Episode: 4598
Title: Recording good audio using open source tools
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4598/hpr4598.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:48 (official HPR transcript)

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4598, for 2026-03-18
Today's show is entitled, "Recording good audio using open source tools"
The host is Shane - StrandedOutput and the duration is 00:40:24
The flag is Explicit, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "This is my advice from several years of podcasting and tinkering with audio software."
Hello and welcome to another episode of HPR. My name is Shane. I have recorded an episode
before. I'll include a link to that in the show notes accompanying this episode. That was my
introductory episode. If you'd like to get to know a bit more about me. This episode is intended
to be a part of a series about being creative on Linux and open source software. But not
necessarily limited to those things. So this episode in particular is going to be about recording
good audio in the context of recording a podcast basically. So I'll cover several things. So I
will cover kind of the sort of philosophical angle of it, which I'm very fond of. I'll cover
the hardware that you need. I'll cover the technique of actually speaking into the microphone.
And I will then go briefly because it's a very dense topic. I will cover
editing the podcast. The software you used to record, et cetera, et cetera. Today I'm focusing purely
on creating good audio and creating good podcasts audio specifically. Now this doesn't
necessarily have to be just podcasts. This could be voiceover work. This could be narration for a
story that's then incorporated into a video. This could be an audio book, whatever. You know,
anything where the speaker speaks into a microphone needs to sound very present and very
authoritative and the tone of the voice catches your attention. That's kind of the that's the
point when it comes to this kind of thing. When you're talking about like I don't know if there's
a specific term for this, but I would say single speaker audio. That's how I would phrase it.
Before I get into specifics, what gives me the right to talk about all this? I have been on
a Linux podcast called Linux Lads for the last seven and a bit years. We have gone through the
trials and tribulations over the years of improving our audio piecemeal. And I think we've gotten
to a point where we sound quite professional. I myself have actually recorded a voiceover real
professionally in a studio and gotten some coaching on that. I have had some experience with
audio editing and sound engineering, not professional, but you know, self-taught. I do have
enough information to be dangerous, as they say. So I'll start with some tips for just speaking
into the microphone, which I am not following at all. The reason I'm not following those tips is because
I'm just on my own speaking into what microphone and I'm very used to having at least two or three
co-hosts. I'm also aware there's a dog barking in the background. There's probably
sirens in the background, but as many of you may know, we're having a bit of a heat wave in Western
Europe over the last few weeks. And it's just too warm to keep the window closed and air conditioning
is not a thing in this part of the world. So this advice that I'm not following myself right now
is breathing. So you need to sit upright, you need to have your chest cavity, be as big as possible,
so that you're not struggling to breathe as you talk. So I would recommend that before you start to speak
you're in a comfortable position, you're upright, you're not hunched over, you're not leaning
too far back, you're just in the middle in a very natural position. As I'm saying this, I'm starting to do
it. So you're in this position, your lungs can fill with air, they can empty air without much effort.
That makes your voice sound a bit more natural and that bit more professional because that's how
the professionals do it. Someone's on TV, they're standing up with a microphone, they're up,
bolt upright, they're breathing naturally, they're they're sounding pretty good. In a radio show,
you've probably seen video feeds of radio shows where they're sitting upright in their chair
or they're leaning slightly forward, talking into the mic and it just makes them sound obviously,
they have professional audio equipment and stuff as well to make them sound great and they have
years of experience. But that's where the breathing comes in, isn't it? Like they know how to
measure their words and they know how to breathe so that they can sound as good as possible.
So they don't sound like they're choking on their words like I'm a little bit myself right now.
There can be nerves that come into it. So you know your breathing can be a little bit shallow and
you're really, you know, you're a bit unsure of what you're saying. So you're kind of, you know,
you're not really taking in the breaths and letting them out in a nice calm manner.
Because I myself am not following that advice right now, I'm not going to spend too much time
speaking about that and I'm going to get to what I really know. As I said, I'm used to speaking
with other people on a podcast. So when I'm doing it solo, it's that bit more nerve-wracking.
