18: How to Edit Your Podcast Using Audacity
Last week, we discussed how to record solo segments and episodes for your podcast.
This week, I'm giving you a very brief crash course in how to use Audacity to edit your recorded audio.
Audacity is a program I've been using since I started my very first podcast over two and half years ago and, to be perfectly honest, I'm still learning new things about it. I say this to help you understand there is absolutely no way I can help you become proficient at Audacity and audio editing in just an 18 minute podcast episode.
However, what I can do is provide you with the basics and tell you exactly where you can go to find all the information and guidance you'll need on this subject.
Take a listen to the episode to learn more!
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Recommended Audacity Shortcuts
Steve Stewart's Audacity Course
Podcasting for Coaches | Episode 17: How to Record Your Podcast's Intro & Outro
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Online Course | How to Start a Podcast (For Your Coaching Business)
Transcript
Welcome to podcasting for coaches. I'm Britany Felix and I'm a podcast launch consultant who specializes in helping coaches and consultants utilize the power of podcasting as a way to build brand awareness and generate new leads for their business. I realize not every new coach or consultant can afford to hire someone to help launch their show. So I created this podcast as a way to guide you through the process of launching and utilizing your very own podcast to help you grow your business and reach a new audience of adoring followers and potential clients. If you're ready to get your voice and podcast out into the world, head over to podcasting for coaches.com to learn more. Welcome to Episode 18 of podcasting for coaches. This week, we are going to go into a very basic, very brief introduction to how to edit and mix things in Audacity. And if you're not sure what audacity is, I want you to go back and take a listen to Episode 17, where we talk about recording your podcast, intro and outro using this specific program. So for the purposes of this episode, we are going to assume you have already listened to that and have added audacity onto your computer. So the interesting thing about this episode is that it is both very simple because of the program we're using. And very complicated because audio editing is not exactly the easiest thing in the world to do right from the get go, especially if you have zero experience. The good news is I can tell you, I had absolutely zero experience when I first started my very first podcast, oh, gosh, I started working on that about two and a half to three years ago at this point. And you know, I became a professional podcast editor. And now here I am telling you how to do it. So it is entirely possible to learn this from scratch if you have the time and the patience to keep at it. And really practice at it. And if you have zero desire to hone your editing skills, you can always hire a podcast editor which of course we will be talking about at some point on this show. In the meantime, though, I think it is a great idea for everyone to listen to their own raw audio, and try to at least learn the basics. That way just in case your editor ever falls through for some reason, maybe they have a family emergency or a health emergency, or they just like out as some of them sometimes do. Unfortunately, I think that goes in every field of working with a freelancer or a contractor. But then you at least know the basics of how to put your show together so that you can step in in those emergency situations. So the thing with audacity and editing in general is that even two and a half years later, after doing this, you know, for myself and professionally, I am still learning new things all the time, I am still discovering new things about this program and other audio editing software, learning tips and tricks to make things a little bit more efficient. So I of course, cannot go through all of that here in this quick little podcast episode. But I want to start off by saying there is a gentleman who I very highly respect in my field, which is of course, podcasting. He actually specifically works with podcasters in the finance space, he does audio editing and post production work for them. But he is a guru, when it comes to audacity, he knows audacity inside and out. And I have learned so many things from him. And he has actually put together a course for how to learn Audacity. And I believe the first 10 videos like the first 60 minutes of it is free. So you can go and access those and get going. And then of course, he has more content beyond that that you can purchase. And at the time of this recording, I believe it's only about $50. And it is so worth the investment if it saves you just a little bit of time on how to do these things. So again, I'm going to go through the very, very basics, but you can learn so much more by going through that course. And I will have a link to that in the show notes on my website. So I got a podcasting for coaches.com. And then click the little podcast tab in the main menu, I would give you a URL, but the web hosting platform that I use, doesn't let me customize those. So we just kind of have to work with what we have. So to start with, you're going to open up the intro and outro that you recorded last week. So you just open the audacity program wherever you saved it to on your computer. And there are a few things that we want to do, we want to check and make sure that the background noise is removed. And you do that by highlighting a section of the audio where you are not talking or doing an audible breath. So basically, at this point, you want to just find a section of the audio, where it is the ambient noise in the room or the white noise. So it will look like there's nothing there. But there actually is unless you are in a recording studio or a completely soundproof room, which most of you are not going to be at that point, you're going to highlight a section of that. That is you know, no more than a second or two, it doesn't really need to be super long. And then you're going to go into effect in the main menu at the top. And then you're going to select noise reduction, then you're going to select Get noise profile. And you're going to close out of that box. And then you're going to highlight the entire track. Then