13th January 2014      by:
Tom Woods     

To refresh your memory: my problem comes when I record an interview via Skype. I can record via phone just fine. I use my microphone to make Ron Paul Curriculum videos and the sound is great. But as soon as Skype is involved, disaster. I am getting a whooshing hiss sound when I speak. As soon as the guest speaks, it’s gone. Post-production noise removal is very, very tricky with this particular sound. For a sample, listen to the audio file at this link.

I have a microphone plugged into an Alesis MultiMix 4 USB mixer. The mixer, in turn, is plugged into the computer to capture the Skype, and my voice is being recorded with the microphone.

Now here’s an interesting clue I got today. Some people were saying it must be caused by the person on the other end of the Skype interview. But I think I can rule that out definitively. Today I tried speaking to someone via Skype. At first I couldn’t hear him when we connected, because I had my computer speakers, rather than the headphones I was wearing (which are plugged into the mixer), as the default device. I eventually figured out the problem. But here’s what’s interesting: AS SOON AS the Skype connection was established I could hear the hiss sound even though I could not hear the other person and the headphones weren’t even set as the default device!

Any further theories as to what could be happening here? I would vastly prefer to interview over Skype when possible.

Also, I really, really want to avoid labor-intensive solutions, like recording two separate tracks.