Any time the audience has to pull your intended audio out of some noise it takes mental effort. I try to reduce noise as much as you can. Sometimes it’s the background hum of the air conditioner, sometimes it’s breath sounds. Noise is any audio that you don’t want your audience to hear.

This makes it easier to totally mute a person if people are talking over each other or if one person if often noisy. Your recording should output one track for each person. You can research best practices elsewhere, but in general my guidelines are: one microphone per person, separate the microphones enough that the voices don’t bleed between them, use a real audio interface and find a physical space that doesn’t produce echoes. Get a recording setup that produces a high quality recording. After editing, your podcast should not waste time or space and should be easy to listen to. Those resources include time, storage space and mental energy. The second goal of editing is to reduce your podcast’s impact on your audience’s resources. After editing, your audience should be able to easily listen to and understand your podcast. The first goal of editing your podcast is to make it more enjoyable to listen to. However the interface often isn’t very intuitive and if I were to start over I would consider learning to use Reaper. I use Audacity because it’s free and I had a bit of experience with it before I started editing. Audio quality is very important to me so I spend a lot of time editing and improving my editing process, but if audio quality is less important to you, save some time by doing less editing. You have to balance your time with the value you’re getting out of it. If you’re getting started with a podcast, I hope this description of my editing process can help guide you.Įditing is a very personal process.

From there I refined my process over time by experimenting. When I started out editing my podcast I learned most of my basics from this video from the Atheist Nomads.

Audacity equalization for podcast