you do the same thing by going back into effect and then noise reduction. And then you click OK. What that does is it then takes that ambient noise and it basically D amplifies it throughout the rest of the recording so it lowers that sound. You might need to do this a couple of times. Be very, very careful because this feature in Audacity is actually very destructive. Which means the more times you do it, the more it lowers the quality of the rest of the audio where you're actually speaking. So use this very subtly, and strike that balance between an ambient noise you're comfortable with, and having the better quality of audio. And so after you've finished finding that balance, what I want you to do at this point, and some editors are probably going to disagree with me. But there is a method to my madness, I want you to actually go to File and then export and export the entire track as a WAV file. When you do this, I want you to run it through a program called level later, I will have a link to this in the show notes as well. Some people prefer to use a program called off phonic, you'll see that recommended a lot in the podcasting communities. Both of these programs, what they do is they level the audio out. So if there was a particular section where you're super loud, because you were laughing, and then another section where you're super quiet, because you were maybe whispering for whatever reason, what this will do is it will actually even out your highs and your lows, so it'll bring your highs down to the middle and your lows up to the middle, and it will find that average volume. So the reason I choose level later is because it does not need an internet connection. And I travel a lot. So that's very important for me, but it's completely free. And it is incredibly easy. It could just sit right on your desktop, you click it open, you drag the WAV file right into the program, and then it process it and spit the file back out for you. And that's it. There's no other settings, it doesn't have any bells and whistles. But to me, it honestly does a better job than a phonic, which only gives you two free hours a month. And then after that you have to pay for it. And there's all kinds of settings you need to make sure are properly adjusted. It's just a lot more complicated of a program. And honestly, I don't think it puts out as good of results. And I can't tell you that I am not the only one that thinks that way. So it's really just a matter of finding which one you'd like and prefer, I recommend starting off with level later since it's the easiest to use. So after you have that file, spit back out from level later, I want you to put it back into Audacity. And again, it's just drag and drop right into the program. And I have found that generally once it goes through level later, it's just a little bit too loud. So we need to adjust the volume down just a tad. How you do this is on the left hand side of the track inside of audacity, you'll see a few buttons where it says mute solo, there's a plus and a minus and element are that plus and minus is where you can adjust the volume for the entire track as a whole. So generally speaking, if you talk in a normal volume prior to running into level later, so you don't talk overly loud or overly quiet, adjusting that slider down to where it says negative four. So on the plus and minus under the mute and solo button, adjusting it down towards negative four generally puts you right in the standard range for podcast, which again, as we talked about last week, is going to be between negative 12 and negative six. And you'll see that in the meter that adjusts as you're speaking or as you're playing audio back. So at this point, you have removed a good chunk of the white noise of the background and you have a level the audio so it's all a consistent volume. And you have adjusted the audio. So it matches industry standards for podcast. Now it's time to listen through the content. And what you're going to do is literally just play the episode and listen through and remove anything that you don't want in there. If you are completely okay with something being totally raw, there are a lot of podcasts that do that, go ahead and put it out. Since yours is a part of your business, I don't really recommend doing that. We don't need it to be super heavily produced, it doesn't need to be this giant NPR production. But we do want it to be a little bit polished so that you don't come off looking like a bumbling fool do your potential clients. So what I typically do is I remove any false starts. So that's where you start saying something and then maybe lose your train of thought or decide you want to say a little bit better and you re say the sentence again. I also remove any arms or arms or any kind of filler phrases or crutch words we sometimes call them, which are things that you're going to notice your guests are especially going to say if they're not really well versed in being a podcast guest or giving interviews or doing speeches, these words just kind of help you get just a split second to figure out what you're going to say next. And it can sometimes make you seem like you don't really know what you're talking about. So we want to remove the majority of those, you're most likely going to find that you can't get every single one. So you'll leave in just enough that it sounds conversational. It doesn't sound robotic, it doesn't sound cold, it still sounds like a real human being talking. So generally my role and what I find is with the ones it's just too difficult to remove leaves about 20% of those things into the recording and then 80% of them are cleaned out, which saves your listener from having to listen through all of those stumbles. So as you're listening to this audio ways that you can get rid of these things are simply just by highlighting the word and then deleting it or silencing it if you want to leave that certain space. Another thing that I check for is the pacing of the episodes. So if I have a long gap where I had to gather my thoughts, I'm going to get rid of that I'm going to shorten that gap up So it sounds more about the length of if I were just taking a breath and starting a new sentence. And in some cases, you may actually want to add a little bit of space, and maybe you're a very fast talker. And you're only leaving like half of a space for her breath in between sentences. And that's going to be exhausting