A few days ago at a networking event I came across a very funky looking mic, The Blue Ball. It’s ideal for those of you who are intending to capture audio for your podcasts from events and presentations as you can just plug it straight into your laptop and it’ll pick up sound from the room. Alternatively, you can flick a switch and use it as your at home mic.

Why flick a switch? Well, in basic terms, this mic is multi-functional. You can have it on one setting whereby it will pick up sound from all directions so if there is more than one person talking or even a band playing, then it will record everything pretty well.

Then, when you want to record your own voice in your home studio, you change the setting so that it concentrates on picking up just your voice as you speak directly into it.

Want to have a listen to it in action? The producer of Sssh UK tells me it was used in the recording of their podcast. If you have a listen you’ll notice it’s not the best quality mic you can get but it definitely more than does the job for podcasting. And for the price, the quality is ace. If you want one for yourself you can get one here for about £70.

The advantage to using this whilst out and about is the plug and play element but you do have to have the laptop with you. If you can’t deal with the size of it (it’s about 8 inches high) and lugging the laptop around then stick to a tie mic and minidisc player or digital recorder…