Speaker 1: Recording interviews for podcasts can be hard. None of us want to be fiddling around with different microphones and lots of gadgets. We just want to record. In this video, I'm going to show you how to record high-quality interviews with multiple people using Clean Feed. And I'm using Clean Feed right now to record this little bit of audio. It's really cool. Hi, welcome to Not Another Marketing Channel. We're going to be talking about Clean Feed in just a second, but let me remind you to subscribe. You know where the buttons are. You know where the stuff is. And also check out the complimentary podcast as well, which is called Not Another Marketing Podcast. It's recorded using Clean Feed. A lot of the interviews, most of the interviews, I use Clean Feed to record them. And it sounds absolutely great. So don't forget to subscribe. Check out the podcast.

Speaker 2: Let's get on with it.

Speaker 1: Podcasts are becoming more and more popular, especially as a marketing tool, as brands can improve their trust and their authority and connect an awful lot better with their clients and customers. But we need to be able to record decent quality podcasts, especially when we're doing interviews. Zoom and Skype can be a right pain. We all know what the quality is like. The audio doesn't sound fantastic. And you get that horrible sucky sound, don't you, when somebody starts talking or you just go, uh-huh, and someone else is talking, they get sucked out of the conversation. That noise cancellation, it brings them out. It's not like a proper conversation. For the last six months, I've been using Clean Feed, which you can find at cleanfeed.net, to record all the interviews for Not Another Marketing Podcast. And I've been seriously impressed with this tool. The quality is fantastic. It really is. You can actually see it in front of you now. This is what you get with Clean Feed. And I'm going to walk you through exactly how it works. But the quality is superb. It sounds like a proper conversation with a person,

Speaker 3: and they could be on the other side of the world. This is kind of how it works.

Speaker 1: You can see from the Clean Feed website, a little demonstration video here of lots of different people all talking and being interviewed and chatting within a podcast. It's very simple. We've got one, two, three different people, and it's all being recorded, all in one little place. Now, Clean Feed comes in a free version and a premium version. I use the premium version, and I pay for it myself. It's not given to me to do this video or anything like that. I pay for it myself, and I have been for quite a while now. And I find it really useful. With the premium version, you do get a few extra little features. The main one is being able to record multi-track audio so that each person you record is recorded as a separate audio track, and this can make editing an awful lot easier. For example, I was interviewing someone the other week in America, in the States. I'm in the UK. They had an air conditioning unit going on in the background, which was giving a very low hum. Well, I was able to take that hum out of just their audio track. It didn't affect my audio track. It was just the one. So it can make editing a little bit easier. But then for most podcasts, to be honest, you just need one track. If you're just going to be recording a simple interview between two people, you may just need just one single track with both people on it, and that's the free version of Clean Feed. Check out their website for the current pricing.

Speaker 3: It's cleanfeed.net. The first thing to do with any interview is obviously connect with somebody.

Speaker 1: Now, they can be anywhere around the world, anywhere at all, as long as they've got a computer and a web browser and an internet connection, they can connect with you. The great thing about Clean Feed is that you don't have to get your interviewee to download any software, which is fantastic. They don't have to download Zoom. They don't have to download Skype or any other piece of software. They literally just click a link in their web browser, allow permissions for their microphone, and away you go. So let's connect with someone. Okay, so we're going to click on the Connect text, and we get a name and email address. A little box appears. So we're going to put Bill's name in here because we're going to connect with Bill. So we'll type in Bill, and then we're going to put bill at bill.com. It's obviously made up, this is. Now, if we click the Invite button, Clean Feed will send Bill an email with a link, and he clicks on that link, and he joins the Clean Feed session, the recording session straight away. There are some advanced functions, which I use quite a bit. Just click on the little Advanced tick box there, and we get a bit more functionality. So we can limit our link to last a certain length of time, so it expires, it goes away, and it can't be used anymore. And you can do that from 30 minutes all the way up to unlimited. A lot of this is available only in the Premium plan, but it's worth looking into it. There are a few options in the Free plan, but it's pretty useful to be able to expire links after a certain amount of time. I suppose one thing you could get is somebody accidentally clicking on a link and joining you in the middle of another session at some point. So it's nice to be able to have those links expire at some point. You also get the chance to be able to get people to connect on you, so they connect immediately as soon as they connect that link, or ask to accept connection, where you'll be asked if you want to accept Bill into the recording session. You also get the chance to be able to send by email or share the link yourself. Now I tend to share links myself because I have a little bit of a podcast interview template that I send out to interviewees. So I click Share the link myself, and Invite, and you get a link. I'm going to copy this link now, and I'm going to paste this link into my web browser, and we'll connect. And that's it. We're connected. That's what it looks like my end. That's what it looks like on Bill's end.

