Listening to Guy Kawasaki’s presention on innovation (which is an interesting lesson in and of itself), I got a cool idea which I tried to find an existing solution for on the web, but there’s no easy-to-find result. So I’m sharing it here, for free.
There should be a microphone headset with an incorporated mute switch or noise gate, so in case you need to sniff, cough or produce other kinds of unpleasant noise that you don’t want to be amplified over the PA or recorded on the video, you — the one who’s wearing it and knows when the incident is about to happen — can just mute it out.
BUT what would make it really great would be if the button were part of a presentation remote that works with both Mac and PC and has all the other cool stuff. But only what we really really need, ok?
So if you’re a microphone manufacturer and don’t want to make the handheld device, please integrate a bluetooth or whatever-works-interface so someone else can make the counterpart.
What else would be cool (in case you’ve already recorded a presentation and want to clean it up afterwards — audio-wise): A plugin or function in your audio software that lets you define a sound (like the noise print in a noise removal plugin) which then marks all the spots in your recording where the software thinks this noise occurs (with adjustable tolerance and so forth), so you have just to check whether the predicted sounds are the ones you want to get rid of and remove them.
Should any of these solutions already be available, I’d be happy if you dropped me a line. Otherwise I recommend you to run with it!