Microphone
Rode Procaster – Main mic currently used for all podcast recordings. Great sound. You need foam pop filter for it though.
Rode PodMic – Cheaper secondary mic for when a second person is needed. This could even function as the primary mic if you are on a budget. You don’t even need a pop filter for this one.
Rode SmartLav+ – We plug this into the phone, into SLR camera. It’s better quality than what’s on the phone, and better quality than normal iPhone headphones mic
Audio-Technica ATR-2100 – This is the lightweight microphone that we now keep in France. Audio is great, but not as great as the procaster.
Mixer
Yamaha MG10 – This is the main mixing board we use to connect everything. It’s not that expensive, and it’s been rock solid for a few years now. We actually have 1 in Australia and 1 in France to avoid travelling with it. The complication comes with connecting it up to a computer. You need a 3.5mm to USB interface or a cable that converts the the two input and output from the mixer into a single 3.5mm plug. If we were to do it again we’d probably get a mixer with USB that still does the mix minus.
Other Audio Equipment
Zoom H1 – it’s been superseded by the H1N – The mixer outputs all channel onto this device, it records all our interviews. We’ve even put a foam pop filter on it and used it as a on-the-go mic for interviews in person. But to be honest if we were doing more of that type of interviews then we would invest in one of the more expensive zoom devices with the XLR inputs and plug some mics into it.
Audio Technica – ATH-M30X – Monitoring headphones used to monitor the audio quality coming out of the mixer. Not too expensive, but also not the cheapest in the range.
3.5mm to USB adapter – just something random we found on amazon that allow us to plug the mixer to the computer.
Video
Logitech Streamcam – This is currently the camera we are using for all video content. It’s quite wider angle than anything we currently have, and the quality seems great. It’s not the most professional setup, and it doesn’t have professional quality video, but it works.
Canon 70D – with a 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM lens. It’s not the latest canon, but it’s something I already own and use for photography, so we’ve also been using it for video content.
iPhone 11 – This the the device we have on hand if we need to do a recording on the fly.
Software
Audacity – This is free software, and what we use to edit our recordings, adding intro and outro music.
Levelator – we pass the WAV file through this piece of software and it’s kind of magic and makes everything sound decent. Not sure exactly what it does.
iTunes – We use iTunes to convert the WAV file to mp3, we also use iTunes to do all the tagging of the mp3 files. Apparently iTunes does a better quality mp3 file conversion than audacity
Camtasia Studio – this is the software we currently using for editing video.
Zoom – We’ve been using this since before COVID-19 began and everyone started working from home. It allows you to record the audio and the video to your drive locally. And should you want to stream an interview or conference call to youtube etc, it has connectivity to do that too.
Hosting
Libsyn – the mp3 files are hosted here, it’s not expensive, we don’t use it to generate the podcast feed to enable us to retain control of the feed location.
Self Hosted WordPress – we use a self-hosted wordpress installation.
Powerpress Plugin – the link to the mp3 file is attached to wordpress post using this plugin. This plugin also allows us to fill out all the other information that’s needed for a podcast feed and in addition it generates the feed that we then use to submit to all the podcast directories like iTunes and Spotify. This issue we currently have is that the podcast feed gets hit quite a lot and causes lots of server calls which slows the server down which limits the amount of episode that we can have on a feed. This is an outstanding issues that we haven’t solved yet.
Previous equipment
Blue Snowball – This is the USB microphone we started with, it hasn’t been retired since we updated to the mixer setup. We’ve used it for in person interview and it works. The only thing to note is that it’s very quiet, and requires you to be close to the mic. And so there’s a bit of work to enhance the audio level. It also needs a pop filter. The reason we stopped using this and converted to the mixer setup was because we were using 3rd party software and Skype to record the interviews, and when software fails you end up losing the interview and wasting the other person’s time, so we needed backup device to record the interview to, hence why we got the mixer with the zoom H1. Plus the quality of the mics that you can plug into a mixer is way better.
Rode VideoMic Pro – Suppose to be for use on top of the Canon SLR, but it turned out the volume was too low and hasn’t been much use as we end up using the SmartLav+ with an extension cable. It also avoids the mic picking up the focusing sound on the canon lens as we haven’t invested in any of the quiet STM lenses.