Reaper Editing Win
First off, if you're not familiar with Reaper, it's a digital audio workstation. It's used to edit & produce audio, and it's very inexpensive. I think I paid around $60USD for a full license and that's not a subscription! I use it to edit podcasts, but other people do music production and a whole bunch of other things.
This weekend I was recording a podcast with my brother, and I made a mistake in setting up the Reaper project. I use an old Macbook Pro (old enough to still have an optical drive), and you have to do some software trickery in order to record onto two separate tracks; so on one track I have my input, through my Yeti microphone, and the other track has my brother's audio from Skype1. Makes for easier editing, so I can remove coughs or weird sounds that shouldn't be there.
Normally the mistake I make is forgetting to set my channel to Stereo. The fix for that is easy, if not a little clunky: you duplicate the track, and pan one to the left, the other to the right. I think you can combine the tracks but I find that just as clunky. But - it's a fix. But yesterday the mistake I made was that I set the left side input to my microphone, and the right side input to my Skype audio. Woops.
I only noticed this about 50 minutes into the recording, when we took our usual quick break, and I saw there was still audio recording while I wasn't speaking. I quickly changed my input settings for both L/R channels to be my microphone, but it was too late - the bulk of my track had my brother's audio in it.
YouTube to the rescue. There are a billion (rough estimate) tutorials online, because so many people use Reaper. I first found out how to separate stereo tracks to dual mono. That was easy, meant I could delete my brother's audio and then I'd have my own mono track. The next step was to convert a mono recording to stereo - and of course there was another tutorial for that.
You better believe I bookmarked both videos. Another tool in my arsenal. But now I also know to take more time setting up my projects before recording. Luckily I won't be the one recording & editing for the next few weeks, so I don't have to worry about it.
Which is sort of the computer audio, but not...like I said, software trickery.↩