One of the cool things about producing DNR offline is that I can take the ambient noise out of my microphone track, and the hum, crackle, and whine out of the telephone track. Well, that poses a challenge for doing live shows, so I set off to find a way to remove this noise in real time.

After scouring the net for hours on several occasions, I always came back to the CEDAR hardware devices for cleaning up audio in real time. If it wasn't for the fact that they cost about 10 grand, I would have persued it further.

I ended up using Sound Laundry 2.5 from Algorithmix, a stand-alone audio cleaner utility that has a “Live” mode - 99 bucks. I had to wire up another Layla 24/96 audio interface to my rack (if anyone is interested in my studio setup, let me know and I'll give the tour) and after drawing out a complex routing pattern using a little mackie mixer, I got it all working, and working great!

Basically, I take the inputs from the mic and telephone recording device and run them through sound laundy. Then I take the outputs of that, and route it back into the mixer, where I can pan and EQ, then send the mains back into two other inputs of the Layla.

I then use the Windows Media Encoder to push the audio signal from that clean stereo input up to the Windows Media Server.  I love this shit!

So, after I get all the bugs worked out, and come up with a production process, I'll do a live morning show for about a week just to test the waters. We'll see if there are any bottlenecks, what the production issues are, etc., and whether or not people will want to listen to it!

Keep the comments coming. I'm listening to any and all feedback, even Jim Cheseborough!