If you need to make a bunch of people sound like they're in the same room, even though they're spread far and wide, then Zencastr might be the service you're looking for.

Zencastr is primarily aimed at podcasters but it actually has much wider appeal when you consider all the situations where it's useful to have a high-quality recording of an online group conversation from business meetings, conference calls or panel discussions to school assignments or other situations where you need to interview someone.

When Skype doesn't cut it

Of course it's possible to have these conversations using VoIP services like Skype, and then record the conversation from your end, but the problem is that the people on the other end sound like they're on Skype even if they have decent microphones and plenty of bandwidth.

The alternative is for everyone to record their own voice locally and then upload their recording to you, so you can stitch those recordings together to make it sound like everyone is in the same room.

This is how many podcasts are recorded, including Vertical Hold which I co-host each week with fellow Australian tech journalist Alex Kidman. I'm in Melbourne, Alex is in Sydney and we have regular guests from across the country so we're rarely all in the same room when we record.

Each week we start a group Skype conversation but also each participant uses a decent externalmicrophone to record their own voice. I use a Blue Yeti mic mounted on a Rode PSA1 boom arm. The Yeti mic isplugged into my MacBook Pro and Irecord using Audacity audio editing software, while Skype uses the Mac's built-in mic so I can talk to everyone else.

We all wear headphones to ensure that you can't hear the other panellists in the background of our recordings, only our own voice, although that can be a challenge because most headphones and earbuds tend to leak a little sound.

Another challenge with this setup is that, even though Alex and I have cobbled together decent recording environments, we can't always rely on our guests to capture decent audio. After we've recorded a show we need to wait for our guests to upload their audio to the cloud, then we download that file, knock it into shape, combine it with our recordings and edit the show together.

Editing the show this way is fiddly and time-consuming; we need to get the multiple recordings in sync, adjust the volume levels to roughly match and then do our best to enhance each person's audio and remove unwanted background noise (which is part of the reason why the final edit has music playing softly in the background).

With this kind of arrangement there's always the risk that one participant will have some kind of technical disaster and we'll lose their audio, which is why I record the Skype audio from my end as an emergency backup using my Zoom H2 digital recorder.

Zencastr makes life easier

Zencastr is designed to take much of the pain out of this process by recording each person's audio and then automatically uploading it and stitching all the recordings together to spit out a polished final product.

Zencastr runs via a desktop web browser, there's no need to download and install software. Each participant only needs headphones and a microphone they can use the mic built into a notebook but you tend to get better audio with a headset or standalone mic connected to your computer via USB or the mic jack.

The Zencastr dashboard makes it easy for the host to invite guests and see which microphone their system is using which is handy if people accidentally select their notebook's built-in mic instead of the attached mic. The dashboard isn't a mixer, the hostcan mute panelists (or they can mute themselves to cough)but you can't adjust their levels or fade them in and out.

The host can also enable echo-cancelling, which ensures you can't hear yourself in the background of other people's recordings and vice versa, but this slightly impacts on the sound quality when people talk over each other. For the best audio quality it's best to disable echo-cancelling and do your best to curb the sound leaking from people's headphones/earbuds to eliminate echo.

Zencastr has its own built-in VoIP service, which is handy because Skype can be a pig, but Zencastr doesn't record that streaming audio it's only there so the participants can hear each other. Instead Zencastr records each person's audio on their computer, to get the best possible sound quality, and then uploads that recording to Dropbox after you've finished talking.

Fix it in post

You can do all this with a free Zencastr account and you've already made life mucheasier, leaving you with individual recordings in Dropbox ready to be edited, but Zencastr's real magic is its automated post-production feature. With one click it will grab those individualDropbox recordings, optimise everyone's levels, stitch together the recordings and mute people's audio when they're not talking to reduce unwanted background noise includingecho.

This automated post-production costs US$3 per hour on Zencastr's free Hobbyist service, but you're limited to eight hours of recording per month and you can only have three participants in a recording using 128 kbps MP3. Upgrading to the US$20 per month Pro service (with a 14-day trial) lets you have more than three participants and record an unlimited amount of audio in MP3 or WAV. It also includes 10 hours of automatic post-production per month.

