I’m the first to admit that considering I only podcast once a week on a recreational basis, I have an overly complicated setup. My “Podcast Arena” (as I call it) consists of four monitors, two desktop computers, one laptop, one audio mixer, one six-channel firewire input device, a microphone, an iPad and a bunch of random cables, headphones, etc.

My Podcasting Arena

As you may guess from the picture above, my main computer operate the dual screen 20 inch monitors, and then the top left monitor is tied to the “recording computer” and the top right is tied to the laptop. As you browse the picture you might think to yourself, where is he hiding the other two keyboard sets? Well, guess what? I only use one keyboard/mouse to operate all three computers.

Awhile back I was introduced to a program called “Synergy”. Synergy is a tool that allows a single keyboard and mouse to operate multiple computers on the same network. The user installs the utility on each computer and specifies one computer to be the host (the one that has the keyboard/mouse physically connected to it) and the others to be the clients (no keyboard/mouse). The beautiful thing about Synergy is that the program allows you to move your mouse seamlessly off of one computer onto another. In my setup above, I simply move my mouse up off of my main desktop, which takes me to my recording computer, and then I can move right off of that computer onto my laptop. As much as I loved the function of Synergy, for quite awhile I felt hard pressed to recommend it to friends as the configuration was complicated, confusing and just downright a pain in the butt. The configuration literally consisted of specifying what was above, below, left, and right of each computer – it was tedious to say the least. Somewhere along the way this changed and became a whole lot easier when Synergy changed to an icon-based configuration:

An example of my Synergy Configuration.

In order to set up Synergy now, the user simple drags the monitor icon to the position they want the computer to be located. In the above example, I’ve specified that my main computer is the bottom, my recording computer is to the top left, and my laptop is to the top right. This only needs to be configured on the host computer, and then the client-computers simply need to install synergy and during setup specify they are clients to the main desktop.

If you’re in a scenario such as mine where you have multiple monitors on a variety of computers, I strongly suggest you check out Synergy. The utility really does operate smoothly and functions in a way that feels like you simply have multiple monitor on one computer. Synergy is available free (http://synergy-foss.org) and can be downloaded for Windows, OS X, Ubuntu/Debian, Fedora/Red Hat and I’ve even heard of some ports to Android.