Hello again!
Believe it or not, my wife and I had to deal with similar a few months ago in preparation for this semester. Given you've got a good and proper desktop with multiple audio-in jacks, including a dedicated microphone jack... let me suggest an over-ear omnidirectional microphone with 3.5mm jack for a wireless mic pack, plugged directly into the microphone jack, and run through VB-Cable and NoiseGator to finish cleaning up the audio.
We'd bought this
Weymic initially which worked a treat, but it's no longer available, so the
Pyle PMEM1 might be a good alternative.
VB-CableNoiseGator (will require Java, unfortunately)
How to set it all up.She uses it as the default microphone setup for her audio lectures and for Zoom. Once you get all the tweaking and fiddling done on the NoiseGator end (the defaults from the video may or may not work, aim for really low times and adjust everything else until it works well), the audio sounds spectacular. Really crisp, smooth, dynamic, no pops, low noise floor, no lip smacking and breathing noises with the mic placed on the cheek/chin/side of mouth, and you can barely even hear the cat in the background when he wanders into the room and starts yelling for attention, and all for around $20.
If you need an audio editor, she's using
Ocenaudio, which is apparently an application favorite among voice-over folks. It's a destructive editor (so make a copy of the master first), but it's far faster and easier to get into and start using than
Audacity. This said, Audacity is the 800lb audio editing gorilla and it does have some nice auto-editing options like
truncate silence. This said, she's just using the Windows default Voice Recorder app to record the masters now, and given how clean the recordings are, she only edits now if she has to splice files or cut out a gonk, and it's really streamlined recording production with the software noise gate already in the recording line already for her. From there,
just dump the recording into Powerpoint directly and export from there. With this workflow, she can go from initial recording for a 15 minute mini-lecture to published with captioning under Microsoft Stream in under 90 minutes, with the captioning the most consuming part of the process.