how good the gear is It's still going to be crap So I just wanted to take a minute to share that this is something else that we do here that's separate, but uh related to Both my youtube channel and you know the podcasting and just kind of talking about it in general what we do And all that fun stuff, but that's about it and we get up real early. So that's This this is actually occur. What time is it right now? Is it like nine? It's 9 45 This is after we're recorded. So we started we get here at 7 a.m Well, I get here a little bit really I start setting up and then Tony and we arrive right at 7 a.m. And we start getting into it and finish all the details. We do mic check and boom We one of these days we're going to have a show title ready before I think we spent 15 minutes this morning trying to decide a show title So as much as we are organized and it feels good at the end when we're all done We sometimes realize we're not always as organized as we want to be Yeah So all right. Well, thanks for watching. Hopefully this was helpful if you have more questions or want us to talk more about the podcast You know ask put the comments below If you want to know where to find us that link will be in there It's a sunday morning linux review or smlr.us And you can hear all the fun episodes and you'll well later today. I'll have published episode 257 All right. Thanks what we call it. Oh, I forgot our episode on the the bus factor the bus factor. All right. Thanks guys Bye