Record It Right

Every experienced podcaster has a lost-interview story. A recording app crashed, a guest's wifi hiccupped at minute forty, a file corrupted, and the conversation is gone, along with the goodwill of the person who gave you an hour. This lesson exists so that story is never yours. Recording is the one step where paranoia pays.

The software: free and boring

For solo recording, use the free tools. Audacity on Windows and Mac, GarageBand on Mac. Both record, both export the audio file you will upload to your host, and neither costs anything, which matches their importance: the recording software is a dumb pipe, and fancy paid suites add nothing a new show needs. The training material in this industry repeats a warning worth keeping: do not spend days learning an advanced tool's settings when a simple one does the job.

For interviews, you need a remote call platform that records. Any video-call tool your guest already knows works, and purpose-built remote podcast platforms exist that record each participant on their own device and stitch the files. Use whichever removes friction for the guest, because a guest fighting software is a stiff interview.

The double-ender: how interview audio actually stays clean

Here is the method that separates interview audio that sounds like radio from audio that sounds like a video call. Have each side record their own microphone locally while the call runs. The guest presses record on a free recorder app or your platform does it automatically, and you record your own mic in Audacity or GarageBand. When the call ends, the guest sends you their file and you send them nothing. Stitch the two local tracks in the edit and the wifi never mattered. The live call is the conversation; the local recordings are the audio. If the platform records a backup of the call itself, keep it, but treat it as the emergency copy, not the master.

Levels and the test ritual

Set your input level once and check it every session. Speak at full interview energy and adjust the input gain until your voice peaks around two-thirds of the meter, never touching red. Peaks that clip into red cannot be fixed in the edit; quiet can be raised, distortion cannot. Then run the ritual every single time:

1. Thirty-second test take at the top of every session, played back on headphones before the real conversation starts.
2. Clap once after both sides confirm they are recording. The spike marks a sync point for aligning double-ender tracks in the edit.
3. Wear headphones for the whole session so your mic never captures the guest's voice out of your speakers. Echos from one side ruin the whole take.

The backup rules

The corpus of podcast training is unanimous on this, because it is learned the hard way: never let the only copy of audio live in one place. Record into your software, and set a second device recording at the same time. A digital voice recorder, or even the voice memo app on a phone placed near your mic, is an acceptable emergency track for your side. Save the session file the moment the conversation ends, before you say goodbye, and copy it to a second location, cloud or drive, the same day. The operator who taught half this industry to podcast records into a dedicated digital recorder rather than only a laptop for exactly this reason: software crashes, and recorders do not.

Clean audio in hand. You are two habits away from never losing an interview again: the test take and the second recorder.