When creating audio lecture content for your online/hybrid courses, there are a lot of factors to keep into consideration. Some instructors choose to invest in high-quality USB microphones to ensure the best sound quality for their audio lectures. Although most of us don’t have a fancy microphone just laying around our office, we do have access to decent quality microphones via our personal smart devices (smart phones, tablets, etc.). Here are a few tips and best practices for increasing the sound quality of your audio lecture content when using a smart device.
- Find a quiet place to record. To make it sound more professional try to find a small room (like a walk-in closet). Rooms with carpeted floors are ideal.
- Use a quality voice recording application to record your voice over. Here are a few decent apps for this:
- AudioShare
- Awesome Voice Recorder
- Voice Recorder Pro
- MultiTrack DAW
- Locate the mic (typically at the bottom of most smart devices) and speak directly into it roughly 4in-6in away from your face.
- For longer voice overs where holding the phone is uncomfortable, consider using a tripod or stand with an adapter that’s compatible with your smart device. If you don’t have a tripod or a stand, place your phone on a soft surface such as a towel. This will help prevent the sound from bouncing off hard surfaces creating unwanted reverb (echoing).
- If you do use a stand, consider investing in a pop filter or a windscreen ($10 on Amazon). This will greatly reduce the plosives (bursts of air) that occur when pronouncing words starting with ‘p’, ‘t’, ‘k’, ‘d’, ‘b’, and ‘g’.
- Once you’re finished with your recording, consider exporting the sound file from your smart device to a PC or Mac. There’s a lot of good, free audio mixing software available on both platforms that not only allow you to boost the sound quality, but also gives you the ability to edit out the content that you don’t want. Most of these applications are intuitive and easy to use, so you don’t need to be a sound engineer to use them effectively. Here are a few examples off audio mixing applications to consider using:
- Audacity (Windows, Mac
- Oceanaudio (Windows, Mac)
- Garage Band (Mac)
