I’d already fallen down the Ultraschall rabbit hole a few years earlier — the podcasting environment built on Reaper that makes you wonder why anyone pays for anything else. I’d even produced a pilot episode with it. Then podcasting took a back seat, partly because I only had an iPad and a Linux machine at the time, and Ultraschall didn’t run on either.
Fast forward. I was doing my usual thing — ghostwriting for a client in Germany, which always starts with what I call an “informal interview” to brief me on the subject. The idea came up: why not turn those briefing calls into podcast episodes? One conversation, two outputs. Record the interview, ghostwrite the article from it, and publish the audio as a podcast. I’d transcribe the good bits using AWS or ADA Dictation. Efficient, right?
We kicked it around, and in the end the client decided he wanted to host the interviews himself. Fair enough — that put me in the role of podcast producer. From Australia. Ten hours ahead of Germany, which makes scheduling interesting and live monitoring even more so.
Recording with nothing but iPhones — it works
The client had no recording equipment, so we went iPhone-only. I set up an account with Studiolink — a genuinely impressive project by a developer who clearly cares about what he’s building and deserves the support — and pulled both guests into the session via the Studiolink integration in Ultraschall. I recorded the tracks on my end as control copies. We had a faint crackling in the recording, but the latency between Australia and Germany was surprisingly manageable.
Both guests, sitting in Germany, also recorded locally on their phones. Getting those audio files to me turned out to be the real adventure. Both had corporate iPhones, and the files were too large for email. After some back and forth, iCloud sharing finally did the trick. The locally recorded tracks weren’t dramatically better than my control copies, which was a bit deflating after all that effort.
I did the initial editing and normalisation in Ultraschall on the PC, then finished the cut in Ferrite on the iPad because I was travelling. Because of course I was — you don’t produce a podcast from the other side of the world and then stay in one place.
My verdict: it all works. The tools are solid, the latency is liveable, and the result sounds professional enough. But the onboarding — explaining to corporate professionals how to record on their phones, where the files go, and how to get a 200MB audio file from a locked-down company iPhone to a bloke in Newcastle — that’s where the real production effort lives.