I’ve noticed the arena of live, hi-quality, online audio recording has become a little more crowded with expensive to free options. It’s also become a little confusing to me. Do we need to pay or not? Do you pay for what you get? Free is necessarily bad…or not? Are there some overt cash grabs being made on what is actually free technology.
FOR ME (and this in no way means any one service is good or bad) I’ve ALWAYS had issues. ISDN has a litany of well documented problems and WILL die someday. As for Browser-based solutions – Either the setup was difficult, the quality was low OR when the quality was high it would inevitably drop out or degrade. Again, that is just me.
MANY big-time Engineers, Audio Talents and Voice Actors have a service or two (ipDTL, Session Link, Source Connect live, even SC Now) they live by and with which they have had flawless experiences. I stumbled onto bodalgoCall a while back and finally had time to jump on and check it out. Surprisingly, I was lucky and visited the demo room when the creator of bodalgo (and developer of bodalgoCall), Armin Hierstetter, was also online. He walked me through every square inch of the service and also did a solid 20 minute test session. I found it to be VERY easy, efficient and CLEAN. In the 20 minute session we did, I never had quality degradation, a drop-out or other audio problem. The BIGGEST barrier will be how people want to “wire” it up within their computer system. via Pro Tools, via another DAW, simple monitoring etc. Its not hard and there are good instructions to follow.
NOTE: This is not an advertisement in any way, though it might come off that way. Heck, I am a voice talent and I am not even a member of Bodalgo (but I might become one now!).
Let me throw some links at you so you can test it yourself and then bullet a few features that I either found interesting or didn’t know about.
The Demo Page: https://www.bodalgo.com/en/conference/calldemo
Setting up the session: https://www.bodalgo.com/en/blog/how-to-record-a-webrtc-session
WebRTC: this is the backbone of most (if not all) of the competitive services. It’s free technology but of course the way you interface with it is most important and what you really pay for. bodalgoCall uses webRTC and it’s free and the interface is pretty solid.
Chrome: I would just use the Chrome Browser – AFAIK it will just make things easier.
Custom Page: The link above ends with “calldemo” – well, just change that to “VOKing” and there is your custom link to send out. OR use the invite box.
Echo Cancellation: This might not be obvious. This tampers with the audio so there isnt any artifacts and room noise. Just chatting? leave it checked. Doing a real recording session? un-check it and everyone should be on quality mics, headphones on.
Audio Quality: You will see little #s (32, 64, 128, 255) on the OTHER person’s mixer. This is the quality of audio you send them. BUT in our test it was very hard to hear the difference b/n 32 and 255.
MANY people on at once: Yes AND this is where audio quality comes into play. You would send the studio engineer 255 but send 32 to the creative, the agency and your mom if she’s just so proud of her baby and wants to hear the magic.
Video: You might see “Mute Video” – you don’t have a camera. If you do, you can turn it on and it will also send a low-qual video feed. Nice little non-intrusive bonus!
OK – so I tried to be comprehensive here but not too long winded. Use the links above for a more detailed description of bodalgoCall and how to setup the recording chain.
At the end of the day why does a dev give away tech that others can clearly charge for…
I want audio producers to use it BUT also to get more attention to the talent on the bodalgo site.
Well duh, ASSES in the bodalgo SEATS. It all comes down to that and thats great for all of us. So far, I’m in.
If you want to learn more about this or the many, MANY competitors – google should get you covered. The VO community has been arguing discussing it for years.