[Music] hey everyone kevin here today we are going to take a first look at how to use the new and also free road connect software so what is road connect and what can it do for you well it helps make podcasting and streaming a lot easier so what do i mean by that well let’s pretend that i’m pulling together a podcast i’m a host of the podcast maybe i have a co-host and i have some on-site guests then i’d also like to include a music bed or some background music as part of my podcast and maybe i have a remote caller who wants to dial in and we’ll include them on the podcast as well with rode connect it’ll connect all of these different sources into just one production it makes it really easy to pull this off we’re going to walk through step by step how you can do it as well now i did say it’s free software but there is one caveat for the best experience you need to use the rode nt usb mini microphone this is a budget microphone that runs for about a hundred dollars a piece but i’m also going to show you how you could use the software with other microphones as well alright let’s jump on the pc and first off i’ll show you how you can get rode connect to get the free road connect software head to the following website i’ve also included a link in the description down below once you land on this site you definitely won’t miss it there is a very prominent download now button right here you can click on this and then you can install it on either windows or on mac go ahead and run through that process once you finish installing rode connect launch the application once you launch it you’ll land on a screen that looks like this and before we can use rode connect first we need to configure all of the different microphones that we want to use with this app with rode connect you can connect up to four different microphones so right up here i see slots one through four and down below i see all of my available microphones and right now i have three different nt usb mini microphones connected to my computer and earlier i mentioned you can use this with other microphones as well but we’re not going to add those other microphones here i’ll show you how you can do that later for now this setup screen is exclusively for the nt usb mini so here i have three different microphones hooked up and i’ll drag each one to one of these microphone slots here i’ll drag it up so i use up the first three slots one thing that’s really neat is as i’m hooking up three microphones you might lose track of well which microphone is which here i can simply click on the microphone and then the mini microphone will light up telling me which one is which also down below you see these colors there’s magenta green blue and also orange what’s neat is rode has included accessories for the microphone where you can place a color on your microphone so it’s just a visual way to connect which number here corresponds to which physical microphone once you’re done placing your microphones in here let’s click on next on the next screen we can add virtual channels to road connect down below i have two available virtual channels i’ll drag them up into these two slots over on the left we have one called system audio and the easiest way to think of this is this is any sound that plays on your system so whether you play let’s say music or spotify or itunes maybe you’re playing music in a web browser all of that will come through as system audio then you also have something called virtual device let’s say that maybe you’re on a zoom call or a microsoft teams call and you want the participant from the call to be part of your podcast or you want their voice to come into road connect you can set that up as a virtual device i’m going to add both of these in here and then once you’re done with that let’s click on finish this now drops us into the main road connect interface and at first glance it might look a little bit intimidating there’s a lot here on this screen but actually it’s pretty intuitive and we’ll walk through exactly what you can do here and over on the left hand side you’ll see these are the three microphones that i just added so i could see them here and then here’s the system sound and also the virtual device that i added so we see all of our sources right here on this screen to get started let’s first focus over on the left hand side where i have all of the microphones and here i have my three microphones that i hooked up right up at the top i could see the number and the color identifying which microphone is which also right down below i can see the levels for the microphone now with sound ideally you want to land right within this bracket area this is considered the ideal audio level you don’t want to go too high if you go too high your audio clips off and if you’re too low well you just won’t be able to hear it that well so this is the ideal range to be in if for whatever reason your voice isn’t landing within this space you can use this slider to increase the volume or you can use it to decrease it you can adjust the levels so every single microphone falls right within the optimum range once you finish configuring your levels down below you also have the ability to toggle on and off mute for a specific microphone maybe you have a guest who’s just not as concise as you’d like them to be well if they keep going on and on you could simply mute them and then carry the conversation forward when you’re hosting a podcast you want to make sure that both you and all of your guests sound as good as possible and road connect includes some pretty nice tools to make that happen if you go up above and you click on this microphone icon this will expose some advanced controls within the advanced controls here again i can see my levels and i want to make sure that i land right within this green range and over here i can adjust it if i’m too low i could boost it a little bit or maybe if i’m too high here i can lower it this gives me a little bit more fine control compared to the slider that i see over here and down below this is where i now have