best way to record phone calls and play pre recorded clips whilst recording podcast?

Question

I'm helping out a friend record his podcast and would like some advice on the best way to feed the host and co-host pre recorded audio clips and also patch in phone calls.

My initial idea was to record at a pro studio and set up aux track which i'd then feed the pre recorded clips down to play them. I then considered patching in a TBU on an aux track for the phone calls.

However, using a pro studio isn't an option and so we are going to record onto my laptop running Pro Tools in his living room with a couple of shotgun mics...problem is my soundcard only has 2 in's and 2 outs....

What would be the best way to play pre recorded audio clips and also any phone calls?

shoot!

Answer 1

Is this something that you have to play live?

With pre-recorded material, you could possibly play it live (line them up into a protools channel) into headphones, and post-edit it into the final product afterwards.

As for the phone calls, you could run the audio out of the phone into the sound card and record that. You would need to share a microphone if you needed both ins for the shotgun mics.

Getting an interface with two mic inputs and a line input could have all three being able to simultaneously record. It's a relatively cheap expense.

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

For the phone calls, you could use Google Voice or Skype and use something like Soundflower to route that internally into Pro Tools. It takes a little bit of setup, but works great. I use it for ADR sessions all the time. This way you can use those two inputs for the shotguns.

Then I would just have the two outputs go to a headphone amp that you can share. To playback the pre-recorded files, I would either have them already in Pro Tools and just place them on the go, or use sound flower again to play the sounds from iTunes or Quicktime and route it into Pro Tools when needed. Just need to set up a few auxes and use the Pro Tools Aggregate Device as your hardware.

Google Voice: https://voice.google.com/