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I've been checking out TalkShoe lately, mostly due to my interest in the Church IT Discussion Podcast. Even though my IT and church sides don't overlap all that much, I love the format. An hour or more of somewhat moderated discussion between a mix of full-time and volunteer church IT people. I've been listening to the archived podcasts for a while, and finally got a chance to check it out live today.

I didn't want to tied up on a long distance phone call, so I decided to check out my Voice over IP options. I followed the instructions for using the SJphone from SJLabs, and it worked really well, but as it turns out, I did things the hard way.

TalkShoe now has their own ShoePhone VoIP solution available in beta. I saw that earlier, but decided to not mess around with signing up for the beta until after the call. I took that opportunity when I stopped by the church this evening during band practice. As it turned out, signing up for the beta consisted of a couple of clicks and restarting the TalkShoe interface. Using ShoePhone is a one-click process.

I tried it out on the computer that we use for recording messages and processing them for radio and podcasting. I started a session of my default "Unlisted Group Call" and pumped the recording feed right into TalkShoe. Wanting to know how it was working, I gave my wife a call at home and had her connect to the stream of the 'cast.

I think there was about a ten second delay, but it was working. Maybe not the greatest way to stream music, but it was definitely working. I recorded the 'cast, but no, I'm not going to share the results here. The band was just running through a new song for the first time, and it's not something that should be made public.

Again, this was using the same feed we use to record sermons and our live-to-two-track music recordings are usually listenable, even if they're not as polished as when we record tracks for later mixdown. It was downsampled to 22kHz, squished to a 56kbps bit rate, and it sounded like the highs and lows were rolled off. The talking parts were actually pretty good, so this is probably a viable setup for broadcasting the spoken word.

We've used Macromedia Breeze (now Adobe Acrobat Connect) for teleconferencing at work. Breeze is probably more robust, has more features, and does not require a downloaded client, but it's not free. I don't know if it has VoIP support or not. We always use a land line with it. TalkShoe is turning out to be a pretty neat service, and I wish I could figure out more uses for it. (That is, more excuses to use it.)