I wanted to leave that in just to demonstrate the importance of that breathing. So let's talk
about the fun stuff hardware. A lot of HPR episodes would tend to be recorded by people who
don't have the same experience with audio recording and audio editing as other people who
maybe do that on a more regular basis, which is completely fine. I mean, once the content is good,
it doesn't really matter. If you do want that spit and polish on your recording and you do want
that extra little bit of professionalism, then there are some very easy steps and some very
cheap purchases you can make to make that happen. So first of all, don't record on a webcam
mic because it's just going to sound absolutely terrible. Don't record on a phone mic, unless you
have a particularly good phone. If you can get a USB microphone, make sure it's not the cheapest
one you can find off Amazon. I would not recommend anything by Blue Yeti. Personally, I just don't
think they sound very good for the money that they cost. I don't know how much they cost these days.
When I last checked, it was in and around a hundred euro, which I just don't think it's a
product that's worth a hundred euro. It doesn't have the audio quality. If you already have one,
okay, fine. What I will say though is the environment that you record in is incredibly important.
Probably more important than your microphone and I'll come back to microphones and recording
equipment in just a moment because I think it is also important. But the environment that you
record in is incredibly important. So if you're recording in your kitchen with tiles and hard wood
and bare walls, it's going sound echoey and tinny and rubbish. If you're recording in a bedroom with
lovely soft pillows and a big duvet and shelves and clothes and wardrobes, that's going to sound
better, obviously because it absorbs the sound and there's not as much echo. It's not going
to sound as hollow and echoey. Currently, I am in my office slash future child's room with
there's three bedrooms or three bedrooms. My god, there's three doors on a wardrobe here and I
have basically opened the doors and wedged blankets into the top. So I've just three blankets
draped over the top of these bed wardrobe doors and then I have the the baby's future caught,
which I haven't gotten around to assembling properly and I have my dressing gown and some pillows
draped over that. So that's created quite a nice sound environment and there's probably still a
bit of echo and there's probably some incidental sounds from outside because I had the window
a jar because it's a bit warm. But the point is is that you have to do the best with what you have,
you know and I'm sure if you have an apartment or a house you're going to have one very small room.
I'll share with you an anecdote from the early days of recording Linux Lads. So I was living
in a rental house with a housemate and my housemate was an artist and she had a spare room or a
boxroom as we'd say. Just full of just other shit, just wardrobe full of old clothes that she
used in art projects and boxes and boxes of them just random random rubbish. That was the best room
to record it. I had a blue snowball microphone which is a very bad microphone, don't buy it and
it was what I had at the time though so I used it. What I would do with that microphone as they place
it on a cardboard box, get another cardboard box with one of the sides cut out, place it on top,
place a towel on top of that to stop it from rustling too much and then honkered down
nearly on the floor and speak into the little hole in the box and that's the only way I could get
this to sound in any way good was by entoming it in cardboard and towels. So that's the lengths
you would go to and that was in a small room with a lot of clothes and boxes and soft material in it
and it still didn't sound very good. Your hardware does sort of matter even if your environment is
you know it's kind of a 50-50 as far as I'm concerned. Your environment matters about 50%
and then what you're recording through matters the other 50% and then of course there's editing
and etc etc but I don't think that has quite as much of an impact you know it's as they say like
you can only take things out in editing you can't put them in you can't make bad audio sound good
you can make good audio sound bad but you can't do it the other way around so to get to the good
stuff hardware what would I recommend my first I would say decent sounding audio setup was
the microphone I currently using actually know that's not true sorry my first good microphone was
an audio technique at 80 2020 the thing with that was was that it was a condenser microphone so
a condenser microphone is very very good for recording vocals from music in a very well-treated
audio environment in a studio so it's actually not the best mic to use for podcasting unless
you are literally in a phone booth with styrofoam all around you yes your voice will sound great
but also the dog barking 6 doors down will also sound great so a dynamic mic is the way to go
for most people because you're going to be in a domestic situation you're going to be
unless you live out in the woods then you're going to be in an apartment close to or in a city
