How to setup the Zoom PodTrak P4 for Podcasting — Easy & Complete Setup Guide

welcome to another video in my series about the zoom pod track p4 podcast recorder in this video we are going to specifically cover how you can set up this podcast recorder to be ready for your recording there are a couple things to keep in mind in terms of settings as well as power solutions and of course hooking up microphones one thing first this recorder was provided to me by sound services gmbh in germany they were really kind in sending this out to me as a loner so that i can make videos about this podcast recorder for you here on this channel they have no say in these videos i make these videos out of my own accord and i get to say whatever i want and they don't get to see the video before it goes live now this may not necessarily be as important for this video because it is a setup guide however the same thing applies for my review as well as my comparison videos between this and the h5 as well as the f6 and the road caster pro so you can check out those videos in the description below there is a playlist where all of those videos are combined to one long list but now in this video we are going to focus on the setup process of this recorder and this may be interesting for you whether you are still thinking about purchasing this or if you have purchased this recorder and now you want to know how you can set this up for your podcast first things first this is an incredibly easy setup for podcasting because it is just made for exactly that purpose so there are no real bells and whistles that you can change there are a very limited amount of features that you have control over and that actually is a very good thing now i want to mention first one thing that is that i'm going to be speaking about the phone call as well as computer integration in a specific video that is also available here on my channel and linked in the description in that specific playlist that is not something that i'm going to be covering in this video this video specifically will be talking about a normal two or three or four person interview where you have xlr microphones connected to the pod track as well as headphones so now let's jump into the first step and that would be to make sure that you have enough power luckily the podtrac p4 has a lot of ways to power this device the first thing of course is powering the recorder with double a batteries on the back of the device there you can just take rechargeable or non-rechargeable batteries and put them into the recorder like so and of course close the door interestingly enough you can also power the pot track p4 just with the usbc port on the side and a battery brick like the one that i have right here from zendure however i would always recommend you also have those batteries in the back because that way this usbc power is actually a hot swap safety so to say so when you plug in the usbc power to a either wall outlet or something like this power brick you have that as your main power source but if that gets disconnected for whatever reason or it runs out of power you will always have the backup here in the back with those double a batteries so having a fresh charged battery pack in there is always a good idea so let's do that for the moment we are going to hook this up with this usbc cord so that we have the power that we need and we are pretty safe that this is not going to be running out of power something to know here is that the pod track p4 actually can be powered up to four hours on those double a batteries as long as you do not need a phantom power for your microphone so now we just turn on our power pack set that to the side and with that we can turn on the part track now once this system is booted up the message on the screen changes to sd card access so that it is going to check your sd card and see or index the files on it so that's already done and we are ready to go now the process for me is usually that i want to make sure how many microphones am i going to be using in this setup for that we have these mute buttons up here right now all of the four microphones would be active and unmuted so we are just going to mute all the microphones that we don't need for this recording i also usually have everything set to zero up here at the top so that i have a baseline which i can work with once you have a certain rhythm with your podcast and you know certain details for example if you always plug yourself into port number one you always have the same microphone and you always need gain level five for example then of course it also might make sense to just set that straight out of the gate without even checking any other details now the next step would be to connect your microphones however something to note before that is also whether or not your microphone needs phantom power and in that case be prepared to also activate that the right order there however is to first plug in your xlr cable then plug in your microphone that needs phantom power and also turn down the gain to zero once you have done all of those things you then hit the switch right here from normal microphone to the microphone with power which has a little bolt right next to it so that the phantom power is active on that channel the same can be done on channel three and four however there you have to set the switch to the middle position and not the far right because the far right position has special meaning so in this case with the channel three is the phone integration and with channel 4 it would be the usb c integration so that you can use your computer audio also and record that so that's something to note here also something to note here is when you do use these integrations like the phone call or the usbc part with the audio interface component then you're actually going to lose either one or both of these xlr ports to those functionalities so you cannot use the phone computer and four xlr ports you can only use then either two or three actual r ports and for example the phone call combination or you can use three xlr ports and the computer integration but you cannot use phone computer and four xlr ports if you don't use any of those two integrations phone call or computer audio then you of course can use all four of the xlr ports so now that we have set up these ports we can go back and change the gain to zero there and we are ready to hook up two microphones these microphones do not need phantom power they are the sure beta 57a and the atr 2100 i usually prefer to use the exact same model of microphone for multiple guests however in this case i'm choosing these two microphones as a demonstration because the atr 2100 is a very popular choice to upgrade from for example because you were using the usb component of that microphone first to connect it to a computer and do interviews that way now with this setup if you have for example two of the atr 2100 or you buy one new microphone with this recorder you can still use the atr 2100 or similar microphones that have that dual purpose with usb as well as xlr inputs but now let's get these microphones into position this one right here and let's also put the other one kind of and so now i have these two xlr ends as you can see here these are the ones that are called the male xlr side with the sticky things or the pointy things in there these three pins right there and these are the ones that go into the pot track p4 in my case i want to use the shure beta 57a on port number one so i'm gonna plug that into there