It is Thursday, so that means we're going to talk about podcasting. Won't that be dandy? Well, hello. How are you doing?
Welcome to the show. This is a show. Yeah, this is a show. I'm using a great show.
This doesn't take podcast shows. My name is Michael Croes, and this is The Daily Grateful. And on Thursdays, because of people requested it, I talk about podcasting and setting up your own podcast. I do just a little bits of it.
So today, what I'm going to talk about is a piece of equipment that you'll eventually have to have, or you may want to have. Maybe you should have, and maybe you have, and you're not using it. My daughter's doing that. But anyway, we're going to talk about an audio interface.
What is an audio interface? Well, when you get past the USB microphone, so you need to get a better microphone, you have to get something called an XLR microphone that has a much thicker cord, and it plugs directly into something called an audio interface. It doesn't go into your computer. It goes into an audio interface.
I like saying that. My favorite words, that's one of an audio interface. Anyway, what it does is you can put it in there. And then it makes your, it has all these wonderful electronic thingamajucks in there.
I call them Ls, who take your voice, process it a little bit, and then shoot it out another USB thing into your computer after you're done, or when you're done, or while you're doing it. But you do this. Now, the advantage of this is you can have multiple people plug microphones into it. You can have, you know, at the audio interface that I was using just before the one I'm using now, I could plug six microphones.
I don't need six microphones in my studio. I need two. So I bought a new audio interface. It's better than that one.
But anyway, that's one of the things. It has a place where you can plug your headphone in and you can monitor everything that's going on. Most importantly, if you buy a really good microphone, you're going to need something called phantom power. All right.
And the phantom power powers the microphone, making the microphone sound better. So you're going to need an audio interface when you move up the ladder for better sound. I'm sitting here right now, okay, talking through a rather expensive microphone. It's a good microphone.
It's a road microphone. And I'm going directly into a roadcaster duo, which is a audio interface. It does all kinds of stuff like the music you heard when I started up. It's on there.
And there's other things up there like, oh, I have to put it up. There's things like that. And you know, just just stuff like that. Oh, no.
Yeah, that's on there as well. So you can add those things. You can add commercials and all of that good type of stuff. So it's kind of a high-end one that I've got.
You don't need a high-end one. By the way, these things are very portable. Usually you can take them with you if you wanted to do a remote. I guess I could take this thing with me if I wanted to do a remote.
But there's others that are better suited for that that you can take with you. So and you can expand into these things. And the price range, well, let's talk about some of that, shall we? And give you some ideas.
This thing that I'm talking to you through right now is what does that cost? It's about 500 bucks, okay? The big brother of it is called the Roadcaster Pro 2. And that's about 700 bucks.
That takes four. The only difference between that and this is that has four microphones. And this one only does two. So it's smaller.
Then we move on to the Focusrite Vocaster. That's a nice little one that, you know, it's very small. It's 99.99. And it's very nice.
The Focusrite Scarlet. That's what I got from my daughter. It's a real good one. And the one that does two microphones is 199.99 on Amazon.
They've got one that will only do one microphone, which is what I got her. And it's 100 bucks. And I will tell you that the circuitry inside anything that Focusrite makes is really good. It's high-end.
It is very professional. I totally, totally recommend them. I just like them a lot. You can even go more low cost if you want to.
All right. There are a bunch of them out there that you can get. There's a baronger. It's called the Baronger, pardon me.
Baronger from Germany. You, Fioria, UM2. It only holds one microphone, but it's $59. You know, it's cheap.
It works rather well. Doesn't last a long time. But it, for my experience, anything from Baronger, Baronger is really good. But they're products for whatever, for a German company you would think, right?
I've had several Baronger boards and different things like that. And they're really, really good, but the circuitry isn't all that great. But to get started, $59, and you're in. So there's a bunch of them out there.
Zoom, company called Zoom has a couple of them. The one that I would recommend, it's $149. I have one. It's in a drawer someplace.
It's great for remotes. It will, it's called, what is it called? It is called the Zoom. Oh gosh, the name is escaping me.
But oh, it's the P4, the Zoom P4. It is fabulous. It's got the plug four microphones into it. It's got the little buttons that make all the music that you can stick on there.
It only has four. But you know, that's pretty good for $149. It's very portable. You can hold it in your hand.
And the quality is great. It is absolutely fantastic for $150. So I'm going to highly recommend once you move beyond just plugging a USB mic and you want to get a better mic, you're going to need to think about an audio interface. When we come back next Thursday, we're going to really get into microphones.
We're going to get into the good USB microphones and we'll get into the microphones that are XLR that you plug into an audio interface and that will be fun. So think about that for a while. Podcasting isn't all that complicated. It's relatively easy.
But you have a few things that you need to do. And then the next week we're going to talk about hosting for your podcast. You can spend money, you can get it for free. There's all kinds of options.
A lot of that depends upon what kind of podcast you're doing and why you're doing it. So we'll talk a lot about that. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.