or even in a house I'm in a house but I am quite close to a city there's a busy road nearby there's
there's a hospital or two nearby there's dogs and everything there's cats fighting so
you know I'm going to pick up ambulances and police cars and cats and dogs and people shouting
on the street coming home from the pub so you know you pick up all that stuff and so I'd recommend
a dynamic mic and a dynamic mic is what people use when they're on stage so that literally picks up
the zone just around it it's not quite as sensitive as a as a condenser mic so just to get
down to brass tax and give you actual recommendations here mine is a sure SM58 so that's a pretty
common microphone that's that's a bit of a standard you know so many people use that same microphone
I got a mic stand for about 20 quid in my local music shop it's it's if anyone's curious it's a
stag desktop mic stand so it's got a very heavy metal bass and then a little poll that juts up
and you can just slot the microphone into it and it's because the bass is like made of solid metal
and it's very heavy it doesn't move it doesn't rattle it's and create any additional noise and
then I have some acoustic tiles on the desk that I picked up years and years ago from a whole
sailor for almost nothing and they just sit on the desk and just absorb any additional reflections
that come off the bare walls in here the thing is though if you have like a stage microphone like
a dynamic mic phone or a condenser you need an audio interface because the connector for that is an
XLR which is a big beefy circular connector that doesn't fit into a computer so you'll need an
audio interface thankfully those are cheapest chips the one I'm using did cost me about a hundred
quid but I got it second hand and it's a bit more than I really need it's got four inputs and four
outputs so that means you can plug four instruments or microphones into it I do also
play guitar sometimes and I mess around with synthesizers and stuff so that's why I have this
but it's it's still more than I need really so the audio interface that I started out with was the
barringer u4ia um2 so that's u-4ia um2 so that is a single input audio interface the thing is
very very cheap I actually had it I got it for nothing actually because my partner is a singer
and she was given it as a gift by by a friend in the past but if you were to buy it
second hand or even new in some places it would cost you only about 20 or 30 quid it's a very
plasticy light piece of equipment it's got three knobs on it and a couple of buttons you can plug
your microphone your XLR microphone into it you can plug your headphones into it it does direct
monitoring so that you can push about and then you can hear what's going into your input so you
can just make sure that it sounds alright it's got a couple of knobs there so you can you can
adjust the gain so that's like how much amplification is on your input you can adjust the volume
on the headphones etc so lovely little piece of equipment and great for traveling you can plug it into
a laptop it's completely USB powered as well you don't have to plug it in separately so if I was
to recommend anyone just like right at the beginning starting out who just wants some decent audio
I would say I sure SM58 a barangir u4ia um2 and then the only extra fancy stuff that you need is
an XLR cable which can be picked up for a five or ten quid and obviously the USB cable for the
audio interface which is similar to what you would have for a printer it's that big square
square USB one I don't know what the name of that standard is but I'm sure you can find out
online I'll put it in the show notes if I if I if I find out now I will say the sure SM58
has gone up in price over the last few years when I bought it it was only about 60 euro
these days I don't know if it's just become quite popular because it's quite a capable microphone
for the price and maybe inflation and cost living has pushed up the price at a bit I don't really
know but it's now retailing for about a hundred quid I don't know why the price has gone up maybe
sure I actually thought oh wait this square to popular microphone let's jack up the price a bit
who knows but um yeah but honestly dynamic microphone don't spend less than 50 or 60
units of your own currency be that dollars pounds euro guineas you know boolean whatever I don't know
just get something that's not very cheap but not very expensive and I think you'll be all right
it's going to sound better than any USB microphone that you will buy now that said there are
good USB microphones out there but I don't think you're going to get one for cheap you know I think
if you buy that barrenger audio interface you buy the kind of mid range dynamic microphone
then I think you're just going to get better audio done with those USB microphones like a blue
yetty just for comparison here just just to illustrate what I'm talking about here so I'm looking
at a website here a blue yetty USB microphone is 145 euro now that's on the higher end I suppose but
you're looking at a hundred to a hundred and fifty quit for that one microphone which honestly
is not a good microphone it does not sound good it does have some features that might appeal to
people who don't really care about audio they just want to start streaming a game or they just
