Mexico Over the Wall

Linking your mobile phone to your computer is an easy way of recording a phone call for a podcast. That way, you can make a call and capture the audio passing through your computer from you and your guest. I’m using a Mac to do this, but there are ways of doing the same thing on a PC.

Apple’s way of connecting your devices is called FaceTime, which allows me to place a mobile phone call through my computer. To capture the audio, I’m using Audio Hijack, which is a very handy program I use for recording all my interviews. You just stick together a series of blocks to make it do what you want. I use the same layout as the one below to record Skype or Zoom calls as well.

As you can see in the picture, I’ve got my guest’s audio coming in on the right channel and my audio on the left channel. I’ve added a volume block for the guest’s audio in case it comes in loud and starts clipping, which I can see on the monitor block showing me the levels on each channel.

Next, the audio goes to a recording block and gets saved as a stereo WAV file. It also goes to my headphones, with the guest’s audio now duplicated to the other channel so it’s easy to listen to as we’re doing the interview. There’s another volume block there in case I need to raise or lower what’s coming into my headphones.

That’s basically all there is to it! All I have to do is remember to set my mic as the input on FaceTime and press the record button on Audio Hijack. Once I’ve recorded the interview, I can then edit it as I’ve described in the articles on editing.