Speaker 2: And the two of us are talking to each other.

Speaker 1: Just before you start recording your interview, it's a good idea just to check a few of the CleanFeed audio settings. Get some levels. Make sure that people aren't too loud or too quiet. In the premium version of CleanFeed, you can fine-tune the levels of your interviewees. So for example, if Bill was really, really loud, we can click on this little cog, and we can reduce or increase the volume of Bill by increasing it by plus 3 dB, minus 4 dB, whatever it is. So you do get instances where your interviewee will be really, really loud. They're talking really close to their microphone, or they've got it turned up really loud on their computer, and it's booming a little bit. It's peaking, which is not what you want. So you'll be able to drop that level down a little bit. And you can also do the same with yourself as well. So when I'm talking at the moment, I can take this right, let's take it down to, you can see the level meter there, let's take it down to minus 9, and now you can see I'm still talking at the same level, but the levels. And then we can plus it if we want, so let's go plus 9, and immediately we go right up to the top. I have mine set, my microphone level set for zero. You also get the chance to be able to record mono or stereo, the left channel, the right channel. You can faff a little bit with the audio settings. I tend to leave both of these on mono mix. It's a podcast, just an audio podcast. It doesn't need to be stereo. There's also a nice little repair function as well called no headphones. Now sometimes when you're interviewing somebody, they might have you coming out of the speaker, them going back into it, and there's a little bit of an echo. It sometimes happens with some headphones as well. Some of the Apple little apostrophe AirPod things that you put in your ear, EarPod things, whatever they call them. I don't know. I don't have any. I have proper headphones. Some of those give a little bit of echo and feedback, so you can actually cancel that echo out by clicking the no headphones section there, and it does sound an awful lot better. I've used that on a couple of occasions, and it works really, really well. Another final setting is that we can actually choose where our microphone input comes from. So I'm using my Behringer audio interface. That's where mine is coming from at the moment, but if I wanted to, I could switch it to the microphone on my webcam, or I could just use the standard browser settings. Once you're happy with how everything sounds, it's time to record something.

Speaker 3: OK. It's time to do some recording.

Speaker 1: When you're ready, just hit the little record button at the top left-hand corner, and we can start recording. You get to choose a name for your recording, so we're going to call it Bill Recording. There we go. And then we get some choices in this little drop-down box. Now, the only ones that you really need to concentrate on for when you're recording a podcast is really just either multitrack or everyone. These are the two important ones. So everyone is everybody in one audio file, one audio track. The multitrack is you get a separate file for each individual person. Now, that's a premium feature that you need to pay for, but it is useful if you do quite a lot of heavy editing with your podcast. I tend to choose multitrack all the time because I do fuss quite a lot when I edit things. So once we're happy, we've got the name of the recording, we've selected multitrack or everyone, we then hit the record button, and we're starting to record right now. It's recording. OK. So we see this other little section here in the middle, which is the little recording bar. We can see that it's recording. We can see my level there. If Bill talks, then you'll see his little recording bar. We can see my level there. If Bill talks, then you'll see his little level going up there. And it all works an absolute treat. Now, what we can do is we can download our audio file at any point. OK. The audio is actually being stored in your web browser on your own hard drive, not on the clean feed service. So at any point, you can click this little download button here, and you can download the audio at any point during the recording. What we can also do is download individual people's tracks as well. So if you want to download just Bill's section of the interview, click on that little download button, and if you want to download your own, then click on that little button. We can also pause the recording whenever we want. Just click on the record button, and it pauses it, and then start it again, and it restarts the recording. Simple as that. So once you're happy with the recording and you've got the whole of your interview done, then you can just click on the little download link here, and download to your computer the audio. So let's open this little file here. We've got a whole bunch of them. So we're going to do this one here, which is the latest one. And you can see we have the different tracks. We have a separate audio file for Bill and for me,

Speaker 3: and also clips, which we're going to talk about next. Another cool feature of Clean Feed is being able to add clips to your audio,

Speaker 1: so you can play clips that everybody within the recording session can hear. Things like, I don't know, it could be little jingles, it could be introduction music, it could be clips that you want people to react to in a certain way. It can be anything at all. So I'm going to add some clips now to this interview. Just click on the little clips button at the top and something else opens. We have another plus sign. So we click on the plus sign and we can start adding some clips. So I'm going to add some of these little sound effects here. So I'm going to add that one. I'm going to add that one. I'm going to add a third one and a final one. Okay, so we've got four little clips. What this does is it gives us the ability to be able to play these clips whenever we want. So we can just click on the clip. And that was really, really loud. So we're going to alter the volume. We're going to take this down quite a bit, minus nine. Try it again. That's a little bit better. You get the idea. We can play these clips whenever we want. It's great for sound effects. It's great for little clips of audio that you might want your interviewee to comment on or talk about. It's great for introduction music.

