June 28th, 2009
Last October, I drew up this diagram to help my friend Erk set up his then-new Yamaha mixer with the rest of his podcasting gear.
The main reason I made the diagram was to help demonstrate how to create a mix-minus situation for monitoring/recording Skype calls. And back in October, Erk was able to get his rig set up and working properly. This month, he moved his podcasting studio, and after he had everything together at the new location, he found he was having some trouble getting the mix-minus working. He messaged me via Twitter, and we eventually connected on Skype so I could try and help him out. After a couple hours of troubleshooting, we were able to get things working again. It seemed that, for the most part, the hardware was all properly wired and configured. The problem came down to some software settings, and ultimately could’ve probably been resolved much faster if Erk’s laptop had been restarted after the software settings were altered (even though the machine never prompted for a restart). Regardless, I enjoyed talking to Erk (and his mom Judy) over Skype, and it’s always good to help out a friend. But when working with computers, it pays to remember troubleshooting rule #1: Restart, restart, restart.
July 14th, 2009 at 1:53 am
Your podcast is the only one I’ve heard where the Skype calls don’t sound like utter crap.
I’ve been interviewed twice via Skype. One time the result came out like crap, and the other time like totally horrible crap.
I felt like I’d wasted my freaking time. Who wants to sound like crap?
What’s your secret, Shawn-O?
July 14th, 2009 at 9:10 am
The only thing I can think of is that we use a second computer to handle the Skype calls. It’s also been helpful that we’ve mostly talked to people via Skype who have their own recording rigs. That always helps.