This is the TASCAM Mixcast 4 and I’ll be showing you the basic setup
and how to get started creating your podcast like a pro.
As we can see here, we have 4 XLR ¼-inch combo jacks on the back of the unit.
This gives us the option of having up to four microphones live in the room with us.
If we have four people on those mics,
naturally we are going to want to have headphones for each guest.
Here on the back of the unit we have 4 dedicated ¼-inch headphone outputs.
I have a TASCAM TM-70 dynamic broadcast microphone
and since I’m the host I’m going to plug that into mic channel 1.
Once that’s been plugged in, I’m going to enter the menu by touching the screen here in the upper left hand corner.
Then touch the first icon which has the images of a microphone, mobile phone, plus the USB and Bluetooth symbols.
This will take us to the input menu which allows us to fine tune the properties of every input.
Now I’ll select Mic 1.
Since the TM-70 is a dynamic microphone, I’ll make sure Dynamic is selected.
However if we were using a condenser microphone,
we’d need the 48 Volt phantom power supplied by the Condenser option,
so select the type of microphone accordingly.
This step can be repeated for every microphone plugged into the unit.
This is the input gain, which will allow us to adjust the microphone signal coming into the Mixcast.
The default setting should be fine to get up and running,
as we can see on the meter to the left of the touchscreen.
But if we are not getting enough input we can raise the level
or if our signal is too high, we can turn it down.
Now I’ll raise the fader for mic channel 1 and we can see the output signal
come to life on the touchscreen on both channel 1 and the stereo master meters.
We’ll notice that the color at the bottom of channel 1 corresponds to the color
of the first headphone volume knob at the top right of the unit.
Whoever is on Mic 1 will be on Headphone 1,
Mic 2 on Headphone 2 and so on and so forth.
This makes organization and workflow a snap.
Now, I’ll raise my headphone volume until I can hear my voice clearly.
The back of the Mixcast 4 has an SD card slot which we’ll be recording to directly.
When the card is inserted, this message pops up asking us if we’d like to make a Sys file.
Touch „Yes“.
Now the unit is ready to record to the SD card.
If we enter the menu again, then click the SD card icon on the right of the screen,
will enter the SD settings menu.
Here we can enable SD recording, turn on Recording Stop confirmation
and start the SD device function. Now that we’ve set up the SD card,
all that’s left to do is press the record button above the touchscreen and
we’ll start recording our podcast.
When we’ve wrapped up, we’ll need to press the Stop button.
Confirm that we’d like to stop recording, then rename this particular recording.
To listen back to what we’ve just captured, enter the menu screen, then press the Playback icon.
This will pull up a list of all the sessions that we’ve recorded to the device.
After making the selection, press Play at the bottom of the screen.
Now our podcast is playing back.
By touching Advanced, we’ll be able to see the unit moving through the timeline
and even be able to set mark positions which will make navigation through the episode even easier.
Once we’ve completed our episode and it’s ready for upload,
we’ll need to get it from the unit to the computer. After connecting to our computer via USB,
we’ll navigate back to the SD Settings screen and touch SD Device Mode.
We see a message confirming that the Mixcast 4 is in Mass Storage Mode.
On our computer, we’ll access our drives and we should see the Mixcast 4 listed there.
Open that, then open the PODCAST folder and we’ll see our final WAV file there.
From here, we can drag and drop that file onto our desktop or any destination folder we like
and upload it to any platform of our choice.
We’ve now recorded our first podcast on the Mixcast 4,
transferred the recording to our computer and now we’re set to upload.
We hope you found this video helpful.
And don’t forget to click the subscribe button to be notified when we post new videos [on YouTube only].
Also check out the links on the screen to get more in-depth tutorials on the many functions and features of the Mixcast 4.