Mastering Podcast Interviews with Zoom

Welcome to Podcast Answers, the show where I help you start and grow your podcast. All while answering any podcasting questions along the way to help you get started with the craft that is known as podcasting. Because while podcasting is easy to do, it does take some technical knowledge and not everyone is technical by nature. So that's why I'm here. I love answering questions.

I love being able to help people start their podcast because podcasting is something that is great to be able to get your word out, to get your knowledge out. People want to hear you and what you have to say. So podcasting is that avenue, that place for you to be able to do what you do. So with that said today, man, if you are not

live on with me, you really should be. I do this show on YouTube every week. And I also do this on the new podcast apps. So stream video to YouTube, which is, you know, YouTube live. You've done that before. You've seen that before. And then new podcasting apps allow you to listen to a live stream of audio going on it right in your podcast app. And I'm streaming right now to live podcasting apps such as, as, as pod verse and fountain and all of the new podcasting apps that can take that.

If you've not checked out any of those, go to podcasting apps.com or new podcasting apps.com. Either one will take you to there and you can see which ones will allow you to listen to live podcasts. And this is a live podcast. I record this live because I like having people to be able to listen to me at the time. And you get to see some of the things that I do that you don't come into the final product.

The fact that I've started this show two times already today and the YouTube audience and the live podcast audience that are with me in the new podcasting apps got to see that because I first forgot to hit record on my road caster. So I wasn't getting audio. And then secondly, I, I forget what I did, but I said something wrong. I, I messed it all up. And so you get to see that if you're with us live, if you're not, you don't get to see what this live. So what are we talking about today? We are

talking a little bit about using zoom for your interviews and what that entails. And I've talked a little bit before on this show about using E cam in the new integration. E cam resume to bring in your guests and how easy that is to do that on, on E cam bringing in video. But what if you're not actually doing video? What if you're not using E cam?

I recognize that E cam for one is a Mac only program. And while it is the best program ever and they have an awesome community, not everyone has a Mac, Macs are expensive, but if you have a Mac, go ahead and use E cam. But not only that, but E cam is a either monthly or yearly subscription and not everyone can pay for that. And then on top of that, you have to add zoom in there so you can do some

of this stuff. Now, what I'm talking about today is going to be mainly just audio and getting audio for your podcast because I am, because the video was zoom, you can get it and you can record it on zoom.

You can even live stream on zoom. So zoom is a good option, a good alternative. If you don't really know, like if, if, if you really just want to live stream or if you want to catch your audience, but you don't want to pay for a third party nugget, you're not going to have all of the fancy, dancy schmancy things that you have when you are recording in something like E cam, because you're, you're just not going to have those.

But if you are like me and, or if you just want to use zoom, you can use zoom. Now you could just use zoom as a free program. Zoom does allow you to have a free account. And the thing about that is you can have as many people on your meetings. It's limited to 40 minutes though. So that is the key. If you're just using zoom and have a free account, your meetings are limited to 40 minutes. And so what that means is that's going to have a little bit of a problem when you try

to do a longer interview, because that's the whole thing. And so if you get your guests on your do doing a pre show checklist, and you're doing all the things that we've talked about pre show, and then you start recording, you may have already wasted 10 of your 40 minutes. And so then you have 30 minutes left or even heaven forbid, if you use 20 minutes, and you're down to 20 minutes left. And so really the zoom free account is not a good option

when it comes to using this for recording your podcast. Yes, you could do it. And yeah, you could, you could definitely do it, but I don't necessarily recommend it. So what you can do zoom is not that expensive for a year long subscription. And the nice thing about it is you get 30 hour meetings. Oh man, if you had a 30 hour meeting, and you were using zoom on your podcast, wow, that'd be a tiring zoom meeting. But you could

do a 30 hour meeting with your zoom. And there are reasons you would want to do a long zoom meeting like that. And with the paid account, you get that you also get with a paid account, five gig of storage, recording storage in the cloud. So zoom has a couple different ways that you can record it. So you could you could do this really simply. Let's say you don't even have a nice soundboard. You don't have a setup,