and the atr 2100 has the different cord that goes into channel two so now these two are ready and connected and i'm just gonna put the chords like so and of course if you haven't already the other side is the one that has the so-called female counterpart and that looks like this and it has this little button right there and that goes into the back of your microphone like so and it clicks into place with that we can adjust our cord again so that everything is nice and straight right there and now we have our main microphone ready it's in a good position and we can go back to the pod track so we find our settings however this way we can only see what we are doing in this case i'm increasing the gain right here and as you can see there is a signal coming in on the screen and this would be way too loud so this is a signal that we don't want so i'm gonna dial it back a little bit so that we can end up where there is a little bit of room of air to the top and i'm not completely crushing the signal so that would be something that would probably kind of work right there now of course the other microphone i am not really speaking into so even though i turn it really loud there is still a little bit of room however that's because i'm not speaking into that microphone so please make sure that you are only setting these adjustments with actually speaking into the mic and not like i am right now with the microphone pointing into the open air nobody's there have your guests speak into it or speak into it yourself to set your gain level for a start you can always adjust them later but for a start it's always a good time to make sure that you have a certain baseline but with the potrak p4 you of course also have these connectors for the headphones and that's actually a really cool feature so that every single person that you have miced up can also have their own set of headphones of course that's also a much steeper investment to also purchase headphones for each person or have other kinds of headphones lying around earbuds for example is not necessarily something i would recommend because it's not really something that you want to put into your ear when 10 other people have used those before however if you have over ear headphones for example those work great now i have my bose qc35 right here so i'm gonna put those on and with this mini jack connector this is a stereo mini jack connector i'm going to plug this into port or channel number one and once more i have a gain level that i have to set in this case it's a gain level that i want to set so that i can actually hear myself fairly well in this case now sometimes it's really nice to be able to still hear the surrounding world with for example having one cup over the ear and the other not however for the purpose of podcasting especially when you have a setup like this pod track where everybody gets their own headset this actually is something where you can dial it into a point where it actually sounds like you are speaking in the room and you have that other microphone also so that someone speaking into the other microphone you also hear that everybody who is connected down here with the headphone ports will actually hear exactly the same thing and the great thing is that there is barely any delay between the time you speak and you hear maybe a couple milliseconds however it is so little that it's for me at least not really disturbing and i always had the feeling that this type of life monitoring could be really really distracting however i do believe now that for the purpose of this type of podcast recording it can be really handy the benefit of having something like this built into the pod track is that actually every single person can have their own gain so for example if i like my gain a little lower and someone else with their ears a little worse or they need a little louder can say they want it a little louder and you have actually the freedom to change those settings now of course there's always also the possibility that your guest does not want to hear themselves at all and for those times it might make sense to not have headphones at all and just use the microphone however it can be really beneficial to have this for every single person and them being able to hear themselves also helps a lot because they would notice if for example the microphone is right here and they stop hearing themselves and as this comes back again you start hearing yourself again and you notice what you are actually recording and you would also notice for example if you're handling the microphone and there are handling noises that's something that you can only notice if you have headphones on sometimes it's also powerful just as a host to have headphones on and everybody else may not need them at the end of the day you have four headphone ports right here and each with their own gain dial so that's really a powerful feature and would be the next step for me to make sure that everything is set up correctly now that i have my microphone here at levels that are pretty nice i would say i can also go into these settings now the great thing about the pod track p4 is that the settings are really minimal and that's a actual really really good thing i think now first things i would go to the mic settings and there i would check if the low cut is engaged for all of the microphones personally i like how this helps me in the processing of things i can of course also disable this and that makes the microphones a little lower in their quality so that the lower frequencies are more present there and you might want to check this even for your guest because you cannot really get these frequencies back once you have removed them however if you just record it like this and you want to do post processing then the signal might be of higher quality for you for doing some post processing if you don't enable the low cut filter so that's something that i would definitely take into consideration if you want to activate or not have activated the low cut filter so you can do this on a per mic basis go back and we also have the settings for the limiter now the limiter on this device is really something that's a complete game changer in this price category in my opinion i have used the h5 previously and the limiter on that one was completely useless you clipped the signal the limiter was not able to recover any of that on the other hand here with this one you actually have a really good limiter and yes the sound is relatively good if you don't use the limiter and you might even get a little bit of a cleaner signal however if you want to have the safety right built in then the limiter is definitely your choice this makes podcast recording super super simple and you don't really have to worry about laughing or getting louder or constantly checking your gain you might want to still do that because it always is better to have a right level or a good level for your podcast however the limiter will protect you in those cases where it gets louder and that's really powerful in this recorder again you can set the limiter per mic on this device so that you only have it active on those where you need it now we can go over with more settings the file transfer only is necessary if you want to transfer the data from the sd card to your computer with the usbc cord this is super handy because you don't need an sd card reader specifically for this sd card so you can just use the inbuilt sd card port rear and keep the sd card right there and connect it with a usbc