cowfish

I’m posting this for two reasons:

1. I might forget how to do it
2. The guides I found online are rubbish

So, due to my new found love of hearing my voice online, aka podcasting, I’ve been looking into ways for me to record things. At the moment the lovely Matt records our (now bi-weekly) podcast and handles all the editing, but being the friendly soul that I am (and knowing that the boy wonder is a busy chap) I’ve been trying to work out how I could do the recording bit (as being a filthy lover of The Steve as I am now I’ve got GarageBand which does editing for you. Or something. I hear). However, I decided that the recording MUST BE DONE PROPERLY! so I’ve been tinkering around (although not particularly effectively as it turns out) and have now found out how to do the PROPERLY! bit.

The challenge: using only GarageBand and software freely available on the interwebs, record Matt’s voice (via Skype) onto one track in Garageband and my own into another, as well as monitoring the Skype call as usual (ie. only hearing Matt in my earpiece).

The online guides I found said that I’d need a USB headset, or AudioHijack Pro (which looks like it would have done most of this for me for a few quids), or other such things, but after a bit of tinkering today (after I bought a USB mic [a nice one though]) I found it can all be done nice and easily with only one download.

In case the mentions of the Holy Steve and GarageBand weren’t enough, this is for Macs. My shiny iMac is running Mac OS X 10.6.2 so, in traditional disclaimery fashion, YMMV¹.

Part 1: Soundflower

If you don’t have it already then you can grab Soundflower from the Cycling ‘74 website – it’s an application that creates synthetic sound sources made up of inputs from multiple other sound sources for ease of routing sound between applications. I thought it was a bit rubbish when I first started playing with it, but now I’ve got this working it’s my new best friend.

Load up Soundflowerbed (which is what it calls itself) and load up ‘Audio Setup…’ from the top bar menu that appears (its icon is a silhouette of a pretty flower. Aaah):

In there you need to create an Aggregate Source by clicking the little + button at the bottom of the left listbox and then select Soundflower (2ch) and whatever audio input you are using for your side of the Skype call (in this case my Built-in Mic).

Part 2: Skype

Fire up Skype, go to Preferences in the Skype menu and choose the Audio section. In there you’ll need to set the Audio Output to be Soundflower (2ch) and the input to be whatever your audio input is:

Part 3: GarageBand

Load Garageband and choose a new Voice project, as that sets us up nicely with 2 tracks ready to go, and when its loaded go to the Preferences menu, the Audio/Midi section and set your Audio Input to be your Aggregate Device.

When that’s done, select track one and set it to use input from Stereo 1/2 of the aggregate device and then set track two to Stereo 3/4. If you don’t have two stereo devices (as far as I know Skype is always stereo, but my USB mic is only mono [but very nice]) then you may have to twiddle around with the mono channels or a combination of mono and stereo. Once you’ve selected things, make sure both channels are set up to record and then hit the record button. Now when you speak you’ll get picked up in one channel and when you dial Skype the audio from there will go into the other channel.

Part 4: Monitoring

But Oh Noes! You can’t hear the other person! If you click on the Soundflower menu and then on Built-in Output under Soundflower (2ch) it will redirect the Soundflower (2ch) audio (Skype) to you standard output.

If you put headphones in then this won’t even cause a feedback loop that will cause the universe to end. Which is a good thing.

This all seems entirely obvious and simple now that I’ve done it. Hopefully it will one day be of vague use to someone else. Or me tomorrow morning when I’ve forgotten it.

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1. I think that’s the first time I’ve actually written YMMV, which I’ve always avoided as I always mistake it for YHWH. I thought I’d share that.

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