How to Record a Podcast Using Audio Hijack

hello fellow podcasters it's me dan benjamin and today we are going to be talking about how to record your podcast using audio hijack on the mac it's an amazing piece of software and i'm going to tell you everything you need to know about it coming up now [Music] that's right we're talking about audio hijack on the mac this is how i record my shows and how i recommend if you have a mac how you consider recording yours it's great whether you have multiple guests in the same studio with you or whether they're remote coming in over skype or another application i'm going to show you with skype but this is the best way to record i've recorded using everything i've recorded uh gosh using quicktime logic pro tools you name it i've used it and after doing this now since 2006 i have found that audio hijack pro if you're on a mac is the best way to do it and i'm going to show you exactly how i go about configuring it from start to finish so that you can use a setup like mine or similar to mine to record whether it's with people locally or remote people on skype that's going to be the main focus because that's the way that a lot of people are still recording today now i did another video where i talked about double enders where you can record and have the remote person record that's still what i do most of the time but i'm using the local copy of their audio that i record with audio hijack to align and correctly uh synchronize their audio with my audio here because as you know audio drift happens when you're recording with people in remote locations so before i show you that of course it is time like and subscribe and ring the bell makes a big difference leave your comments down below do you like this do you agree you disagree you want other videos ask me questions in the comments i'll answer every single one of them that's a promise and i want to say one more thing if you want to support the work that i do i've got a patreon you can go to patreon.com dan benjamin if you like helping out help out if you don't enjoy the video and let's dive in here we are in audio hijack and i'm going to show you the exact way that i record almost all of the podcasts that i do and have done for a few years now i'm going to start by creating a new session and when i start with a new session i usually choose input device as the template uh that just seems to work better for me you could certainly start with a blank session and add the input device but this is just it skips one step so why not now here is our new session and you can see that it already has the input device that it's selected and it has the macbook pro mic which is not what i want to use i want to change that in this case i've got a scarlet 2i2 connected on a usb port so i'll pick that but that's not enough there's a little bit more that i have to do here because uh each audio interface that you have potentially has multiple channels coming through and in my case there are two channels uh one for the first mic and one for the second mic i actually want to set both of these to be channel one i really want a mono recording we'll get to those details in a little bit but that way i'm only getting what's coming in through the first channel okay so that's it for that now here i'm going to control the format that the file's actually saved in and i have a couple different choices the default is a high quality mp3 file and that's good i like that um most of the applications that you'll be doing editing with these days and that's perfectly enough but i don't like the defaults now some people would say wait a minute what about an aif file or a wav file yeah you can absolutely use those file types instead if you want but in my experience especially considering that i'll be mixing this down to like a 96 kbps or 128 kbps file it really just takes up a ton of extra space like i've said in other episodes of this program i i'm not narrating like a national geographic special the podcast will be enjoyed by people at much much lower bandwidth so there really isn't a reason to save it as an aif file if i was if i was recording a band and i was making an album or if i was recording a narration for a national geographic special i probably would pick an aif or a wav file but i'm not however these mp3 settings are not what i want for example a bit rate of 256 kbps that's fine it's a little bit overkill again i'm probably mixing it down to 128 or 96 anyway so generally i'll pick 192. if you want to leave it at 256 and you've got a lot of disk space sure go ahead but for me 192. i do not want variable bitrate i want constant rate if you don't know what that means that's a whole other show but pick constant sample rate generally in audio recording i see 48 000 hertz more than i see 44 there are people who will say 44.1 is enough i go with 48 that's also the default that the focusrite records at so there's no conversion that has to happen there uh you can change that in the focusrite you can change it in almost all audio interfaces but uh 48 000 is pretty much the standard and of course you don't want joint stereo i don't want any stereo because mono so i pick mono and what i can also do if i want is i can change the the location and then file name but for the sake of argument right now this is just fine i'm going to leave it at input input device recording and date and time and saving the audio hijack folder you can control that and i do actually for different shows that i do if i'm recording an episode of one show i might have it have the show name here as the file name with the date and time associated with it if i'm recording multiple people i might have their name in there as well to help keep those different tracks so for right now i'll leave input device recording but i'll go ahead and put my uh my name in here so that i know that that is going to be my track you don't really need to worry about a file limits um that's just not something that um that that we need to worry about we don't need it to start a new file or anything like that it's fine just the way that it is now i'm going to go ahead and make this window a little bit bigger so you can see what i'm doing in here because as you start to add additional devices it requires a little bit more work now something else that i like to do is i really like to have some kind of meters going so that i can see where the the levels are for me and and the guests and there's a handful of different meters that you can use it really just depends on the style that you like for example the peak rms meter that's the one that i generally use the most and in a second i'll speak into that microphone i'm recording with a different microphone and you can see the peak levels start to move once i get the whole recording set up now if you want if you want to be mr fancy you can use vu meters and i'll put both of these in here so you can actually see what they both look like but i recommend having at least one meter in there now there's a lot of audio effects you can also put on here i don't do any of those i like to have either my pre-amp uh my audio interface do them or i like to do them in post i never use them in here and there are people who who would say you're crazy they're great and they have the tons of these uh built-in effects as well you can put low-pass filters you can do all kinds of stuff i just generally don't need to do that in this application i have a workflow and it happens for me mostly in post now there's another source that i want to add of course we're talking about my skype guest so i will drag application over and then i'll get to choose the application you'll see that recent applications are highlighted here at the top and if the application that i wanted to use wasn't in here i could select the application but in this case it'll be skype so i'll pick skype but there are some details here that are very important obviously you uh you don't want to include the audio input uh i'm already recording the audio input right here so i want to uncheck that i also want to make sure that i fill playback gaps with silence and i don't want to limit audio capture i also like to add meters to my skype cast as well and i'll just put the peak rms meter in there instead of the vu meter because you're gonna get the idea so i also want to add in a recorder for the skype input the skype channel and i will go ahead and make these settings pretty much the same as they were for my audio track i'll just name this input device even though it's not and i'll put that down as guest and i want to go in and change these settings again the same way that i did before so once again we set it to 192 kbps we have a constant bit rate 48 hertz and mono and now we're ready to record however depending on the audio interface and most of them work this way you if i were to hit record here you're not going to be able to hear your guest and that's because audio hijack will hijack the audio so you need to add an output device and you need to set that to be whatever your headphones are plugged into so if your headphones are plugged into your scarlet 2i2 like mine are well then that's what you want it to be set to but if they're plugged into your other usb mic you'd set it to that if they're plugged into headphones or if you just want to listen in some other way then you want to change that to the device so as you can see here i've got a few different options uh the scarlett 2i2 is what i want to use that's what my headphones are plugged into and with that i am ready to record and now i am recording and uh if my guest is there they can speak and as you can see here goes the show and uh this is what it looks like while you're recording you can watch the levels both on the peak meters and the vu meters and then when my guest speaks you can see their meters moving as well now i can go and grab those files and edit them with my favorite audio editing application and that's it that's how i set up and use audio hijack for my podcasts and that's it that's how i record using audio hijack you get it all if not re-watch the video but i'm sure that you did because it's super straightforward right and now you can record the same way that i do and i hope that you find this has been a useful tutorial for you again like subscribe ring the bell and i'll see you on the next video [Music] you

Channel: Dan Benjamin

Views: 2,838

Keywords: podcast, podcasting, recording, audio hijack, editing

Id: QMmTAnLZb-c

Length: 11min 11sec (671 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 15 2020