Here's an update to last Thursday's Auricle post Recording online audio interactions - the easy way?. Some other interesting candidate tools are appearing, but so have a few problems. Over at Webfeed Central I came across MixCast Live a work-in-progress by James Prudente of TinyScience which aims to make creating a podcast as easy as possible. My interest is in its promised Skype recording potential. There's a 'pre-release' version available (which isn't free). MixCast Live requires the dotnet 1.1 framework, so it's for Windows users only.
I couldn't get MixCast Live to work at first, but with the help of several emails and a Skype conversation with James Prudente we identified the problem as a conflict with my Replay Radio installation which installs supplementary sound drivers. I temporarily removed Replay Radio which enabled me to put MixCast Live through its paces. Basically MixCast Live provides an easy interface for the simple recording and mixing of different audio sources and the production of either an MP3 or .wav file. I found some bugs in MixCast, e.g. it appeared to create two MP3 files for a single recording session (only one of which worked) and when a .wav file was created and played back in Windows media player it would get two thirds of the way through and then Windows Media Player would then declare is was an 'unrecognized format' (playing back the same .wav file in Real player presented no problem).
The pre-release version I evaluated doesn't yet include the facility to record from Skype but the developer tells me that's on its way in the very near future so I'll report on that when I can get my hands on it.
James Prudente, the developer of MixCast Live proved to be extremely responsive and has taken the clash with Replay Radio very seriously because there's an awful lot of users of the latter out there. So MixCast Live is certainly on my watch list but most users would probably be wise to hold back until some of the Skype functionality has been added and clash issues sorted. If these happen then MixCast Live could be one to watch.
In my previous article I also introduced Replay Telecorder as a candidate Skype recording solution. Telecorder certainly seems to do the job but I've found it difficult to maintain microphone levels during Skype recordings. Some test interviewees have complained about an annoying echo at their end although everything sounds fine at mine. I suspect this may be more of a Skype problem than a Telecorder one. Despite configuring Skype not to, this VOiP application seem able to adjust the microphone levels on my systems audio mixer so I can start off with good sound levels but then have Skype force them down leaving my voice as the junior partner (some may see this as an excellent feature:)
I also have found Skype to be extermely fussy about working with other applications. A fresh install of Skype may work perfectly, but start Replay Radio, or Replay Telecorder, and Skype may or may not decide to crash; it will only work again after a reinstall. Yet, on another system the same combination can work perfectly. When Skype works well it's very good, but it needs to be able to do this consistently and I just don't like it taking control of my recording settings. If I can't get the robustness we require for online interviews then Robin Good's recommendations regarding iVocalize (see previous Auricle article) could look a better bet, but I'll keep Auricle readers posted.
