I’ve seen people posting details of their rig on other sites, so I thought it was high-time I did so here too.

To walk through the image:

• On the far left: HP LaserJet 2420 printer - far better than my old printer by leaps and bounds.
• Tucked in under the printer - Apple Mac Mini computer. The workhorse that has been the centre of the rig since I started and now relegated to just file and print sharing.
• ProLine mini boom desktop mic stand
• Kel HM-1 condenser mic, in a shock-mount
• Sterling Audio PF-1 pop-filter - gets rid of the nasty pop noises of “p” and “b” blowing air into the mic.
• At the back, my Alesis mixing desk with firewire hookup to the studio computer.
• Samsung 22" widescreen LCD monitor
• Apple MacBook laptop - now the centre of my world. Not only did it supplant the Mac Mini for podcasting, but its beaten off competition from my Dell Inspiron laptop to become my main machine.
• Tucked between the MacBook and the big-ass monitor, is an Apple Keyboard (for the Mac Mini)
• An ancient pair of Labtec speakers that provide me with sound
• Underneath the speaker, Western Digital “MyBook” 750 Gb external drive - there are only 2 kinds of people in the world … those who obsessively back up their data, and those who have yet to experience a hard-drive crash. There are 3 Apple computers in my house, and all three run “Time Machine” for backups. (Drive/volume names: Zippy, Bungle, Geoffrey & George … can anyone guess what inspired the names?)
• Lastly a lovely old Logitech “TrackMan Marble” trackball

This is proof, from episode 21 of the podcast, that I script the whole thing. To the left is a text editor with my script, and to the right is Apple GarageBand, showing the first 40-seconds of the episode.

My very first steps in podcasting made us of a tool called Propaganda - surprisingly capable for the price but it had some severe limitations too. On the strength of Propaganda I took a look at the DJ Mixing software from the same company and fell in love with MixMeister Express.

In January 2007 I posted to my personal blog about issues I’d encountered with Flash based audio players. Detailed there was my next step - record raw audio in the fabulous “Audacity” audio editing software. Export, and use MixMeister or Propaganda to do the mixing/editing of things. Save as a WAV file and encode to MP3 using a command-line utility called “lame”. I mentioned yearning for the simplicity of the one-stop Propaganda software.

Then I took a look at what Apple had to offer, and was seduced by GarageBand. All the mixing and editing power I needed, great audio recording, and could export into iTunes for final ID3 tag editing. All-in-all my new favourite tool.

So, that’s the rig. Modular enough that different pieces can be upgraded for better at any time, but still within the bounds of reason as far as price. I believe (before the most recent upgrades) I’d invested around $1200 in things but that was before adding the backup disk and new laptop.