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Wednesday, April 01, 2009

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Übercaster: the most complete audio podcasting tool I know for Mac

Allan Tépper | 04/01

Übercaster goes way beyond GarageBand for professional audio podcasting on the Mac

Many of our readers know that I produce a podcast with the same name as my channel here at ProVideo Coalition. The TecnoTur podcast is currently not in English, but in Castilian, the most widely-used Spanish language (but certainly not the only one). I have three co-hosts in the program: Rubén Abruña, Tanya Castañeda, and Liliana Marín, and we have interviewees who participate on the phone from the USA, Spain, and various Latin American countries (so far). When I first sought to choose a tool for audio podcasting, I logically made an analysis of the available tools, taking into account some of the more demanding tasks I needed for the TecnoTur podcast. Of course, I looked at Apple’s GarageBand and a few other audio programs, but none came close to the US$79.95 Übercaster, especially considering our requirements. Übercaster is from Pleasant Software in Offenburg, Germany, and has the features I really needed, plus unexpected time-savers I appreciated later.

TecnoTur‘s requirements

Because the TecnoTur podcast has multiple presenters “live” in the studio, plus guests on the phone from different countries, I needed multitrack, “live-to-disk” recording of several local microphones, plus a telephone feed. For those readers who don’t quite follow what I mean when I say “multitrack”, I mean that each source (individual microphones and the phone feed) should be on a separate audio track, since this facilitates adjustments (fine tuning levels or even equalization) on a source-by-source basis in post-production.

Telephone Hybrids in traditional radio and TV broadcast

In traditional radio broadcasting (and even in TV broadcasting), a hardware device called a “telephone hybrid” takes care of the following important tasks:

Matching the impedance and levels between the telephone line and the audio mixer.

Separating the caller’s voice from the announcer’s voice, to prevent radio listeners from hearing what is known as sidetone, which is the announcer’s voice coming back from the telephone line. (If the radio listeners were to hear the sidetone, then the announcer would sound as if s/he were on the phone.)

In addition, in traditional radio and TV broadcasting, it has been necessary to use an audio mixer with a mix minus signal to feed the telephone hybrid. Mix minus is a technical term to describe a special mix which includes all audio program signals minus the caller’s voice. The least expensive telephone hybrid I know costs US$495, and they go up from there to thousands of dollars, depending upon the brand and model. That doesn’t include the cost of an audio mixer with mix minus capability. You can get the idea how introducing a telephone source in traditional radio and TV greatly increased the complexity and cost. But things change, at least for podcasters

How Internet Telephony killed the hardware hybrid

In this article, when I refer to Internet Telephony, I am not referring to services like ViaTalk and Vonage (whose main use is to emulate traditional telephone service at a lower cost, using traditional telephone devices which connect through an adapter to the Internet). In this article, when I refer to Internet Telephony, I am referring to PC-based services like Gizmo and Skype (whose main use is to offer telephone calls from a computer). Unlike traditional telephone service, computer-based Internet Telephony does not use sidetone! That is wonderful for podcasters who want to record interviews on the phone, since the send and receive signals are already 100% separate (although I doubt they designed it that way with us in mind). Of course, there are many cheaper programs than Übercaster that offer recording Skype calls, including recording the caller and the host independently on separate tracks. However, those programs are not complete podcast solutions, nor do they support multitrack recording from multiple local microphones (I checked with them), so I couldn’t consider those programs.

How Übercaster facilitates remote interviews

Since its first version, Übercaster has been able to work with Gizmo, iChat, and Skype. (GarageBand can work with iChat, but iChat doesn’t allow calling standard telephones. GarageBand cannot work with Gizmo or Skype without adding 3rd party software which greatly complicates setup.) In its December 2008 release, Übercaster greatly improved its interface with Skype, since beginning with that version, Übercaster began using Skype’s official API. This meant two major changes:

Audio Input and Output settings no longer need to be made in Skype for its use with Übercaster.
Telephone calls can now be “dialed” or “picked up” directly from Übercaster, which communicates with the Skype application in the background. There is no longer any need to “dial” them in Skype and then switch back to Übercaster.

In addition to that, Übercaster lets you play back pre-recorded audio clips (i.e. jingles, intros, outros, sound effects, or even a an audio clip from a TV show or movie, to make reference to it during an interview). Übercaster then records those pre-recorded clips on yet another separate track of your project… and of course, Übercaster lets the remote guest/caller hear the pre-recorded sound. For example, ask your interviewee “What were you thinking when you shot this scene of the film?” and then play the clip.

Quality of Übercaster/Skype phone calls

The quality we have experienced with our Übercaster/Skype calls have varied between very good to nothing short of phenomenal. In fact, one listener commented to me that she doubted whether the guest she had heard (Alessandro Angulo of Laberinto Producciones) was really driving on the highway in his car outside of Bogotá, Colombia during his interview… since to her, it sounded as if Alessandro had actually been in the studio with us in Miami! We had similar results when we interviewed Salvador Castellanos in El Salvador. With other calls (as when we conversed with Ashok Chopra and Verónica Micossi) in Spain, they sounded better than standard telephone quality, but not quite like studio quality. It really depends more on the environment where the caller is located, and the particular telephone and handset used, than the Übercaster program and Skype’s network.

How to “dial” a phone number from within Übercaster

Just as when using the SkypeOut feature in Skype, phone numbers should be entered in international format, i.e. to call a number in the USA, like TecnoTur’s main number, you would enter +13056688556 or to call Adobe’s main line in Spain, you would enter +34914534392. (The USA’s country code is 1; Spain’s country code is 34; the + sign is the symbol used as a universal variable to indicate and substitute the international prefix, which in the USA is 011, but in many other countries is 00.)

Unlike with SkypeOut, with Übercaster you must not use any spaces or even dashes in the number being “dialed”. If you do, Übercaster will “dial” the number properly, establish a connection properly, but strangely not record the person’s voice on the other end. I imagine that this issue will be corrected soon in an upcoming update of Übercaster. It took quite of trial and error to determine that the root of the problem was in the spaces and/or dashes. Fortunately, Pleasant Software continually updates the Übercaster application, and so far has never charged extra, nor has there been any change in the project file format.