Photo by israel palacio on Unsplash (This is nothing like the mic I have. Must improve.)

I thought it would be interesting, even fun, to facilitate a roundtable with the QtM team and record the results. I came armed with four questions and no expectations, which turned out to be a winning strategy.

While the experience and the content were great, the audio recording…isn’t. Here are some of the things I learned from the time I spent trying to clean up the recording in Audacity:

  • Even if the mic is positioned equidistant from everyone sitting around a table, my voice is picked up best. #loudmouth
  • A quality microphone is worth. every. penny. The one I have is…not.
  • The conversational ‘yeps’ and ‘um-hmms’ that are usually good form to convey active listening in normal conversation make for a bad recording.
  • I laugh at my own jokes too much.
  • Room echo cannot be cleaned in post. Find the deadest room possible.

I’ve included two clips here and plan on transcribing content from the remaining recording for ease of reference and to spare the eardrums of anyone who might find the content useful.

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