primary microphone mini-survey & live(-ish) results

[bluedreaming]

There are often discussions about podficcer starter mics and what mics people use (often I see them on discord, but here's an example on Tumblr) to which there will usually be a few varied responses depending on who sees the post, but it's never terribly conclusive. For instance, I feel like there's an impression that the Blue Snowball and Blue Snowball iCE are popular podficcer mics, but is that actually the case?

So, out of curiosity, I put together a mini-survery and simple results interface to answer this question.

Link to the single-question form (Airtable form)

Embedded form:

Link to the live(-ish) results! (Airtable interface)

Embedded results:

I know this question is maybe a little headed more towards podfic_tips/podfic_tips but hopefully with the inclusion of live(-ish) results (I learned my lesson!) it's meta enough to fit here.

Some notes:

This survey is a small little for-fun stats-gathering survey just to see what microphones podficcers use as primary microphones. I'm not collecting any personal information, and the single-question format means there shouldn't even be more than one vector by which to identify someone. The results are being displayed live (with a slight delay for wrangling if you needed to write in your response). The write-in field (which should still not receive any personal or identifying information) is not and will not be displayed publicly.

This survey is about primary microphones since, with the inclusion of mobile phones and headsets and computers, many of us technically have more than one mic available to us and have possibly used a variety for pick-up recordings, etc. This is more of a "what's your daily driver?" question.

Since there are a lot of different kinds of mobile phones, but I haven't heard that any had particularly unique built-in microphones, and also for privacy reasons, I've opted not to collect detailed information on the specific phone maker and model, so there's a generic option.

Some preliminary feedback on discord indicated it's possibly mostly Mac users who use a built-in computer mic for podficcing, so I've gone with an Apple Mac option (again not breaking it up into models) and a generic computer option.

This mini-survey isn't intended to provide any kind of mic recommendation, but rather to just provide a slightly more detailed answer to the questions "what mics do podficcers use?" and "is there a popular podficcer mic?" so we'll see what happens!

On discord, a link to this article (Which microphone and interface should I get?) was shared, from the context of professional audiobook narrators, and I'm including it here for curiosity's sake but we don't need to spend that much money!!

At this point I don't have any set plans for when to close the mini-survey; I'll probably see when responses dry up.

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Crossposted to: amplificathon, podfic community on tumblr, mastodon/fediverse, bluesky

Comments

[flowersforgraves]

Interesting! If I am at home, I use my snowball, but if I get myself to the library recording booth I use their yeti. (I put myself down as a snowball user, since I do that more often.) I'm a little surprised to see how much the answer varies for people!

[bluedreaming]

Oh that’s interesting! Do you do a lot of recording at the library or is it more sporadic? And I wonder what types of equipment library and similar public-ish recording spaces would typically have.

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting because it’s always so hard to get a good sense, so the results are really neat!

Just the info I needed today

[jesse_the_k]

I'll always be a podfic listener, not creator, but I'm starting to narrate an audiobook in connection with EFL tutoring. I used my AirPods Pro for the first 15 minutes, and something's gotta be better than that!

(Also joyous props for embedding Airtable in DW. Your technical skills delight me.)