Podcasting Tools: RINGR

We will be featuring various tools and resources for podcasters on the Podcasting Blog. We hope you enjoy this guest post from Tim Sinclair
CEO of RINGR.

When starting RINGR in July of 2014, my primary goal was to solve a problem I encountered as a radio host: I was tired of conducting phone interviews with guests and having the audio sound like Neil Armstrong when he landed on the moon in 1969. It amazed me that—all these years later—broadcasters and podcasters still battled static and drop out and latency. The industry had accepted that poor quality audio was “just how it was.” So, I launched RINGR.

At RINGR, we want to change the way long-distance interviews are recorded.
We built a technology that allows you to record anyone, anywhere in the world, on any device and sound like you are in the same room at the same time. Telephones and Voice-over-IP apps (like Skype) heavily compress audio to transmit it down a phone line or over the internet, leaving it sounding hollow and thin and full of holes. RINGR simultaneously locally records lossless audio on each device and then merges the files together…eliminating the static, delay, and dropout you find in a typical telephone or Skype recording.

How Does RINGR Work?

Record

When you make a call with RINGR, the audio for each participant is both being recorded on each respective device (at high quality) and being sent over the network to facilitate a back-and-forth conversation.

Upload &Process
After the call, the audio is automatically uploaded to the RINGR servers where our adaptive leveling, volume normalization and synchronization algorithms stitch the files together and maximize the quality of the recording.

Export
Once processed, the recordings are exported directly to the interviewer in a variety of file types, formats and mixdowns…including mono; stereo and split-tracks.

What’s the difference?
The compression applied to conventional telephone or POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) phone calls or VoIP (Voice-over-IP) call audio allow the audio to be streamed over the internet reliably and at low bandwidth. However, the quality of the audio is greatly (and noticeably) compromised. This ‘lossy’ compression reduces the size of the file but, unfortunately, sounds terrible. Most people are quite familiar with the difference this compression makes to the audio and can easily tell whether a recording was made over a telephone, VoIP (e.g. Skype) or in a studio environment.

RINGR is designed to avoid this compression and provide you with a studio quality recording from each participant. The audio is automatically synchronized, leveled and merged with the other recordings…producing a single studio-quality recording where the parties sound like they are in the same room at the same time.

Take Your Studio Anywhere
We started RINGR on mobile because we wanted you to be able to carry your “studio” with you anywhere – after all, do we really get vacation these days? We have one podcaster who moved to Bali for several months because hewouldn’t miss a beat recording his podcast with RINGR. RINGR mobile also allows the experience for your guest to be seamless. You can even invite them from the RINGR app, so all they need is their mobile phone.

Convenience In Your Studio
In addition to mobile, we knew we wanted to impact the experience in the studio too. So, we built RINGR desktop. With RINGR running in the browser on your studio computer, you can be behind your beloved microphone…and your guest can be at the coffee shop, in the car, or on their couch.

The RINGR mobile app has proven to be a benefit primarily to individual personalities, podcasters, and their guests who do not have access to a professional studio. But with RINGR desktop everyone sounds better: entire radio stations, high-end podcasters, and anyone else who sits in a studio all day like I used to. It’s the highest sound quality possible without expensive equipment or telecommunications systems.

Your guests will sound amazing, you’ll sound like you always do, and you’ll both sound like you’re right there in the same room. I invite you to give RINGR a try for free today!

Thanks to Tim for his guest post! We’d love to hear from those of you who have tried RINGR…join the Podcasting Smarter Facebook group to join in our discussions! You might also want to check out the RINGR blog, including Podbean’s recent post about podcast hosting.