O’Reilly editor David Battino recently pointed me to this interesting tip on how he improved the audio of a recorded Skype interview for one of his podcasts. From Digital Media Insider Podcast 11: Synth Mania, Part 1:
Because Paolo and I live on separate coasts, we decided to do the interview by Skype and record it with Ecamm Call Recorder. To maximize the audio quality, I used a Rode Podcaster USB mic instead of my usual Logitech headset. (The Rode is what I use for the show’s main voiceover.) I recorded into Call Recorder using the highest quality AAC compression setting.
But we also tried a radio trick called a “two-ender” to boost the quality further, and it worked great. Paolo set up two mics–one feeding his Skype computer and another feeding Sound Forge on another computer. After the interview, he sent me the local recording, and I substituted it for his side of the Skype recording. (One of the great things about Call Recorder is that it saves each side of the conversation on a separate track.) Not only did the direct recording sound fuller, it avoided the clipping distortion in the Skype signal, something I encountered on my previous Skype podcast as well.
If you have the most recent version of Audio Hijack Pro at both ends, you can also do a double-ender trivially as well. Option-click when selecting "record", and you can record the "input" and "output" for the hijacked application to left and right tracks. Very nice and simple.