Recording narration in Keynote ‘08 – WORKAROUND!

I use Keynote ‘08 for my professional presentations at the office, I also use it for client work such as training and technical presentations. I am super-excited about the new features in Apple’s Keynote ‘08 update. Unfortunately, if you have decent audio recording equipment it seems Apple didn’t do a good job at testing this with the “Slideshow Recording” feature. Problem: Keynote ‘08 is not able to use some Firewire audio interfaces as the audio input source. If you try, you get this error message (Grammar Girl, where are you?):

The Apple Discussion board has been tracking this bug since Paul Figgiani reported it on Aug 10 2007. I respect Paul and like his work so I was extra-motived to find a solution. Someone posted a workaround that involved basically dumping the “Line out” of your interface into the “Line In” on your computer. Yes that works, but it feels dirty and you’re compromising your sound quality. Here’s a better way!

Workaround:

You will need:

1. Audio Hijack Pro from Rogue Amoeba software ($32 if you don’t already have it. I’m a podcaster so I already had this.)
2. SoundFlower from Cycling ‘74 (Free. Thanks, Cycling ‘74!)

How to hook it up:

• Inside Audio Hijack Pro:
  • Add a new “session”. I called mine “Keynote workaround device”
  • Set the “source type” to be “Audio Device”. See Figure 2.
  • Set the “Input Device” to be your audio interface (e.g. “Alesis 1394″)
  • Set the “Output Device” to be “SoundFlower (2ch)”
  • Click the “Advanced Button…”
  • Inside the “Advanced Device Options” dialog (See Figure 3):
    • Set the Input Device Left Channel to be 1 (assuming you have your mic plugged into mixer channel #1)
    • Set the Input Device Right Channel to be 1 (this assumes you only need to record your own voice into the Keynote slides)
    • Set the Output Device Left Channel to be 1
    • Set the Output Device Right Channel to be 2
    • Close this dialog
  • Your settings should now look like Figure 4 :
    
  • Hijack this Audio device (click the “Hijack” button)
• From the Mac “Sound Preferences” control panel, set the default audio interface to be the “SoundFlower (2ch)” device. See Figure 3.
• Now go back to Keynote ‘08 and record your slide voice over
• Ta Da!

How does this work?

My guess is that Keynote ‘08 doesn’t know how to deal with an audio device that has more than 2 channels. Through this workaround, I’m using Audio Hijack Pro to route the mixer input #1 into both sides of the Left-Right signal path of the SoundFlower(2ch) pseudo audio device. By setting SoundFlower (2ch) as the default system audio input device, Keynote ‘08 is tricked into using the fancy audio interface.

The best part of this workaround is that you’re getting the best possible sound directly from your audio interface. You’re keeping your audio signal in its digital form all the way into the Keynote and using your expensive interface to do the A/D conversion instead of the Mac’s “Line In” port.

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