Ideal way to use a USB mic for live broadcast?

[tylerpost]

Hey everyone. I've seen this addressed before but I wanted to see if there was a clearer answer...

I have a USB Blue Yeti Mic, Radiologik DJ and Nicecast as the conduit. If we're broadcasting live, how do we do nice clean voiceovers with minimal delay?

It seems that this isn't addressed that often, which makes me think that either there's something really obvious that I'm missing in doing this OR people have some additional component to do live broadcasts - in which case, what's the missing component for running live broadcasts using Radiologik DJ and Microphone?

Thanks in advance.

[MetroEast IT]

If you're using Nicecast as your only broadcast, there's nice built-in VO option in the Effects drawer.

Control click on the green line and select '4FX: VoiceOver'.  (Somehow I suspect you've tried this...)

[Lane]

Well, there's that delay thing. You can't avoid it doing the mix inside the computer.   To get rid of delay, you really want to do the mix outside the computer.  Have Radiologik DJ play out to a hardware mixer, and that's where you plug in the microphone, and adjust the mix.  You then take the output of the mixer, and send it to the computer, and set nicecast to listen to the sound input instead of Radiologiik DJ. That's the best way to go in my opinion.

Also, I dislike that yeti, but we'll not go there.   But do note that a usb microphone won't plug into a mixer. You'll need a standard XLR type microphone. I personally recommend dynamic mics for non studio environments. If you have a properly sound conditioned and quiet studio, a condenser can be used if the mixer provides 'phantom power'.

[MetroEast IT]

I agree that to "do it right" you should use an external mixer.

It might be possible to make this work with Soundflower and an app that will give you control over the mic mix/gain.  I'm not coming up with anything useful suggestions for an app, off the top of my head.  But, a quick search at macupdate, and I found this:
http://www.ardour.org/
...which should be able to handle the routing on it's own (sans Soundflower.)

Not sure this would play nicely with RLDJ, but then there's no reason to suspect that it wont.  The features suggest the ability to route anything to anything, and mixing.

If the USB connection presents itself as a choice on the input selections in System Preferences, you might be able to make it your default input.  You could then use the setting in RLDJ to make 'Line In' your system input...  It would be possible to cut the mic on and off, roughly...  And gain control (if present at all) would be in the Audio portion of the System Prefs.  Not the best, but it might 'work'.

[tylerpost]

You guys are a great resource. Thanks so much for all of the responses and assistance. I'm going to start messing around with some mixer options and see what I can come up with.