and then go to file transfer and you're ready to go now going deeper into these settings right here we are now in the settings menu there we have usb max minus which is something that i'm going to be talking about in the phone and computer integration video you can set the time and the date lcc contrast battery out of power off and the sd card formatting for example is right there so you can make sure that you have enough storage on that specific sd card that's something that might be interesting to also do before you start recording so that you know that you have long enough right there on the sd card ready for you and that's probably one of the most important settings in this menu however you also on the home screen you can see how much time you have left as of the time as you are starting right now and i can see for example this is a 16 gigabyte card that's in here i already have plenty of audio on this device and i still have almost 4 hours and 24 minutes this is still with everything recording because this recorder will always record each of these four tracks and also record the sound paths plus a stereo mix down so it will never do just two of the channels or just the sound paths it will always record all of the channels so for example right now if you had microphones connected here but you have the mute buttons enabled then they would not be recorded like for example if i hit this button here then you can see that it is muted and it's not going to be picked up right now however if i bring it back now it's going to be picked up again and will also be part of this track one file on this device now generally speaking this is all you really need for podcast recording on the pod track p4 however there are also these sound paths and these are actually really interesting for things like intro and outro as well as for example listener questions and sound effects now to set these up you can go into the menus and then navigate to the sound pads point and then you can choose which one you want to change and also how they behave i have made a video specifically about that which will be linked in the description below where we are talking specifically about the play modes as well as how to use these in general and also what these might be interesting for to use but now i also want to do a test recording for you right now seeing how all of this works in action so i'm going to hit the record button right there and of course now you are able to hear this recording right now with this mic from the pod track p4 however i also want to bring up the gain on the other microphone right there so that we can see a little bit of the signal right there and now i'm gonna just put this down for a second and go over there and now as i am speaking into this microphone you will be able to hear the microphone the atr 2100 on your ears now if i go back and switch to this microphone now you can hear again the shure beta 57a and now what i want to show you is what happens if i fade this so if i go lower louder and louder and remember there's a limiter on this so it's not clipping despite the signal on here clipping ferociously so this is clipping and i'm going louder and louder and still it's getting louder and louder however it is not clipping and that's really really cool the signal is kind of protected like that now i can also use these sound pads for example and have a funky sound and i can play that out as well and it's going to just stop once it is finished and with that i can also have applause because yeah this is a really cool video right so that's going to be just played for the time of me holding this button and there are more functionalities as i mentioned i made a video specifically about that feature set now i also want to demonstrate how things work with the mute button right now you can see we are recording right here but now if i hit this mute button now if i bring it back now you can hear me again and also important here is that the mute button actually does not have any kind of click or something similar so you can just actually use this in the middle of everything to and to unmute something that you are saying or some microphone that you have on the desk when someone's leaving or wrestling around or stuff like that and with all of that of course you have the headphones however that is something that i cannot really demonstrate to you you can change the volume here and i can hear myself louder or less loud now once you're done with your recording you can either hit the record button or the stop button and with that the recording is going to be finished and finalized and now you will find these files on the sd card and with that i can go on to my computer for example go into the setting of file transfer and now these recordings are ready to be transferred and i can plug something in here with the usbc port and have that connected to my computer and use those files in whatever program i want the great thing about this recorder is that you have a final stereo mix down of everything that you have mixed there so maybe you want to do some loudness normalization maybe you also want to convert it to a mp3 file that's a good idea for podcast hosting sites but in general you could just take that file make it an mp3 and then publish it to whatever site you want so that's a ability that this type of recorder gives you which is absolutely great because you can just mix the whole thing on here and be done by the time you come back home now i hope this was an interesting overview of how to set up the pod track p44 podcasting with its different features with using an external battery power so that you don't lose out on any of those informative interviews that you are about to do now i have made multiple videos about this device in comparison to other recorders and also a full-fledged review about the pod track before all of those are in the playlist linked in the description below i will also have product links in the description below for the pod track p4 in the description below those are usually affiliate links and they help me make more videos like this by earning a small commission now if you have any more questions about the pod track p4 then of course you can leave those in the comment section down below and i will try to answer you there or make a video specifically about it however please know that this unit is not going to be on my hands forever this is going to be shipped back to sound services gmph who were nice enough to provide this for me so that i could make these videos now if this video was helpful or informative please give it a thumbs up that helps out a lot with the youtube algorithm also subscribe to the channel and hit the bell icon so that you don't miss out on any of the upcoming videos and with all of that said i hope you have an amazing day make it your life create your podcast and i will see you in the next video ciao you

Channel: Chris Spiegl

Views: 19,124

Keywords: Podcast Equipment, PodTrak P4, Best Podcast Recorder, Podcast Recorder 4 People, Four XLR Ports, Simple Podcast Recorder, Cheap Podcast Recorder, Mobile Podcast Studio, Best Mobile Audio Recorder, Podcasting Gear, Podcasting Equipment, Live Streaming Mixer, Podcast Mixer, New Podcast Mixer, Ultimate Podcast Recorder, Cheap Podcasting, No Money Podcast, Podcast Launch, Which Podcast Recorder 2021, Setup Guide, How to Setup, Easy Setup, Setup Process, Podcast Setup

Id: -2DAqHubzPE

Length: 24min 34sec (1474 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 15 2021