you could just use some sort of USB mic, like the pod mic or something like that. And, and not the pod mic, but all the all of the is sure. The sure mics that in things, well, even Yeah, the pod mic does have an SBA oxygen, USB option, you could use that. And you could just go right into zoom, you wouldn't have a whole lot of audio control, but you could

do it and record. And the recording options in zoom are really cool, because it allows you to record locally, if you wanted to just use locally, and you wouldn't come up against that limit of the five gig, you could record locally, you don't get as many options for files when you do that. And I'll explain the files in zoom that come with a cloud recording.

Or you could record at the cloud, which is great, because then it doesn't have the processing power and you actually get a lot more video recordings and audio recordings that you can use later, while editing your podcast in a third party app like Adobe Audition or audacity or something like that. And so let's let's talk a little bit about the settings that I recommend in zoom first. And then we will go ahead and talk a little bit about what

we want to do in zoom. So if you're looking at zoom, and you go into the settings, which I recommend that you do, so you are me go ahead and make that bigger, if I can't, I can't make that bigger. Okay, so in the settings and zoom that I would recommend is you go into the audio tab, and you're going to be able to set your speaker and your mic. And so that's going to be dependent on what you are actually doing with your mic and your

speaker. Now, zoom has some audio profiles, because again, zoom is really just a audio conferencing thing. It's really meant for audio conferencing, or audio, but video, audio and video conferencing, it's not really meant for recording. Yes, you can do it, you can do a lot of things with zoom. But because of that it is, it is by default going to try and make the best audio quality for for the for you. And so by default, when you speak,

it's going to try and isolate your voice. But if especially if you're doing things like this, where you have a soundboard, or you have things like that, it's going to pull up those things out because it's going to think that, hey, I'm trying to make it so that you can hear Andy's voice. And so audio profiles, zoom background noise removal is

usually checked personalized audio isolation or original sound for musicians. And so I suggest that you choose that and again, this is the audio that you're sending out to the to the zoom meeting. And so if you're having people on and you want them to hear your your sound, then you're going to want to turn this on original sound for musicians and same if your guest is playing something other than just their voice. But the nice thing about

zoom is it does do a pretty decent job at isolating audio. And so if your guests are in a noisy room and not using a sound, a soundboard and using something like I'm using right now, then then and there is noise around them like my my soundboard is the roadcaster pro. And on the roadcaster Pro, it has an audio gate, it has a noise gate. And so if I'm quiet,

you can't hear anything going on at all. If I'm quiet, and the dog starts barking, if I'm on a if I'm on a guest session, or if I'm somewhere, and I'm stopping talking, you can't hear what's in the background. Zoom does that for us a little bit. And again, like I was saying, in these settings, you want to go ahead and go into the original sound for musicians, and I turn off five fidelity music, echo cancellation and stereo mode.

Now one thing to know is, every time you're in a meeting, you have to turn it on and you don't turn on here, this is where you're saying you're allowing yourself the option, but you're not actually turning it on. And so if we go back into the zoom, and I'm going to go ahead and start a zoom meeting, just so you can see what it's like, if you're watching this on, oh, you're gonna get a nice, hey, that's kind of fun. You're gonna get a whole nice

thing. So essentially, I'm going to zoom meeting here. It was I had my video on and my video is feeding from my live stream. So it was making that nice little endless loop of video. So up in the right hand corner here, you're gonna see something that's called original sound, it has a little green badge. And it says original sound is free musicians off

and you have this is the part you have to do every time you're in a meeting. Click that and now it says original sound for musician on and you get a thing saying original sound is on noise suppression is disabled. And so now, if I talk or if I play my sound effects, people on my zoom meeting are gonna see and hear that because it's sending original sound