In one take

The Zencastr Pro service also grants you access to a Live Editing Soundboard, which makes it easy for the host to drop in your podcast'sintro, transitions and other sound effects on the fly. You can even loop a sound effect, if you want to play music in the background.

This is useful if you're trying to record your podcast in one take, but it won't suit everyone. Zencastr doesn't include any editing tools, it simply spits out a mixed version of the entire recorded conversation, warts and all.

Most people will want to import Zencastr's final audio into editing software like Audacity so they can edit out bloopers and those short planning conversations you might have between segments. This means you can't have music in the background while you're recording or you'll hear the music jump at the edit points the musicneeds to be added last. If you're already doing a little post-production in Audacity then it might be just as easy to also drop in the intro, sound effects and background music using Audacity.

One downside of letting Zencastr do the initial mix is that when editing afterwards in Audacity you can't fade down one panelist which is sometimes useful if two people have started to speak at once and then one has backed off to let the other finish. As a result your conversation will sound a little more raw, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

The Live Editing Soundboard would also be useful if Zencastr supported live streaming, but it's not designed to do that. There are plenty of live podcast and vodcast streaming tools around, but Zencastr is aimed at people who want to add a bit of post-production polish to their product before releasing it.

Play it safe

Most podcasters have been stung bytechnical gremlins, so it's worth asking what protections are in place should disaster strike your recording session.

Because Zencastr is recording the audio locally rather than over the internet, it keeps recording everyone's voice if one participant's internet access temporarily drops out even if that participant is the host.

It might take you a while to reconnect, but once you do you can keep talking and there shouldn't be a break in anyone's recording. You'll want to edit out the "are you there?" section of the conversation later in Audacity, but the recordings will stay in sync and nothing should be lost. Alternatively you can stop the recording, which saves those segments, then start another recording and later stick the two together using Audacity.

While you're recording, each person's audio is stored in their browser's local storage so it's important to ensure that everyone has a bit of free space on their hard drive, especially if you're recording in WAV. Keep in mind that WAV files are much larger than MP3 so it takes much longer to upload the recordings. If bandwidth is limited you might elect to stick with MP3, although it's a shame that Zencastr only offers 128 kbps MP3 recordings even with a Pro account.

If your computer or browser crashes in the middle of recording, or you simply close the tab before it's finished uploading, the file is still stored in your browser's local storage. If you reopen the browser and go back to the same recording page you'll see a stored track marked in orange with an exclamation mark. Hover over this and it says Finalise, which lets you tidy up what's in the local storage and upload it to Dropbox without losing more than the last 30 seconds of audio.Zencastrtells me that it also does a regular backup to Dropbox while recording, although I haven't see this working.

Thefact Zencastr can cope with flaky internet, plus it keeps a backup in the browser's local storage, should be enough to protect you against most disasters. If you're paranoid like me you still might want to use a standalone digital recorder to capture the VoIP conversation coming through the headphones jack on your computer.

So what's the verdict?

It's not aone-click solution, but Zencastr might be a godsend if you're chasing decent audio yet don't have the time and/or expertise for professional post-production especially if you're regularly rotating guests who have varying technical skill andaudio capabilities. We've only just started experimenting with using Zencastr for our podcast, so far I've been impressed but it will take a while to win my trust.

To be a one-click solution, Zencastr would need built-in editing tools to let you cut out sections of audio in post-production as well drop in sound effects. Finally, it would need to support ID3 tags so you could added details to the metadata such as the episode name and number before exporting the audio file and uploading it to your podcast hosting service.

If you're looking for an all-one-one solution then you might consider Zencastr rival Cast, which works similar to Zencastr butincludes online editing and even hosting options. This simplicity might appeal to some people, but Cast doesn't match Zencastr when it comes to the quality of its post-production mixing.

While it's only part of the puzzle, Zencastr is still going to save you a lot of time and effort if you're regularly stitching together multiple recordings because you're not satisfied with the quality of Skype-based audio. If you're looking to lift your podcasting game, or produce any kind of slick online group audio recording, then a few bucks spent on Zencastr's post-production tools might be money well-spent.

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Hands on review: Zencastr podcast maker - The Sydney Morning Herald