Commentary Issues

My long standing subscribers will be aware that when it comes to me commentating on my videos I have always had issues with how my voice is recorded.

No I’m not talking about the fact that I find my voice to be quite deep (and something that I can’t avoid) nor am I talking about the issue of getting over the fact that you always think you sound awful having completed one (which I think I have got over now) it’s the actual quality of the recording that I’m talking about.

If you go back to my first video, I used a mic very similar to this one which plugged in via a jack. The problems that I had with this mic was that whilst I feel that my voice stayed constant, listening back to the recording my voice would be very quiet, then be loud and back to quiet again. I’m not talking about me changing the pitch or tone, it was just the sound levels of the actual recording were not consistent.

I persevered with this mic for a while but felt that if I wanted to produce better quality audio I would have to purchase something with a USB (my thinking was straight forward – use a USB and this would eradicate the problem.)

I then purchased a mic similair to this one which had a USB connection. My initial problem with this was my computer did not recognise it. I played around with various sound settings and eventually got the thing to work and for Audacity to pick it up.

To my utter surprise I had exactly the same problem with this mic, my voice was all over the place and went from being hardly there to booming out and deafening you. With this being more of a podcast mic the sound was more noticeable as the mic was picking up everything, even though I had a mic shield.

I reverted back to the desktop mic and due to me changing the settings for the other mic, Audacity wouldn’t pick the desktop one up – Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr

I do have a basic mic that I use when gaming on the PC which is connected via jack but it’s not a brilliant one so I thought I would give that a try. Audacity picked up and the audio, whilst not perfect was OK so I managed to get a couple of comm’s completed with this.

Then suddenly and for no apparent reason half way through a comm Audacity suddenly lost my voice all together and I was left with complete silence. This happened on at least 6 attempts over various weeks so I gave up.

I made a couple of videos with music just to try and keep some kind of updated content on there but really felt that I had to get back to doing a comm so I could interact much more.

I then went out to where I have my consoles set up and got another headset, which I use for when I’m on the PS3 and thought I’d give that a try.

The sound coming through is probably the best I have had after a year of trying to get this resolved but the problem with this headset is the arms really creak and make so much noise that it comes out on the comm.

I have so far completed one comm using this headset and I was trying so hard to keep my head still, with no movement whatsoever so it didn’t creak but if you’re like me, when you are making a comm you really get into it and trying to get expression means you move around so the creaks are unfortunately quite obvious.

So now I’ve explained what my issues have been how do I rectify this. The simple answer is I can’t. My PC is 4 years old, it isn’t a gaming pc and the hardware that I have is just basic to get the computer working. I did upgrade my gfx card and that’s the max I can put in it. I’m the first to admit I know nothing about the insides of rigs and no idea where to start. Knowing that my PC has the basic could this be a sound card issue? I don’t think it’s the settings under the ‘recording’ tab via CP so I really am at a loss as to where to go.

Oh and for the record – No: I can’t purchase a new ‘gaming rig’ as I don’t have any damn money for one but maybe investing a new sound card is the way forward. If it is and based on me knowing I couldn’t get a top end gfx card I’m guessing it will be the same for the sound card ;(