Before you listen, a couple of caveats: please try to ignore the background hiss; and forgive my nasallly voice, I normally sound much better but I’m a little hayfevery at the moment.

Hey Mac. Very well-done, I thought. What a trip to actually hear your voice after all these years. Imagine my surprise when I found that, unlike the voice in my head, you don’t have an American accent.

The content was great, and well recorded. (And kudos for not violating the podcasting three-minute rule.) The script was great, and you read it well.

I was going to mention the hiss, however, which you already know about. There’s a bit of an echo as well. Perhaps you’re using the built-in mic on your laptop. I assume you don’t want to invest in an external mic, since they tend to be expensive. Are you recording this in GarageBand? Although it might detract from the content, you could probably drop in some sort of low-key music in the background that would hide the hiss. Some standard GB loop would probably do the trick. I dunno. Just a thought.

Also, maybe I’m just living in a vaccum, but I could have completely missed Live8. I don’t think there was the excitement about it here that there was in Europe.

you could probably drop in some sort of low-key music in the background that would hide the hiss. Some standard GB loop would probably do the trick.

Wow, on second thought that’s a terrible idea.

It sounds great, minus the hiss, which isn’t that bad once one get use to it.

I am of course biased, I’ll jump at any chance to hear your voice, love. ;0)

Thanks for the kudos, Mat (and Bee!). It’s much appreciated.

Yes, I did record it with Garageband, and I used the built-in mic of my eMac. I do have a better quality mic, an AKG one, but I don’t have a stand for it yet which makes it a bit awkward to use.

But most of the hiss is due to the computer’s fan anyway, although I don’t have any soundproofing in here either. (I could always hide under a duvet and record it that way, like a lot of V/O artists do, but then I don’t have a torch so I couldn’t read the script.)

Next time I do it I’ll likely have a better recording set-up. I should get an sound input adapter for my iBook so I can record with that instead.