Co-Host Interview

After 40+ episodes of Digging for Idols, it seemed fun for the show’s co-hosts to turn the mics on one another, so to speak. They spend so much time talking about others; why not direct that energy inward, so to speak? To that end, DFI recorded a brief bonus mini in which Christopher interviews Taylor about her experience doing the pod so far. While Christopher has co-hosted a wide variety of shows in the past, the experience is far newer for Taylor. That combined with their differing ages and technical backgrounds made this a fun topic to approach for a chat.

The interview was recorded, as are all episodes of Digging for Idols, remotely via Riverside.fm. The show maintains a paid account through the service which allows episodes to be created easily without having to meet and set up gear over and over. This process has been refined over the course of the last year and a half of pod production. Both Christopher and Taylor use the same desktop USB Samson Q2U microphone with pop filters to make sure the tone of the audio matches as well as possible for two people recording remotely in two different sized rooms, aided by Riverside and its approach to capturing lossless local audio. The experience is much like recording a Zoom meeting, where session participants can see one another (with an option to capture hi res video as well) but the audio records onto each machine locally–to avoid loss of quality due to fluctuations in internet bandwidth. Those raw, pristine files then upload into Riverside after as separate tracks that can each be downloaded, tweaked and edited separately to match. This workflow allows for long recordings to be easily cut and for external elements like room noise or unwanted coughs in one track to be easily excised without impacting the other speakers. Most importantly, garbled bits and pieces due to taxed or shared wifi can be avoided as the recording first collects on the participants machine.

The initial chat with Taylor resulted in a raw recording of roughly 10 minutes total with two .wav file tracks. From there, edits were made first for redundancy, then based on how interesting the comments were, finally stitching some nice sounding statements around the end as a landing spot. Because of the 2 minute target and the difficulty in having a meaningful conversation in that brief a time, the draft represents a significantly more edited vision of Digging for Idols, which is already itself a highly edited production in which raw recordings frequently drop to one third of their raw size in pursuit of snappy, digestible podcast episodes. Speaking more directly to small details, there are quite a number of crossfades as certain words and sentences were removed, switched, or simply reordered in pursuit of a seamless and rich 2 minutes.

While feedback on the draft version of this chat was generally positive and focused on the tone, audio quality, and hosting style, there was a comment about the backing audio “competing” with the speakers at times. Due to the duration of the piece, I stand by keeping the music as a lingering background element throughout, but I did lower the levels on the track any time someone is speaking. Best to err on the side of caution on that front, in my experience.