access to some pretty advanced controls i have something called a noise gate and i can toggle that on or off a noise gate helps reduce any background noise in my audio signal so let’s say that maybe i have an air conditioner on in the background or maybe my computer fan is really loud i can toggle on the noise gate and that will eliminate all of that background noise down below i also have something called a compressor and this will help my voice sound a little bit more balanced and consistent so as i’m speaking maybe there are certain words that i emphasize where it’s a little bit louder and maybe in other parts maybe i decide to whisper a little bit with a compressor it’ll bring those together so they’re tighter and it just results in a better and more consistent sound and down below there are some additional effects or aphex effects made by rode one of them is called the exciter and the other one is called the big bottom the exciter looks at the frequencies of your voice and it takes those higher frequencies and it introduces more harmonics to it so it gives a little bit more shine or sparkle to your voice with the big bottom on the other hand this is looking at the lower frequencies in your voice and it adds a little bit more richness and depth so those are two options that you can use to enhance the way your voice sounds now that we’ve looked at how the microphones work let’s shift our focus over here on the right hand side where we have the different virtual audio sources and first we have system sound so once again this is any sound playing on your computer it could be the sound from a game or a music player here for example i have a music player open and when i click on play here you’ll now see the levels showing up for this music source just like i could do with the microphone i could increase the levels if i want it to be louder or maybe i just want it to be background music in which case i could lower the levels so it doesn’t overwhelm the speaking over here from the microphones with the sound too just like we could do with the microphones i can mute the sound or i could turn the sound back on if i go up above and i click on this icon here i can configure these specific levels for the sound source here i could also see the levels up above lastly you can also input audio from something like microsoft teams or zoom or cisco webex using the virtual device over here so how do we set this up so we start getting sound well let’s jump over to zoom as a quick example here now i’m in a zoom meeting and to configure this to work with rode connect here i’ll hover over so i see all of my controls on the bottom of the screen over here i can click on this carrot icon next to the microphone to access all of my different audio controls up above i can select a microphone that i want everyone in zoom to hear right here there’s an option for stream input what this means is all of the different audio sources from rode connect will be fed into zoom so here if i want the zoom participant to hear every single microphone that i have connected i’ll select this one called stream input also down below i can select a speaker so this way sound from zoom will be sent into road connect and right here there is the option for virtual output road connect so select this option back now within road connect here i can verify that the audio from zoom is successfully coming into road connect and here too i have all the same controls that i have with my microphones and the system sound here i could adjust the levels maybe they’re too quiet and i want to raise it or maybe they’re too loud and i want to reduce it a little bit here too i can also click on the icon and here i have more fine controls over my levels now that we have all of the different audio sources configured before we start recording i want to show a few additional settings that you have up here in the top right hand corner there’s an ellipsis let’s click on that and then go down to preferences this opens up preferences and there are just a few that i want to call out up at the very top you can choose how you want to monitor your sound so let’s say you have headphones on and you want to hear what the whole production sounds like you can choose your device right here also under monitor mix you can decide whether you want to include or exclude your microphone now i don’t know about you but when i’m talking and let’s say i’m also monitoring what i’m recording i don’t like hearing myself talk as i’m recording in which case i would choose microphone excluded but if you want to include the microphone maybe someone else is monitoring you can choose included and underneath that you also have the option for recording you can either go with stereo or multi-channel so what’s the difference well with stereo it takes all of your different audio sources and it combines it all into one file alternatively you can get the combined file along with individual files for each one of your different audio sources so once again you’ll get a combined file and then you’ll get a separate file from microphone one microphone two three system and virtual and then you can mix them together on your own so it gives you a little bit more control after the fact to tweak and fine-tune your podcast or your stream for this i’m gonna select multi-channel those are all the preferences i wanted to look at let’s go up and click on the x now that everything is configured and we have all of these different audio sources coming together we are ready to record and right up in the top left hand corner there is this massive record button we can click on that and that kicks off the recording here you see i’m a few seconds in let’s say i’m hosting a podcast and someone makes a really interesting point i can drop a flag and maybe someone makes another interesting point i can drop another flag once i’m all done recording i’ll come over here and click on record this has now stopped my recording and over on the left hand side i can click on this icon right here to review all of my recordings here’s