Category: Podcasting

Baptist International Outreach (BIO) is the mission board that I am associated with. In this episode of Missionary Talks I talk with the Missions Director of BIO, John Yingling.

The call quality on this episode is horrible. I thought the last one was bad. This one put it to shame. I think I have a much better system figured out now. The next phone interview will be a far better quality.

When I called John, we talked for over an hour and a half. But the interview part was pretty short. Those who are needing a short podcast this week get to save 2 minutes off the length of this one. You’re welcome.

A couple days ago I posted about a neat little box that I had devised to help me with interview recordings. Well, I have abandoned that route in lieu of a better set up that was recommended by a member of the Podcast Pickle forums.

Instead of having a long post here on the main page, I have made a separate page for this “article” with hopes to refine it as time goes on.

I hope it is a help to someone else down the road.

The long version. 

Today I built a little device that will allow me to record a phone interview into my iRiver recorder. If you have heard my recent podcast, you know that the recording quality was not that great. I would still like to find a fix for that problem, which I will do…some day. But until then, I came across a neat solution on my own.

I have a phone that allows you to tap in with a cell phone headphone/microphone combo. The kind with the tiny little plug. The box I built comes out of the phone and splits into separate connectors for an 1/8″ headphone and an 1/8″ microphone plug. Then the headphone pipes over to an RCA connecter and out to the iRiver’s microphone input.

There is one other thing I need to figure out. Maybe one of my readers will have a suggestion. I want to record only the other person through the iRiver. Then I will record myself through my computer. This total isolation of the voices on the recording helps edit out interruptions on one end or the other.

In my current setup, I get my voice coming into the recording. It is not nearly as strong as the person on the other end, but it is still present. I thought it was due to my headphone/microphone combination. But, I ended up plugging in a separate headphone and ran the mic out of my mixer back into the box so that the other person could hear me. I still had my voice in the recording. I assume this is due to the telephone patching my voice back through the speaker. That way the person on the phone hears their own voice and knows that the line is not dead.

The biggest problem is that the call quality is phone quality. You will be able to hear in the recording that it is definitely a phone interview. This was done for episode 18 of Missionary Talks.

I spoke with an old friend, Bob Van Sant, this morning. Bob is a missionary in Ukraine working with the Deaf. I think I met Bob in 1990 or 1992. I was working at The Bill Rice Ranch when we met. He left for Ukraine a short time later. Since then we have only seen each other a couple of times.

Today I interviewed him for Missionary Talks. The call quality was not that great, but the content survived. It actually took 5 phone calls to get it all recorded. It is stitched together a bit.

He talked about his first trip to Simferopol with our other friend Ronnie Rice. He also told about how the site of the Yalta conference between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin is just a short drive from him.

It was enjoyable talking to Bob. I hope you enjoy the episode.