Shut down your e-mail program before you try recording a podcast segment, or you’ll get cute little alarm tones sounding in the middle of your recording.

So I’ve recorded a couple of bits for Julie’s Forgotten Classics podcast, “Jabberwocky” and “How the Whale Got his Throat”, and I thought I’d make some technical notes, never having done this before.

I recorded the two bits using GarageBand, which has a podcast setup; it seems to work just fine, and I think I’ll stick with it for the time being. My microphone was a cheap headset that I got with a copy of Rosetta Stone last year; it worked out OK, but I thought the result was rather noisy. Later, I went back and did some experiments, using the headset’s earphones to monitor the sound as I was recording…and, oh, yeah, it’s noisy. Here’s what I got:

• A rather loud hiss.
• A periodic beep, beep, beep, beep.
• Every little noise uttered by my sons in the next room.
• My every breath and plosive, whether I wanted them recorded or not.

By playing around with GarageBand, and a little judicious Googling, I found a filter called Speech Enhancer that masks out noise; it dealt with the first two, and maybe the third, but not the last. For such a little microphone, it picks up everything in the room.

So, after some more judicious Googling I ordered a new mic, a “Blue Snowflake“. It’s a portable USB microphone made precisely for podcasting and the like, by an outfit I’d never heard of that makes professional microphones. I’ve done some limited experiments with it, but so far I’m quite pleased. The hiss is still there, but is rather quieter, and the annoying beep, beep, beep is gone. It’s a directional mic, so noises elsewhere in the house are less of an issue, and as I can place it one to two feet from my mouth plosives aren’t an issue. Very cool; I’m looking forward to using it.