Recording a “Guide” Track When Recording Episodes

When recording podcast episodes over the internet using a service that records each participant’s track separately, it’s often handy to record a real-time backup recording containing all participants for the purpose of lining up everyone’s individual tracks later.

For instance, the host of the show can locally capture all participants on one track and then in post-production line up everyone’s individual track to that “guide” track.

NOTE: The audio of the “guide” track will not be used in the final episode audio – it’s just there to line up all individually recorded tracks (from Squadcast, for instance). But of course the “guide” track also serves as a backup recording in case you DO need to use it.

Why bother with this “guide” track business? Because sometimes the individual tracks you record will not line up and it can be an absolute nightmare sifting through various length recordings and lining everything up by ear.

Zoom, especially, is infamous for everyone’s track being DRASTICALLY different lengths. Check out Darrell Darnell’s Facebook post about Zoom files being different lengths for different participants and then having to spend a ton of time figuring out how to line everything up in post-production.

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