When recording with your phone:

1. Find a quiet room — preferably one with carpet, lots of furniture, etc. — for interviews. Unplug or remove all devices that click, tick, ring, hum or buzz.
2. Make sure your phone has enough space. You don’t want to gather awesome sound only to find out there’s nowhere to save it!
3. Have the person being interviewed hold the device’s receiver a few inches away from their mouth. If you want to capture multiple people’s voices, ideally each person will have their own phone. If the phone is too far away, their voices will be hard to hear.
4. ​Check out some broadcast/recording apps (see our Apps tab). Two popular options are Hindenburg and Transom.
    

When recording on your laptop or desktop computer:

Built-in computer microphones generally aren’t as high quality as the ones in smartphones, but you can always pair them with a good external microphone to get decent sound. Consider recording in a room with lots of books, carpet and maybe even pillows behind your computer.

While most people know to go somewhere quiet and speak a bit away from the microphone, subtle things like the popping sounds at the start of P's and B's can ruin audio quality or cause the average volume to be raised / lowered because of the spikes in volume. Knowing ahead of time how to reduce those sounds can save hours of editing and re-recording.