How do I use Skype for voiceover sessions?

We'd heard a lot about it. For a long time.And to be honest we thought that our voiceover agency had no need of it especially as the quality seemed so poor.

My only dealings with Skype had been with - what we later found out to be - an audio producer calling us using a Skype phone to give us a voiceover job but the line kept cutting out and he had the nerve to say OUR phone wasn't working!

Anyway, as more and more people are using Skype to direct sessions - and it would be a free way to cope with voiceover sessions abroad - we thought we'd invest in it. Which we did.

But could we get it to work? We tried and tried and tried. I guess every voiceover studio set up is different so it was very hard to work why it wasn’t working properly: we could either record a voiceover but not hear the director on Skype or we could hear the client on Skype but the Adobe Audion would also record them - neither of which worked for us! As I am sure you will understand.

I even got round our local PC expert who said the only way around it was to upgrade Windows XP to Windows 7 but that would mean that our lovely new super-dooper sound cards in both PCs wouldn’t work. Arrgh.

Anyway to cut a long story short, we fiddled about with all the sound cards on the PCs and used a cheap old pair of speakers to listen to the caller on Skype - while maintaining the audio either from the voiceover booth or on ISDN through the main speakers. So now the client can chat away happily on Skype and not get recorded.

Phew. Another crisis averted. And our voiceover recording service to our clients improved.