I’ve had 2 people ask me this in less than a week. To me, that qualifies this as a FAQ.

Let’s start with Skype. Don’t attempt to record Skype from Audacity (more on this later). Instead, I use a program called HotRecorder that came out a few years back when I started podcasting. There seem to be better programs out there now that can record off Skype. The important thing is you want to have what’s known as 2-channel (sometimes called stereo) recording for Skype. Often your audio level will not be at the same level as that of the folks on Skype. Listen to the first few episodes of Country Witch * City Witch to see what happens in this scenario. Full disclosure: I have spoken to Antonio who does post-production for the CW*CW show and Witch in the city and they seem to be improving as of late :) .

Why not record Skype from Audacity? First, you would need to set it to record the WaveOut channel instead of the Microphone channel. This is a problem. For example, the laptop I currently use does not have a WaveOut channel. Even after trying some software Jason recommended, I am still without that channel. You can get around this, but that’s not useful. Why? If you do manage to record WaveOut (or an equivalent thereof), your Skype guests/co-hosts will hear a very persistent annoying echo. It can be annoying to the point of being unable to discern what people are saying. That is not conducive to a podcast with actual discussion.

The great thing about 2 channel recording is you can export this to an audio format Audacity can use (Ogg-Vorbis, MP3, WAV, AIFF and so forth). You can then split the track (your recording) into left and right channels. After that, Audacity has a nifty drop-down box on the left where you can change it to mono (instead of left or right) so the audio is all “centered.” To make one channel louder or quieter, there is a volume control bar on the left where you can quickly adjust this.

If you’re not familiar with using Audacity at all, I’d recommend learning how to podcast from the same video that taught me how to do this by viewing the video below or downloading it here: