Over the past five years or so, the popularity of podcasts has exploded, especially with the pandemic’s support. Podcast production and consumption have increased more than ever. According to Forbes, 125 million people will be listening to podcasts on a monthly basis by 2022, up from the 100 million people who did so in 2020.
The Tascam Mixcast 4 is the complete system with 8 smooth channel faders and a large colour touch screen, including 8 colour-coded sound pads that can be loaded with music or audio cues of your choice to add some sonic flair to your podcast. The sound pads can also access audio from an SD card. Physically it looks the part and feels nice and sturdy. The Mixcast 4 also provides plenty of output options: 5 headphone outputs (with 4 individual volume control pots), stereo TRS output and a stereo 3.5mm output. It can also output to a computer via USB when acting as an audio interface.
Spec-wise the Mixcast shares the same ultra-HDDA pre-amps as Tascam’s US-HR series interfaces and Model mixers so we know the sound quality is no slouch. The studio-grade pre-amps are accompanied by a healthy selection of processing such as dynamics and equalisation, vocal processing such as de-ess and noise compression, reverb and delay effects, high and low pass filters and even a handy pitch shifter so you can manipulate or hide the identity of your guests. The Mixcast 4 has an SD card slot and content can be recorded and stored directly to the SD card as individual tracks.
All the processing is able to be applied individually per channel, and within the Podcast Editor software you can stack up to 6 processes (or plugins) per channel. This gives ultimate flexibility when it comes to mixing a podcast with the Mixcast 4.
The Podcast Editor allows control of the Mixcast via your computer with access to record, edit and processing. The GUI is extremely user friendly with all the editing capabilities you’d expect to find in other DAWs. The same processing available on the Mixcast 4 hardware is also available via the Podcast Editor as plug-ins (VST). The editor combined with the features found in the Mixcast 4 itself makes for a one-stop recording and mixing workstation for podcast creation.
Considering podcast creation has exploded in recent times, the need for tailored podcasting interfaces has grown with many brands releasing new products. Tascam have built a great reputation with audio professionals over many years, and they continue to use their legacy to their advantage when they create new products. Tascam’s Mixcast 4 may have set a new benchmark in the podcast mixer and we love it!
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