Audio interfaces vary greatly in their functionality and their price. In this episode, I teach you how to choose an audio interface for your podcast.

How do you choose the right audio interface for your podcast?

Hey, I am Ryan from PodcastFast.com and I recently created an article on the 10 Best Audio Interfaces For Podcasting which you can check out at PodcastFast.com/25. But a lot of questions came out of my research for that article and I wanted to answer them to help anyone online who may have these questions.

So how do you choose an audio interface for podcasting? How do you know which one is going to be right for you?

There are a lot of different audio interfaces on the market and they range from very cheap, around $100, to extremely expensive, we are talking $2,500 or more in terms of how much this audio interfaces cost. So it is pretty tricky as a podcaster to understand what should I buy, how much money should I spend, what are my needs, etc. So this video is a guide to help you make the buying process slightly easier for you. So there are a few things that you need to consider.

The first thing is obviously going to be your budget. How much do you want to spend? If you only want to spend $100 well then you are very limited and there are only going to be a couple of good options for you. For example, the Focusrite Scarlett Solo is $99. That is a good option. There are a couple of other ones out there as well. The PreSonus Audiobox 2×2 is a good option for $100. But if you do not want to spend much like you only have a budget of $100 or $200 then you only have a couple of options.

If you have a larger budget and you really want the best for your podcast then the buying decision comes a bit more complex because do you want one of these cheaper models? Will it do the job of what you are actually going to get for the more expensive model? So there are a few things that you need to consider when purchasing your audio interface for podcasting.

The first thing that you need to consider is the number of inputs that the audio interface has. And if you do not know what an audio interface is, go back and checkout my episode on What Is An Audio Interface at PodcastFast.com/27. You can check it out over there and learn all about it. But basically it connects your analog microphone to your computer – so you put your analog microphone into the audio interface which is like a really good sound card and it basically converts that into digital format. It gives you really good sound and sends that to your computer and your recording software whether that be Audacity or Screenflow or GarageBand or whatever it may be. So that is just a quick summary of what is an audio interface.

But when you are looking to purchase an audio interface, you want to look at the number of inputs that you need. Now I do a solo podcast. It is just me recording and my microphone is actually a USB microphone; it goes directly into my computer. But let us just imagine that this was an analog microphone that I want to plug into my audio interface. Now I do almost all of my recording by myself with just 1 microphone, a single microphone.

So really, when it comes to purchasing an audio interface, I only need something that has 1 input. But let us say I started a podcast with my wife, which is something that we have been talking about and considering, I would ideally like to get 2 microphones and have 2 inputs. So now the audio interface that accepts only 1 microphone is not going to be good enough for me. I am going to need one with 2 or more microphone inputs.

Now let us say I create a podcast about my favorite TV show at the moment which is The Expanse, which is a sci-fi show. If you have not checked it out, go ahead and check it out. It is absolutely awesome, Game of Thrones in space basically. So let us say that I want to get 5 of my friends together and we are going to talk about ea...