want to record some audio very quickly and they just want to know for solution with no extra
equipment or cables they can plug it with USB into their computer and they're they're away
yeah fine I get it but the audio is just very bad it's not good it doesn't sound good for the
price you can spend 20 or 30 quit less and get in my opinion better sound so I don't know
maybe it comes down to space convenience who knows but that's my two cents on the
issue I think if you get a cheap audio interface a cheap condenser no sorry no condenser a cheap
dynamic microphone then you are going to get superior audio quality done one of those USB stream
or microphones unless there is some product these days that is completely blowing everyone's minds
and I'm just not aware of it so as I talked about earlier you could record on your phone
you could record on your iPad you could record on your on like a little dictifone if you want to be
really old school if you do want to follow what I'm saying here and you want to record on a very basic
XLR mic setup you know with your sure SM58 and your barringer audio interface I just want to
stress though those are not the only options I'm just saying that those are those are very solid
options if you're looking for a low price point that will give you the best bang for your book
obviously if you spend more you'll get more unless it comes to USB microphones of course
but what I'm saying is that spend more on the microphone yeah there's better microphones
there's there's there's there's other sure models and there's 18 models like audio technique
and stuff that do offer you like really really buttery sound that really sound really nice
I would say though if you're in a very poor noise environment always go for dynamic mics
just avoid condenser mics some condenser mics can actually handle a poor noise environment
better than others but I would say if you're a podcaster you know if it's a single speaker
kind of in deal that you're trying to accomplish you know a podcast or narration or a voice over
I would say stick to a dynamic microphone especially if you're in a house with other people
or you have kids or you have pets or you have you know you live in a built up neighborhood
I would say just stick to dynamic microphone so when it goes to the software that you used to record
I'm I'm gonna focus on Linux honestly because I have not been a Windows user for
I want to say six or seven years I've been a Linux daily driver for for quite some time
so the only recommendations I can authoritatively give here are in an express
I would just say use audacity audacity might seem a bit intimidating for the average person
but it really isn't you look at the top you see pause play stop skip back skip forward record loop
those are the big square buttons on the top I think a monkey could figure that out you know
you hit record you record you hit play you play hit stop you stop you hit pause you pause
these are buttons that have been on every remote control for the past 40 years so
and longer probably so I think audacity is the way to go
one thing I would make sure to do is to click the audio setup button
if you're recording for a podcast it's a very good idea to record in mono
by default it will assume you're recording music and record in stereo
so that's two channels left and right
mono records on just the left channel so if you don't record in mono or sorry if you record
mono into a stereo track and then you listen back to it you will only hear it in your left ear
because it's only on the left channel that's just one little thing to be aware of it's
a simple enough matter to just go to tracks mix and then mix stereo down to mono
but not everyone will be aware of that and those are menu options you know audacity just
to be clear so you go tracks mix stereo down to mono and that will take your two stereo tracks
and mush them into one so all that does is basically take the left ear of the stereo track
and put it on both the left on the right it makes no difference whether you record in mono
or you record in stereo on the left channel and then mix it down to mono it really doesn't matter
some very seasoned audio engineers might have a different opinion I don't know but yeah it doesn't
but I would say just for your own kind of convenience just record in mono so you know you'll
see it in audacity when you're recording you'll have two lines moving across the screen
and you'll only see one of them produce a waveform produced of the bumpy bumps and the one
below it will produce nothing and that's an easy way to tell if you're recording in mono you'll only see
one line and that will have the bumpy bumps on it so I'm trying to make this as
simplest possible for people so that there isn't any confusion here editing your audio is another
thing entirely to share a bit of my journey on Linux lives on the podcast I started out editing
podcasts in audacity audacity has changed quite a bit over the years when I originally started
using it it didn't have non-destructive editing so non-destructive means that when you delete or
change a part of the audio in the track that you've recorded it it doesn't completely delete it let's