for musician back in to the meeting. So that's one of the things that's that that is the the major thing that I would I would do for for you and your recording because again, you want to be able to send that musician that sound. Now if your guest is on a soundboard, like the roadcaster pro like the Mac, easy as creator, all those other soundboards and

things like that, you're gonna want to have them turn that on too. And so you're gonna have to walk them through that because you want the best sound of coming through that you're, they're already producing a good sound. And so you want that sound to come through to them to you so that you can record it. So again, for me when I do a zoom meeting and I'm recording it, I'm still recording on my roadcaster pro I'm bringing the zoom

audio in, you know, on my zoom. So for me, the roadcaster pro, if I had a zoom meeting going there's on the roadcaster pro there's three different USB channels, there's a USB main USB one chat in USB two. And I usually bring I usually bring things where I'm gonna have chat coming through into a chat into the chat channel that by default has the mix

minus turned on. And you want that turned on because you don't want to feed that back and if you've never seen a mix minus I have an episode of mix minus so go back and listen

to that and see what all mix minus is. You can find that at podcast answers.com but but you're gonna want to have that on for them to so if they're using a mixer board, turn on so for me what I do is an in zoom I have my mic and my speaker set as the USB chat channel on my road caster and then I can still control them coming in I can hear it I can bring a volume up I can bring it down. I do my recording on the roadcaster even if I'm

bringing it in through zoom. But you do not have to do that. Because zoom has, like I said, two different recording options recording locally, which allows you to get a recording of the audio and the video. And I believe you don't have any a lot of options in there. And so you wouldn't be able to you wouldn't be able to have things go in there and have all sorts of different different settings. So with with that, what I want to do is I

want to, I want to take you into this is the zoom settings. So if you are in zoom, and you go to your settings for your account, and you go to the recordings tab, you'll see a cloud recording. And it says allow hosts to record the following to the cloud. And there's a zoom meeting is what you want you want to allow that and then you can say these are the settings that you actually want to set record active speaker with shared screen.

So when you're if your guest shares screen, then you're going to also shoot shoes and see active speaker record gallery view with shared screen, turn that on. So you get the gallery view with the shared screen on. If you want to go back and actually have video edit where you can see everybody in the mix and stuff like that. You're going to want

all these check record active speaker gallery and shared screen separately. So this is active speaker, you'll get a file for the active speaker, you get a gallery view, and you get

shared screen. So you'll actually get three different files of those things. And then here's the key, especially if you're going to be recording audio, and want this in maybe in post production, especially if you're not going to be recording on a roadcaster like I am, I'm, I'm recording, I just use the zoom as a backup recording, in case I need to have that. But what you would do is record one audio for all participants. So you get one

audio file, it's a mix down, record a separate audio for each participant. What that does, is, is that allows you to have a mix minus, you can have a separate audio, not mix minus sorry, a separate audio file for everybody. So in case they're Doug, they're Doug, their dog starts barking, then you can actually turn their channel down while somebody else is talking or what you're talking or something like that. And so that's, that's really the

ones you want. You can also choose save chat messages from the meeting and webinar. And so that that allows you to go ahead and see any chat messages that are, you know, into your recording also. So those are the settings that you're going to want to record when zoom and you and what's great is again, you record to the cloud, it's going to record all of those things, it's going to have an audio file, one audio file for every participant

recording separate audio tracks for each participant. So that way you can go ahead and use those separately later. If someone was talking or forgot to mute their mic or whatever you can post production can take them and dip their audio volume down and then you don't hear that in the final the final mix. And then if you are doing video, you know, you're gonna

want separate audio recordings for active speaker gallery views shared screen. I want all the recordings that I can get because I want to be able to if I want to go in later and see, let's say I have 35 people on a zoom call, and I'm recording that now again, this

is probably not going to be for a podcast. But if I have 35 people on a zoom call, and I'm recording that I want to have the gallery view and active speaker separately, that way I can be mixing in the video in the audio if I want to have whoever speaking but then I want to go to like a audience shot, if you will, then I can see the gallery. I have that I can mix that in later, it's it's going to be something that I can I can use. So again,

