Tag Archives: Zoom

Recording Interviews and Podcasts with Zoom

First, make sure that everyone plugs directly into a wired-ethernet connection for internet instead of using Wi-fi, if at all possible.

Next, make sure that all participants are in as quiet a location as possible and are wearing headphones in order to reduce the need for Zoom to use algorithmic background noise and echo suppression.

Then, you will need everyone to adjust some settings in Zoom. If you look at the attached screenshot you can see my recommended settings in the “Audio” section.

  • “Automatically adjust microphone volume” = Off. This isn’t entirely necessary, but can help keep background noise down when people are not speaking. Note that this will require each participant to manually set their microphone volume using the “Input Volume” sider and ensure that the level is not going into the red and clipping. If that is beyond their capability, it’s better to leave this on.
  • “Suppress background noise” = Low. This is of course contingent on the participant’s ability to find a quiet space. If there is a lot of background noise, this should be set to Auto.
  • “Show in-meeting option to enable Original Sound” = On. The other options below will appear when this is checked. Note that each participant will need to turn this on from a check-box in the upper corner of the Zoom call.
    • “High-fidelity music mode” = On
    • “Echo cancellation” = Off. Note that this should only be turned off if the participant is wearing headphones (which is *highly* recommended)
    • “Stereo Audio” = On. This is not 100% necessary, and can be turned off if people are running into bandwidth issues with their connection

Finally, if you are going to be doing any post-production editing, I would also recommend that you follow the instructions at the bottom of this page under  “How to record multiple audio files”:

https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362473-Local-recording?mobile_site=true

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Completely alternatively, many folks doing remote podcasts have all participants record their audio locally (using software like Audacity, a separate portable recorder, or even their phone) in tandem with the Zoom call and then send the high-quality WAV files to the editor for synchronization.