I recently wrote a post about the demise of the ISDN line in my voice over studio.  For many years the line and my ISDN software codec were mainstays of my voice work and studio.

Despite being based on 1980s technology I was using my line for the remote recording of voice overs for radio and TV ads right up until nearly the end of last year.  Although still deemed “studio quality” in recent years the line was mainly used for remote direction with the actual recording done in my studio and sent to the client over the internet after the session.

I realised last year that clients were increasingly preferring self direct sessions or were switching to other, web based, connections and as a result I was not using the line for enough work to cover its expense. At the time I could not afford to buy myself out of the 5 year contract I was in. Luckily earlier this year BT announced an amnesty for people in contracts like mine and I was able to end it and, after 18 years,  the line was disconnected,

Since then I’ve been weighing up what to replace it with.  I’m using Clean Feed with a number of clients but I was feeling that it would be good to have something that is not effected by latency  issues if the speed of your broadband drops of fluctuates.  Source Connect has been around for a long time and so on balance I have decided to go with this Source Elements software.  Its monthly charge is cheaper overall than the ISDN line was and its very widely used in professsional situations.

Installing the software is easy but setting it up to work correctly is a bit more of a fiddle.  The software needs a direct dedicated connection between your computer and their servers which is done by using dedicated ports on your computer.  The complexity of the process comes about because you also have to configure your broadband router firewall to allow the port forwarding to take place.
Thanks to very unclear instructions with my BT hub this was the part of the installation that took the most time – my hub would not save the port forwarding settings. Eventually after many google searches I discovered there is a tiny cross on the set up page in the router software that you need to click on to save the settings.

In use Source Connect has a workflow that is very familiar to long time ISDN users like me so it not taken long to get used to using it.

Chris Radley – Voiceover