zoom is a good option. Now again, there are other options that are maybe better than zoom. If I'm thinking you know, there are there are some that do what they call a local recording. So it's essentially a double ender. And if you're not familiar with a double ender, what it is is it means if we're doing an interview, and let's say I was on the phone, so this goes this goes way back before internet and everything like that. What you would do is

if I was talking to you in an interview, I would record on my machine locally. I would have my track local. I would be talking to you on the phone. But you would record local so I have a high quality of me and I have a high quality of you. I'm using the phone as the transport, the connect if you will, so we can hear each other. But at the end of the show, you send me your file. So I have a local copy, a good copy of mine and a good

copy of yours. I mix those together. It sounds like we're in the same room. There are products that do this now. So you have a local copy of yourself and you have a local copy of the guest and then they upload it actually uploads as you're talking but the recording happens locally on the machine. And the reason that this is important is because if you don't have a great internet, if you don't, if you have an internet dropout, if your internet

is is kind of wonky, the delivery is wonky. Zoom, you'll start to get this artifacting robot sound type of a thing. And so that works. It's okay. It doesn't happen very often. But it does happen sometimes because the internet is a big pool of computers. And sometimes it takes a while to get from one to the other. And, and that audio quality can be degraded. So if you're using something like Riverside, then it records locally for you and it records

locally for the guest and it brings them, uploads them to the internet. It makes the devil enter a whole lot easier because back in the day, when you did this, you record it and you have to use something like Dropbox or some other way to get the file to them. Riverside actually just uploads it seamlessly and then you can download it. The one issue that I had with Riverside is even though I didn't, I was using it because I didn't have

super great internet. I still found it being an issue where my files wouldn't complete. I wouldn't get the full thing. It just didn't work out for me. So I started using Zoom for my interviews. And while it does artifact and does have some issues, sometimes for the most part, it's a good product for the most part. It works well. And especially since I'm doing their producing and I have a local copy of my own voice because I am recording

locally on my computer. So I do have my own voice locally. So I get the highest quality I can from me. People are going to be more likely to put up with a not quite as high quality from your guests because they know it's a guest. And so if it does artifact for a few seconds, it's probably not that big of a deal. I just find that Zoom is an easy thing to do. People have used it. People use Zoom all the time. People... Since the pandemic,

people have gotten used to using Zoom. People know what Zoom is. People have Zoom on their computers already. It's really easy for them to join a link. They don't have to go, "Okay, you need to go to this website. You need to allow your camera. You need to do this. You need to do this because it's a website based thing." They know Zoom. They've used Zoom. And so it's easiest to say, "Let's just jump on a Zoom call together. I'm going to record

it and let's just talk. Let's just have an interview face to face over Zoom." It works great. So guys, Zoom, yes, it does cost something, especially if you have the pro level or business level account. It is going to cost you some. And the more you pay, the better, the more features you get with Zoom. But for the most part, a pro account is going to be good for what you're doing. It gets 5GB worth of recordings. And for me, I record it and I download it.

I get rid of it off the cloud once I'm done. And that way, I don't take up my cloud recording in Zoom. So yes, it does cost something, but it is well worth it to make good quality, good sounding interviews in Zoom.

Guys, thank you so much for listening, for hanging out. If you got questions, I would love to hear your questions. I'd love to answer your questions. You can go to podcastanswers.com/contact. Again, that is podcastanswers.com/contact. And you can contact me and ask your question. And I would love to answer your question for you. Guys, I'm going to be switching my recordings. Right now, I'm recording usually Tuesdays

or Thursdays at noon Eastern. I'm going to go ahead and record. I think I'm going to switch to Tuesday evenings. I haven't decided on the time yet, but I would love to get more people on live. And I think people are going to be able to watch live more likely if we are not doing this during the day. So next week, look for a change in schedule. Have a great week guys and keep podcasting.