the recording that i just wrapped up and here i can see the sound waves that correspond with my recording if i click on this icon i could jump to the first flag and here if i click it again i can jump to the second flag so here i can see the entire recording within this view i can also click on the play icon if i want to listen to my recording this is just a quick and easy way to hear what everything sounds like once you’re ready to export your audio down here you can select your recording click on this icon here you can give it a name a color and then you can export it to your platform of choice if you choose custom you could define all of these different controls whether it’s a wave mp3 what the quality level is or let’s say you want to upload to spotify or itunes or some other service you can choose that and it’ll automatically identify the optimal settings once you’re ready to export you can click on export or maybe things didn’t turn out the way you planned in which case you can simply click on delete once you’ve finished recording on your computer in file explorer road connect will create a folder with all the different files that it recorded here i’ll click into my most recent recording right here i have a file called stereo mix and this takes all the different microphones the system sound and the virtual device and it combines them all into one file but i selected multi-channel so here again you see that i have separate recordings for each one of my microphones and i also have a separate recording for the system sound and the virtual device so here i could bring that into a program like audacity and then i can mix the audio on my own here for example i’m in audacity and if you want to learn more about audacity i’ve included a link in the description that’ll give you a full tutorial of how you can use this software but here i can see every microphone is an independent track also my system sound and the virtual device so i could come through here i could adjust levels i could cut out different portions but i now have full control over editing my podcast now you might be wondering well what if i don’t have an nt-usb mini or what if i have an nt-usb mini but i also have another microphone how can i hook up other microphones to rode connect to be able to pull this off we need to get a piece of free software let’s jump over to our browser within your web browser head to the following website i’ve also included a link in the description down below this program is called voice meter there’s another one called banana or potato the main difference is well with voice meter you can connect up to two devices and then output it with banana you get even more you get three and then with potato you get all the way up to five so in a sense you can bring five microphones into rode connect using this software now depending on how many microphones you want to bring in choose the appropriate bit of software and then run through the download and install process now this software is free but if you enjoy using it they recommend donating money to support the development of these apps once you’re done installing voice meter open up the application and there’s also a lot of functionality here and we’re not going to run through all of this i just want to show you how you can get another microphone or two into road connect over on the left hand side we have two different inputs here in this drop down list you can choose an additional microphone that you want to bring into road connect let’s say you want to bring in two microphones you can also select another microphone over here that you want to bring in then over on the far right hand side you can choose your output and here when you select this drop down here you can either choose system output or virtual output and that’ll send it through to rode connect now that i have the microphone selected and i see that the output is coming through let’s jump back into road connect back now within rode connect i have my other microphone that’s not an nt usb mini and i see it coming through as a virtual device now once again i mentioned you could either send it in as system sound or as a virtual device so i could use either one of these as an input and now with voicemeeter i can bring in two microphones and with banana and some of the other variations i can bring in up to five different microphones the only downside though is if i bring in multiple microphones on this virtual device it’ll merge all of them into one track if i select multiple tracks but if that doesn’t matter to you this should work just fine we’ve now looked at all of the core capabilities of rode connect but what if you want to take your output and you want to live stream maybe you want to go on youtube maybe you want to go on facebook live you can very easily do that now i love the software obs if you’ve never heard of obs before you can use it for streaming or screen recording and it does a fantastic job luckily you can take all of the audio output from rode connect and you can bring it into obs as an audio source if you want to learn more about obs i’ve included a link in the description right down here i see my microphone in obs i can click on the settings gear and then go down to properties within properties i can choose the device that i want to use and at the very bottom there’s an option called stream input this will take everything from rode connect and it’ll bring it together here for my stream so here i’ll select this click on ok and then here all of my system sound all of my different microphones my virtual device all of them get combined into this input source once i’m ready to record or stream i can click on start streaming or start recording all right well that’s how you can use rode connect if you enjoyed this video please give it a thumbs up to see more videos like this please consider subscribing also if you want to see me cover any other topics leave a note down below alright well that’s all i had for you today i hope you enjoyed and as always i hope to see you next time bye you