Last night I recorded the very first new Bel Folks Stuff episode, and my hope is before the end of the week to record another. It was so much fun last night getting back into the swing of things, and I am not sure if I could have picked a better first guest to sort things out with. We had a charming conversation that once edited down a bit wound up right around the hour mark, so pretty much exactly what I was targeting. It seems like the whole sending the questions out ahead of time bit works as well because it allowed Grace some time to think about the answers she wanted to give. I am still super shocked that as many people have said yes as they have. Right now we have 22 who said yes, 2 that said no and 1 who is still a maybe… and then some folks that I have yet to get in contact with.
The real challenge however was “HOW” to actually go about recording all of these people. For AggroChat we use a privately hosted TeamSpeak that more or less just has access by the members of the show. Tam has a massive preference towards teamspeak over anything else, and as such it is what we continue to use. There are two problems with that, the first being that very few people have the Teamspeak client and that it is always a pain in the butt to have to ask someone to install it. The second big hurdle is the fact that since it is a fairly private venue with a very specific purpose, I am not sure if I want to invite 22 new people to it. Discord seems to be the most ubiquitous chat option but it doesn’t have a native option to record chat in a channel.
This however is where Craig.Chat comes in and last night was my first time using it. Essentially Craig is a bot that you invite to your discord server and then can issue commands to. So when you issue from a text channel:
:craig:, join general
Craig will join a chat channel named general and begin recording everything that is broadcast to that channel. When you are finished recording you issue the other important command:
:craig:, leave
Craig will then stop recording, leave the chat channel and send you a private message with links to download and delete your recording.
This for example is the page that loaded when I clicked on the recording from last night. I could download as a ready to go Audacity Project that comes with Ogg files that are already aligned perfectly with one track per speaker. If it floats your boat you can download several FLAC or Wav files that represent each user track and merge them together yourself later when you import into your audio editing software of choice. Of if you are lazy you can just download one track premixed and roll with it. I personally went with the Audacity Project as I knew I would need to do some volume adjusting given that Grace tends to come through a little quiet.
There was some weirdness at the beginning with some awkward pops that I am not sure if they were just plosives or if it was something with the recording. However after the first few minutes everything seemed to be perfect cromulent. I plan on doing some more testing with this method but I think it is a completely viable option moving forward with this nonsense. When it comes time to record with each person I will invite them to the discord that more or less exists only for the purpose of recording shows, and one that I don’t really plan on trying to make a thing out of. I am however considering inviting Craig to the Blaugust Discord for example so people could try and record impromptu shows off of it if they so decided. All in all I am really happy with having some option that works for recording Discord.
