Figuring out Audio
I did a couple of things tonight in my latest audio recording that made a big difference. First, I bought a new headset. It's a $30 plantronics headset from Best Buy. The earpieces/muffs are bigger and absorb the sound so that the speaker's voice doesn't feed into the microphone.
More importantly, I'm using the mute feature of the microphone. For some reason, using Skype's mute feature had no effect in the recording, but the built-in mute feature of the plantronics head phones does wonders for the sound. It really blocks out a lot of the white noise.
Second, I'm using Pamela instead of Hot Recorder. I set the volume levels at about +25% for both the mic and speaker. Pamela sounds better/louder/clearer than Hot Recorder.
Finally, I switched web hosts. I was initially lured in by Globat's promise of one terabyte of data and bandwidth, but the promise turned out to be somewhat of a scam, because while they give you greater bandwidth, it seems like they cram more people on the same server. The result was slow web loading. It was taking about 15 seconds for my site to load sometimes. This was totally unacceptable. Their tech support tried to say that it was my content that was making the site slow.
But when I switched to Lunar Pages, my site's loading time sped up to about 1 second loading time. I really recommend Lunar Pages. Our chapter has been using them as a web host for about 2 years now, and we've never had any problems. Although they don't advertise immense amounts of storage, their technical support is excellent (in contrast to Globat's tech support, who seem more like secretaries), and their all-around quality is superb. The cPanel is fully loaded.
Also, for this interview with Perlin, I had to initially convince him of the value of podcasting. I need to carefully count the downloads and see if it truly results in more click-throughs and promotion for his site and services.