say for instance there was a cough or a fumble in the audio or someone said something and then
ten seconds later said oh no I want to do that again something like that with destructive
audio editing which which was audacity at the time you would have to go back you would have to control
Z you would have to undo every single action and you would have to go back and say you made a mistake
in the editing you have to keep control Z control Z control Z keep on doing everything you did
for the past five minutes until you got to a point where that little piece of audio reappeared
and wasn't deleted anymore with non-destructive audio editing you can trim clips you can
like basically drag them from the edge and you know shorten them or lengthen them or you know split
them into new tracks but then when you split them into new tracks you can shorten them or lengthen
them again and all the audio on either side of that little clip that you have produced will still
be there it's all still there so you have a lot more flexibility in terms of editing so my work flow
when I first started Benix Lads when I was the editor I'm not the editor anymore we have another editor
who is not a host thank god what I would do was in my little workflow in audacity was to import
everyone's audio track into audacity run the noise removal tool so it would take 10 seconds
at the start of the episode to just basically say nothing I would take that 10 seconds of silence
run it through their little noise removal algorithm which is actually incredibly good I'll get to
this later but other audio programs don't seem to have as good a noise removal algorithm and I don't
understand why and just remove the background kind of falls in the room you know the room tone
as they call it and that would just give your audio just a little bit of a level up so if you just
capture 10 seconds of just the background noise of the room obviously if a dog barks or an ambulance
goes by it completely ruins it because it's going to identify that frequency and it's going to
cut that frequency out from everything else in the recording so you have to be selective about
period of audio that you select for your noise removal because it's going to sample that audio and
think right this is the background noise this is what we don't want and then if I apply this to
the rest of the track it's just going to remove all of those frequencies it's happened on several
occasions where there was something left in that little sample for the noise removal algorithm
and then it removed that frequency from a person's audio for the rest of the recording and it sounded
really weird I used to do the entire podcast in audacity but then what I started doing later on was
because the editing experience in audacity was not great since then it has introduced
just non-destructive editing so that means you can resize and you know adjust the length of clips
split them up transfer them to different tracks increase or decrease the length without
deleting anything so as I got used to audacity I started to notice pain points and friction
so I moved on to ardor so I will say that even though I moved on to ardor audacity's noise
removal tool was still fantastic and I would even to this day I would still use it because I
have not found an equivalent in other applications and I know other podcasters who still
swear by it they say the noise removal tool and audacity is fantastic and they just cannot
father musing anything else it's one of a kind the ease of use with ardor though is in the editing
it has it has always had non-destructive editing right from the beginning and even having used
more recent versions of audacity that do have non-destructive editing now I would say that ardor
ardor's workflow is still far superior they've made not to throw shade audacity they've made
great strides there but ardor's editing workflow is just miles ahead still it's just a different
animal in terms of audio editing software audacity's definitely aimed at a more
beginner kind of market and ardor is definitely aimed more of a professional market you know
them audacity's like a sound recorder with some additional features and it's thoroughly meant to be
more of an entry level to mid level kind of tool whereas ardor is targeting more of a professional
audience so they're both very good for what they are so it's good to use them in tandem you know
let like I used to we we we now have an editor for the next lads and I don't do the editing
myself anymore which is good because I personally don't enjoy audio editing but yeah audacity
is great for the initial treatment and you know trimming kind of the silence at the start the
silence at the end just getting all your tracks ready for editing and removing the noise
doing the initial treatment and then exporting them as kind of a lossless format like flag or
something and then plugging them into ardor for like chopping them up and you know putting fades
on the end of things and the beginning of things and making everything sound good so
while you're editing in ardor the whole point is to cut out all the fath and the fumbles and
the things that people didn't mean to say and like let me repeat that and that and that
cutting all that like awkward stuff out entirely depends on your style but if you
want to leave some of that in just for humanity and character that's also fine but
if you leave too much of that stuff in it's going to sound a bit
on professional and rubbish if it sounds like something you know your
cousin or your brother might have recorded on their laptop then it's not something that people are
going to want to listen to again and again so if you're trying to produce like in our case
we're trying to produce a podcast that people want to listen to every two weeks you do want
a certain level of quality now there are other podcasts out there that do have that level of
quality and I think they they slightly exceed our level of quality they do take take that care and
attention to making audio that sounds quite good but on the next slides we kind of embrace more
of a ad hoc nature if you will so personally we're happy to leave in some of the imperfections
that said the audio needs to be listenable it cannot sound harsh or irritating to your ears
it cannot sound grainy or staticky or harsh or annoying or any of those things like it needs
you need to be able to listen to it for half an hour when I was publishing YouTube videos the advice
I always heard was people will put up with bad video but they will not put up with bad audio
and that's very true how many YouTube videos have you clicked on the video quality was terrible
put the audio quality was very good and you keep watching it I think that's what happens with
audio and video so with video you see an image and the image makes sense with less information
that's my theory anyway I think you need a lot more you need a lot more audio information to kind of
understand a scene then you do visual information all the things I've said don't necessarily mean
you have to live up to a certain standard nobody's expecting you to do that if you just want to
record something that you are passionate about and that you want to speak about don't worry about
audio quality just do it don't be too concerned with what people think of you or how professional
your audio sounds or any of the things I've just said I would thoroughly encourage anyone to just
record a HPore episode and just upload it and learn by experience and if you listen to it
and you want to improve your audio quality and you want to improve your sounds then by all means
use the advice I've given in this episode but what I would say is that don't aspire to a standard
that someone else has said the advice I'm giving here simply just if you do want to reach a certain
level and you want to sound a certain way then by all means follow my advice but if you're happy to
talk about a novel you love if you're happy to talk about your hobby or something on the internet
that interests you and you don't honestly care about how it sounds you just want to convey
what you enjoy then by all means go ahead so I'll finish on some very easy easy tips that you
can use so say you're using a webcam mic using a built-in mic on your laptop you're just using
something that you have and you're really not bothered buying new equipment or you're really not bothered
delving deep into audio editing or anything like that so what I would say is be in a small room
with some soft things around so be in a small room some cushions a bed things like that
and then record on your laptop you can maybe boost the effect a little bit by wearing a hoodie
you know I've often recorded with a hoodie on and the hoodie upper on my head that acts as a sort of
audio booth effect almost it it's surprisingly effective if you really want to go the whole
hog I would say get a blanket and put it over your head on the microphone that's actually quite an
effective way to get your audio sound quite good the only danger there it though is that as the
microphone or as the blanket moves around it will rustle like that against the microphone
and against the microphone stand and against the laptop or against your clothes and it will sound
really bad so I don't know come up with your own solution there and just those are just some
easy suggestions you know just put some soft material around you to absorb the sound as much as possible
you would be quite surprised how good you can get a bad microphone sound in the right environment
contrary to what I said earlier in this episode yeah if it depends on the level of quality
that you're going for you can get it to it it's kind of a difference between getting its
sounding quote unquote professional and sounding not irritating to your listeners is the point I'm
so you can have poor quality audio but the sound that you're producing won't be abrasive in
anyway so I will come back with another episode on on this if you do have any suggestions or questions
please reach out to me on info at strandedoutput.com that's STR, A&D, E-D, O-U-T, P-U-T.com
you can also get my website on strandedoutput.com you can reach out to me on mastered on my handle there
is also stranded output I'm I'm happy to receive feedback I'm happy to receive messages feedback
criticisms insults whatever you have if you insult me I will hone you down and kill you though
just so you know other than that I will see you in the next one and thank you very much for listening
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