How to Optimize the Power of Zoom for your Podcast

Casey Combest: There's a little communication tool you might have been accustomed to over the last few years called Zoom. On today's episode, we're gonna speak about how to optimize the power of Zoom for your podcast recording. First, and I think we need to say this right off the bat, zoom is not our favorite platform.

The audio is not great, and even with some of the things we're gonna show you in a moment, it's still not as good as something like Riverside or squad cast that records high rise. But during Covid, everyone became accustomed to using Zoom. Even my parents can use Zoom, so it's a great way with some guests who maybe are busier or they're booking back to back Zoom calls for you to just use that tool as is and unlock some of these features that'll help you have better audio.

Without further ado, here's our three favorite tips for getting better audio in Zoom. First, your background noise suppression, and here's why you want to do. Suppressing your background noise is using the internal noise filter that Zoom has. And for us, we honestly think that there are better tools out there, tools that we have on a professional level that we would prefer.

Now, if you are editing your own show, this is a great tool. Please do it. We would recommend putting it on the low setting, so you'll see that. As you can flip through and toggle medium, high, low, and it kinda gives you some examples on this version of Zoom of what those things are. Now, for me as an audio engineer, I prefer doing that on my own.

Zoom's is completely fine and it does reduce the audio, but we would prefer if someone's sending us files for them to move that from high to low. Uh, because what'll happen is that noise suppression kicks in so strong that it's really manipulating the voice and there's not much there for us to work with on.

Cue side of things. So bump that down to low second. Use music and professional audio modes. Um, again, this original audio mode, it's probably a little more bells and whistles than anything, but there is more data stored inside of the file when you engage these settings. Now, I will say this is probably a little stretch to call any of Zoom's features, professional audio.

That being said, there is a nuance difference when you engage the high fidelity mode, and we would suggest doing that third, and this one is the most important, and it can be found under the recording tab. And this one is probably the most important, but that's to break out individual channels of separate audio for each participant.

So why this is helpful is for your audio, it might be great for your guest audio, it might not be great, or it might be great, but just very different than yours. So you can process. EQ with EQ or compression differently and approach it in a whole different mindset. In closing, again, we don't think that Zoom is the best way to record, and as a pro tip, I would encourage you, even if you're doing Zoom for your guest, still use Logic Pro Tools, keybase, whatever you use to record your high res audio.

Thanks so much for watching another episode, and you guys have a great day.