How can I record podcasts remotely?

We know, and this period is an excellent example: it's the customers and the constraints that push us every time to go further, to do things differently, to innovate. Here we share our experience of producing brand podcasts during the 1st month of confinement. We'll be talking about:- the technical and logistical configurations we set up with our customers and partners- our tips for successful remote sessions in this context- our experience and feelings following all these recordings.

Learn how to record a podcast remotely and quickly

An exceptional situation... From one day to the next, our customers have experienced:- A reorganization within their department and company, of their working environment, their objectives, etc. You know exactly what I mean... And finally, our advertisers turned their entire communications plans (internal and external) upside down, including budget allocations and channels used. And all this in the space of just a few days... So it was vital for us to strengthen our ties with them. Thus, an exchange of views during the 1st week of confinement enabled us not only to understand everyone's requirements, but also to reassure them of our availability, advise them (on strategy, creation and logistics), and ensure continuous service on our scope.

What did we do at Calliopé when we heard about the confinement?

One of the most important principles of podcasting is regularity. "Create an appointment with your listeners", "Establish listening habits",... We've heard it all too often from our clients! So, Covid-19 or not, our challenge was not to cut this link between the brand and its audience, even less so in this period of confinement, which is conducive to listening to podcasts.

STEP 1: Home-studios relaunched

Our priority was to ensure post-production of all episodes already recorded, in order to meet the various release schedules. So we (re)launched home-studios at our production team's. With the same quality of equipment as our studio, we were able to ensure post-production of all the productions already recorded, and maintain the pace of broadcasting.

STEP 2: Reactive partners

The agency has built up an ecosystem of partners with whom we collaborate on a regular basis. They enable us to offer a global experience around the projects we carry out.All these partners responded by ensuring the transition when the containment was announced. This enabled us to continue to serve our customers to the best of our ability, and we'd like to thank them all very much in the process! These voice professionals also ensured the transition by equipping themselves (for those who weren't already) with high-quality equipment to ensure their sound recordings with our teams (we're thinking in particular of the members of the Les Voix association and our independent partners).

STEP 3: Ensure registration

With all this in place, all that "remained" was to set up the appropriate configuration(s) for remote recording: for dramas, we already had the SessionLink tool in place, enabling us to carry out remote sessions with equipped professionals. However, for podcasts involving non-professionals or non-equipped people, it's a completely different story. In this configuration, we create a VoIP conversation group with everyone (host = interviewer, guests = interviewees and customers). The host can use his professional microphone if he has one. The guest just has to download the chosen application to carry out the interview on mobile or computer. And customers take part in the exchanges, microphones closed.

What we note about this configuration:

This is a very simple configuration to set up, directly interconnected with ProTools. On the other hand, the output sound is a "remote effect", as the frequencies responsible for voice clarity and precision are not taken into account by these applications (below 200hz and above 10khz).

The result?

Dozens of episodes have been released for internal and external communication using this simple configuration, adapted to customer constraints, for a "clean" result.