Speaker 3: It's great for lots of different things. Okay, I want to talk to you a little bit about the sound quality because it is really, really good.

Speaker 1: I would call this near studio quality. But you are relying on internet connections. So it can be a little bit iffy if somebody has got a slow or dodgy or intermittent broadband internet signal. Okay, so it does rely on that. But the quality is really, really good, is extremely good. I mean, I'm lucky that I record all these little videos and all my podcasts within a small recording booth. So there's not much echo. It's quite a dead area for me to record in. I've got a nice microphone, a nice little pop shield and everything. So it sounds quite nice inside my booth. Other folks might not have that. But generally speaking, the sound quality from CleanFeed is excellent. It really is excellent. If the person you're interviewing has a good quality microphone, they're in a nice quiet room, you can get near studio quality out of CleanFeed without a problem. Okay, here's what CleanFeed actually sounds like in real life. Here's a clip from my Not Another Marketing podcast when I interviewed Alban Brook, who is the marketing manager of Buzzsprout, which is a podcast hosting company. And he was using a really good microphone. I was using a half decent microphone. And it does sound really, really nice. We're recording this. He's in the States. I'm in the UK. And this was recorded using CleanFeed. Should we video our podcasts? Should we stick them on YouTube? Is it still a podcast, do you think, if we actually video it? Should a podcast be audio only and that's it? You definitely should be putting it on YouTube.

Speaker 4: But there's quite a few caveats I'd put in as well. If you're going to put something on YouTube, you need to make sure that the content you're putting matches the way that YouTube presents information.

Speaker 1: So you can see the sound quality is excellent. It really is. I mean, I would call that near studio quality, to be honest with you. It is really, really nice quality. So make sure that your interviewee has a decent microphone. They're in a quiet room. And you should get a really, really good quality interview out of CleanFeed.

Speaker 3: Okay, so in conclusion, I've been using CleanFeed for around six months now, I think.

Speaker 1: And I pay for it. And I'm really impressed. In fact, I use it for a lot of voiceover stuff, which I do anyway. So if I want to do some little video voiceovers or just record some little tiny clips and things for work, then I can just come into my little booth and I boot up CleanFeed in my browser and I record directly on that. I don't use any actual audio software to record things anymore. I just use CleanFeed. Just me. And I record myself, I'll download it as a track, and then I can move it into my editing software where I can edit it and do any post-production to it. So I like the simplicity for me. It's also really simple for the person at the other end, whoever you're interviewing. They literally just have to click on a link, accept microphone permission within their web browser, and they're connected. There's no downloads. And that is huge. That is enormous. When you're interviewing people, they may not be as tech-savvy as you. They may not want to download strange software that they've never heard from. They might not have a Skype account or a Zoom account, and they've got to create an account and a username and a password and all this stuff just to be able to connect to you, right? So the easiest way is just provide them with a CleanFeed link. They just click on it, allow microphone permission, and away you go. I also like the fact that you can download things as a single track, a multi-track. As I mentioned earlier in the video, I'm a little bit fussy with my editing, and I do edit quite a lot, so I like to have that multi-track element so each person is on a separate audio track. That's a really good feature. One thing which I would like to see them do in the future is maybe offer some sort of templating system for the emails that go out so that when you actually send out an invite to someone, then you can actually customise what the email says. That would be a nice little feature. Another nice little feature would be to have the software being able to connect to other software, for example, my booking calendar. I have a booking calendar. Maybe if somebody books a podcast interview with me on my calendar, then CleanFeed can automatically send them a link to access the system without me having to do anything. That would be a perfect world, I think. So all in all, I think CleanFeed is pretty cool. There is a free account. Sign up, give it a go, have a try, have a play with it. You don't have to spend any money. Just have a faff with it and see how you like it. Been using it for a while now and I think it's great.