AG19: Do You Have The Audacity To Edit Your Podcast?

Download Episode 19

This week Chris and Russ talk about using Audacity to edit your podcast. Audacity is a full featured audio recording and editing application that is available for Mac, Windows and Linux. You can use Audacity to delete the coughs, ringing phones, crying babies or anything else that detracts from your podcast. If you are going to use Audacity to edit, you probably also want to record with it in the first place.

Remember that silence is your friend. Leave some silence at the beginning of your podcast: It will help if you want to eliminate noise later. In addition, you'll want to leave some silence after a mistake, simply because when you are editing it is easy to spot those stretches of dead air, which means that it will be easy to find the mistakes.

Speaking of editing, remember: Never ever edit the one and only copy of your recording! Keep that original recording in case you need to go back to it. We have screwed up enough editing sessions to know how important this is.

To cut out a that cough or ringing phone, you simply find the part of the recording that you want to cut, select the graphic that corresponds to the unwanted sound and hit the DELETE key. Always listen to a few seconds before and after your edit to make sure that it sounds OK. Audacity supports unlimited undo, so if you mess it up just undo your change.

If you seed to change the loudness of part of your podcast, select that part of the graphic and hit the effect/amplify menu item. You can use the slider on the resulting dialog to make that part of your recording louder or softer. But don't over-do it!

Using Audacity to remove noise is a two step process: First you select some silence (remember the silence that you left at the beginning of your podcast?) and select the effects/Noise Removal. When the dialog comes up, you hit the "Get Noise Profile". Now Audacity knows what the noise sounds like. Now you go back, and select the part of the podcast (maybe all of it) that you want to clean up and select the effects/Noise Removal menu item a second time. This time around, select the OK button.

Exporting your podcast to MP3 is pretty easy: Go to File/Export, enter any tags and make sure you ask for an MP3 file.

Finally, our bonus suggestion: Start with the best quality recording that you possibly can.

Happy Podcasting!

Russ & Chris