Portable+Podcast+Guide

These thoughts are for the beginner. Once you have recorded several times, and have shared your creations with the world, you can refer to other guides for more detailed information about which microphones would be best for your setup, which recording device gives you the most range and which digital audio formats would be best for you work with.

I'm preparing this for a very portable setup and a budget of $500 or less.

Recording audio is quite simple if you keep several things in mind. What are you recording this for? This can help you determine the quality of recording and how you record it. What are you recording? Ambient or background noise is quite different than voice and instruments.

At the very least you will need microphones and something to record on. You can make this as simple as recording directly onto your computer using the internal microphone of your laptop, if you have it, and some free recording software. There are several issues with this setup. First, the microphone quality is most likely not very good. Second, the computer makes noise with it's fan that the microphone will pick up. Next, you don't have any control of microphone placement and finally, It's difficult to have more than one personal talking into that microphone at a time.

I'm going to work through a couple of possibly setups and then make a final recommendation.

Recording on a portable device: Zoom H4n - $299 @ Amazon
 * XLR 1/4 inch inputs
 * Pros - heavy duty construction, great field microphones, 4 channel recording, SDHC recording media
 * Cons - expensive, bulky

Edirol R-09 $259 @ B&H
 * Mic and line input
 * built in microphone
 * SDHC

Olympus LS-10 - $197 @ Amazon
 * Very light weight and portable. Good quality microphones
 * Pros - line level input,
 * Cons - no microphone input

Mixer: Behringer XENYX 1202 - 12 Channel Audio Mixer- $79.95 @ B&H

Microphones: Audio-Technica ATR3350 - $25.95 @ b&h LR-44 batteries required
 * pros cheap, small, good quality
 * cons battery powered and no way to tell when battery will die, 1/4 plug not XLR

Headphones: Sony MDR XD200 $21.83 @ Amazon