Now follows a thread that will be uninteresting to 99% of you ("what's new?") and will only be interesting to hobbit-y hunched over sound people but sometimes I search on Twitter for this sort of thing and find it useful.

I just recorded 3 audio dramas in lockdown & here are some thoughts.

I've been using Cleanfeed for remote recording podcast interviews (we also recorded a sitcom for Radio 4 with it - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b092sfnk) and it's good when you have actors with a decent USB mic and laptop.

For these podcast dramas, we had no tech budget, and also I didn't know what the technical proficiency and equipment the actors would have, so I decided that we'd record everything using mobile phones to make it as easy as possible.

With phones, best quality would come from the actors recording themselves and sending the audio back to me, but I felt that was too open to error, and also a pain in the arse when you're recording for two eight hr days. So remote recording (like Cleanfeed, Zencastr etc.) it was.

Half the actors had iPhones & it transpired that iPhones don't work with most remote recording systems. This is something to do with the way their internet browsers work. So the only options were Cleanfeed (which somehow offers iPhone support in beta) & Ringr, which is app-based.

I tested Ringr and it works and the sound quality is okay for an interview, but it's not good enough for an audio drama. So Cleanfeed it was. However, when we came to record, it still doesn't work quite well enough with iPhones.

An Android phone (inside a duvet and pillow fort) can sound surprisingly good over Cleanfeed, but for some reason iPhones come through with barely any recording headroom, so it's hard to do anything louder than quiet talking without distortion. It's a huge pain in the bum.

I think the final plays sound really good, but that's a result of a lot of jiggery pokery. So in conclusion, would I recommend remotely recording a drama using mobile phones? If there are iPhones involved? No!

I think @cleanfeednet are working on it. So let's see.

Anyway, you can hear the plays - made by Cardiff-based theatre company @DirtyProtest - here: http://anchor.fm/ritualpodcast 

#AudioDrama