I haven’t appeared as guest on a podcast in a while, so it was interesting to appear on Chris Smith’s Podtastic Audio recently. Within a few hours, Chris went from recording session to a published podcast that sounds great — a nice reminder that a technical workflow for a podcast needn’t be over-complex to get professional results.

We joined Chris on Wednesday in the evening (here in the UK) over a Cleanfeed session. Chris is based in San Diego, California; I haven’t measured it myself but that’s just a little under 5,500 miles away. That means when I ask Chris something, our audio is travelling 11,000 miles for me to hear the response. Yet, with Cleanfeed it sounds like we’re in the same studio (take a listen).

Chris clearly loves audio but he’s also a busy guy, fitting in podcasting around his day job. What struck me is just how this keeps his feet on the ground when it comes to the technical aspects of his workflow — to huge advantage.

We recorded for a little over an hour, and most of that made the cut for the resulting podcast; it’s a pretty authentic record of what we heard during the session (as well as Cleanfeed & podcasts, we talked about college radio, tape machines and more!)

Chris explained his workflow. We each have a USB mic, or an XLR microphone and audio interface. We all join Cleanfeed (wearing headphones, of course!) and set our levels. Doesn’t have to be exact, but that means adjusting any dials so that when we speak we’re just ‘hitting the yellow’ on the audio meter and everyone can hear clearly and comfortably.

Then, Chris uses a Cleanfeed multitrack recording. This means later he can apply a fully automated audio processing to each individual track (that’s one each for himself, Marc and I). Those are mixed together, with opportunity for any edits and then a final mix down.

Cleanfeed is the enabler here; the high quality audio lets the conversation flow at recording time. It means a natural, authentic conversation and, importantly, one that means fewer technical edits and ‘fixes’ later.

Chris is signed up to Cleanfeed Pro to use our multitrack recording, but sign up for a free Cleanfeed account and you can get unlimited recording and great results, too.