Podcast Recording Shootout

Do you have a podcast? Okay, dumb question. Of course you do—podcasting is the blogging of tomorrow. It's quick, it's easy, it's not tied to a computer screen, and your audience members can take you with them anywhere on their iPod-ish devices. Best of all, you don't have to worry about actually learning to spell in order to inflict your opinions on others. So long as you can speak clearly and have fun doing it, you too can have a podcast. So who wouldn't want to do it?

I mean, you have an opinion you want to express, right? Or you have a story you want to tell. Or you simply have a desire to see what will happen if you gradually fade the volume out on your podcast until it's near zero, encouraging your listeners to turn their headphones up, before you blast them with a channel-saturating guitar riff to wake them up. The point is, you have a podcast, or you want one.

One thing you begin to notice when you get into podcasting is that listening to your own voice is boring—really boring. It's cathartic to rant into a microphone for half an hour and then put it on iTunes for the world to hear, but after a while, it's really nice to have listeners call in, or have guests, or pick up a cohost in another state.

How can you do it? Telephony, naturally.

Now, I must emphasize that not just any telephony client will work. Ekiga and Skype are not created equal. Neither are Gizmo and Twinkie. That doesn't mean they aren't all good for something, but good for something isn't the issue here. We need good for podcasting, which is a whole other spool of fiber-optic cable.

In my podcasting and production career, I've run into a lot of remote conferencing, and I've found that pretty much any remote conferencing is done for one reason: you can't get the talent into your recording studio (humble as it may be).

Why this can happen is a bit of another matter. For one of my podcasts, The Polyschizmatic Reprobates Hour (don't ask), my sometime-cohost lives halfway across the country, and to have any kind of intelligible real-time conversation, we needed a good telephony setup. This went double for when we needed to bring in guests for interviews. The basic requirements list is as follows:

Now, looking back over that list, the vast field of SIP clients narrows substantially. Instead of a couple dozen to pick from, there are only two that will fit the bill, and neither of them are open source.