How To Record 3 People In Separate Locations & What Mics To Use?

The first part of your question is outside my experience, and I can best refer you to the GarageBand forum. You will find you can get answers not only about GB itself but also about microphones and recording techniques. I can't suggest specific microphones - I've been using the same ones for yesars and they are no longer available - but you may find this page by one of its premiere posters helpful:

http://www.bulletsandbones.com/GB/Microphones.html

As to the matter of picking up the other voices, any microphone will do that. You will all definitely need to wear headphones. I shouldn't use headsets with mics - these tend to be inferior quality and can also pick up noise as you move your head. You would be best off using a separate mic - if it's not a US one you will need a preamplifier or a mixer, you can't just connect it to the line it - and wearing headphones to listen to the others.

I should be prepared to have a couple of trial runs before doing it for real, to get balance and general sound sorted out.

Yeah I would also like to know the answer to this. I am thinking of creating my own podcast and have a nice microphone set up for my computer but the person I want to co-host is not in the same city as me. So essentially I need something that would be a conference-like program but that would also be able to transfer his audio at a high quality and be able to record it from my computer.

Technically it could be done by him hitting record on his own recording program about the same time as me but then we'd have two different audio files which would be a complete hassle to match-up when editing.

Blair.Harrington the answer to the microphone/feedback question is simply that you guys should all use headphones to listen to what you're each saying. This way the audio from what others are saying will not be caught/recorded by your microphones.

As said above I think it'd be better to get a decent quality microphone rather than one attached to a headset. I've bought a microphone known as the "Snowball" which was about $80-90 but I'm glad to finally have a good microphone.

Hope this helps. I'm also trying to find a good multi-location recording program.

Technically it could be done by him hitting record on his own recording program about the same time as me but then we'd have two different audio files which would be a complete hassle to match-up when editing.

It can be done. When you make the recording, start by counting down together - (three, two, one, mark) - this won't give you an exact match because of the delay, but it's a start. After recording, trim the start of each to the mark.

When he ends you the recording, you need a program capable of multi-track. Amadeus Pro can do this. Simply open one recording, and drag the other one into the window: it will form a second track. You can shift them about slightly until them match, and there is a slider to adjust the level. When you are satisfied, you can 'flatten' the file to one track and edit it in the usual way. Obviously it's vital not to edit either file until you've done all this.

I liked the idea that GarageBand seemed integrated with iChat and knew when to record the conversations. However, when I tried this a couple of times GarageBand would end up freezing about 15 minutes into the recording. So we ended up just recording ourselves separately in Quicktime while we were talking over iChat, and my friend e-mailed me his file, and I put them both into GarageBand. Syncing the separate recordings was pretty easy too.

We also tried just recording the iChat conversation from within the iChat program and using that for audio, but it was not very good quality - lots of echoes for some reason. I highly recommend the Quicktime option.

Yeah I'll let you know how it works out. I don't see why it wouldn't work. I'll be trying my first recording with my co-host in a week or two (hopefully) and give you feedback then.

My plan is essentially to talk with my co-host over skype with us both just using a different program (I'll be using Windows Sound Recorder and recording to WMA format) that can record high-quality audio. As mentioned above we'll more or less sync our countdown and press record on our programs and just talk into our mics while listening to each other via skype. Again, I don't see why it wouldn't work.