After reading a LOT of reviews, and receiving a number of recommendations, I ordered the Blue Snowball. It arrived yesterday, and I haven’t had any time to play with it, because we had a friend visiting from out of town. However, a few initial impressions. It’s a lot bigger than I thought it would be, but lighter than I expected.

And the sound is just great. I recorded just a few seconds of audio, and then did a longer reading. The crispness of the plosives and sibilants was very impressive. I’m looking forward to recording something, and getting back into podcasting.

And it’s got a little switch on it that turns it from a one-sided mic to an omnidirectional mic. Still need to figure out which is which. But I think that means that it’ll make a better interview mic than what I had before.

Thanks, everyone, for the great recommendations. I think I picked the right mic. Stay tuned for some more podcasts, finally.

For a while, I had a podcast microphone that I used for FeatherCast, as well as several other things. It was a Samson C01U USB microphone.

When I say “I had”, what I really mean is that it was attatched to my job. We obtained it to experiment with podcasting, since we were considering putting some podcasts on our website at the time.

Since I have changed employers, I no longer have that mic, and so haven’t done any podcasting since then. But I’d like to get started again. Ideally, I’d like to get a mic before I go down to New Orleans for ApacheCon, so that I can do some FeatherCast interviews while I’m there.

I quite liked the C01U. It was simple – plugged directly into the USB port, and I could record directly from it with Audacity, without any additional gear. Very convenient. And it is fairly inexpensive. There are some other devices that might be nicer, like one of the many portable digital recorders that are out there, but they’re a LOT more expensive, and aren’t really geared to the sit-down interviews and readings that I enjoy doing

But, if anybody has a recommendation, particularly of something inexpensive and good quality, please let me know. It’s been a long time since I recorded anything, and I’d really like to pick it up again.