for your listeners. So there, what you would do, you would just highlight a section of silent audio. So highlight a section of audio where you're not talking or breathing, and silence that. And then just copy and paste just like normal Ctrl C, and Ctrl V, if you're on a PC, I'm not sure what the shortcuts are, if they're the same for Mac users or not. And you just copy and paste that audio in between the two sentences that you think needs a little bit more space for. And so you proceed through your entire track this way, making adjustments taking out things that you want, adding in spaces where they're necessary, just kind of tweaking the audio. So it sounds again, just a little bit more polished than it did before. There are of course, some more advanced things you can do, such as making an edit in the middle of a word, changing content around from one section of the audio to the other, all of those things that I am just not going to be able to cover in this episode, because it's already pretty long. But I encourage you to check out Steve's audacity workshop, again, the first 10 videos, 60 minutes worth are absolutely free. And so you're going to get a lot of value just from those. So how you actually mix this together with your music, again, is going to be pretty complicated if your music is not the exact right link for your show. So if you can hire somebody out for this, I do recommend you have someone else put together your intro and outro. But essentially, all you do are just put all of the tracks into audacity and they're going to be layered one on top of each other, you'll see you can just scroll right down and see all of them. And in the section next to all of your you know, record play fast forward buttons, you'll see some buttons there that allow you to do different things, you can either zoom in, you can use it looks like the cursor icon or the eye to help you select a specific point in the audio. Or you can use what looks like the arrow so it's got a left and right pointing arrow, you can use that and that actually helps you move tracks around you can drag and slide tracks. And so then all you really have to do is just line up your tracks so that they flow normally. So it's literally going to be just that you slide your copy over so that it starts wherever you want to to start a new music. And again, you may have to make adjustments to your music, which then gets pretty complicated with what you have to do. But if you are able to do that, you can, you know, shorten the length of the music or add a few sections to it so that it makes it a little bit longer and it hits just where you want. And you can line up those tracks that they start and stop when you want them to. Again, that part is actually fairly complicated. And to be perfectly honest, is one of my least favorite parts about what I do when I edit for people or I help people lunch, because it can get so tedious with adjusting that music and getting the levels just right. So the music's quiet enough in the background that it doesn't overpower the speaker. But yet, we still want to hear the music. So it's not just the one talking. So again, I recommend that you check out Steve's workshop and reach out to either myself or Steve or somebody to help you put together this intro and outro at least. And for the purposes of this tutorial, we'll say that you have that intro and outro created already. And at that point, again, you just use a little left right arrow icon to drag those tracks so that they line up so that when one starts the next one stops, when that one stops, the next one starts. And it's really as simple as that just dragging until they line up properly. And at that point if you have a completed episode put together. So you've lined it up with your intro that's been created. And you have your main portion of the episode and you have your outro and maybe some other elements if you decide to add them in like commercials and transition music, things like that. Once you have all of that mixed together, and it's a complete episode, you just go to File and then export the entire thing the entire program, so make sure nothing is highlighted, and then export it as an mp3. So we want to work with WAV files while we're editing, because it's non destructive. And what that means is that all of the changes you make in each time you save it, it's not going to compress it or really do anything to the file that's going to lower the quality of it. When you do it as an mp3 it does. So we only want to do that right at the very, very end, and then work with a WAV file all up until that point. So I want to mention that I did talk about a few shortcuts in this episode, and silencing things and deleting things. I actually have a list of my most commonly used shortcuts, and you can set those in Audacity. So literally, when I'm editing an episode, my right hand never leaves my mouse, my left hand never leaves my keyboard, and it makes me incredibly efficient at what I do. So I'm actually going to put that list of keyboard shortcuts in the show notes for this episode. So again, you're going to have those keyboard shortcuts, a link to level later, and a link to Steve Stewart's audacity workshop course where you will get the first 10 videos slash 60 minutes for free. So to find those again, go to podcasting for coaches.com and just click on the podcast tab. This is episode number 18. Now before I wrap up today, I want to mention actually it's kind of funny that this is the episode where I was planning on bringing up Steve anyways and talking about his course. Because Steve actually reached out to me after last week's episode he does he listens to all of these. He Even though he's not a coach or consultant in the traditional sense, he does help people, of course, and he coaches them on their podcast. But that's not what he labels himself as. But because he is just so amazing and supportive. He listens to this show, and he sometimes for rides with feedback, which is very much appreciated. And he actually reached out to me after last week's episode and said, Well, you know, you only talked about plugging your headphones into your microphone, and then plugging that in before you open audacity, and I know, you're talking about ATR 2100. But there are a lot more microphones where you don't have to do that. And then there's the whole mixer situation. And yes, there are all of those things, it can get incredibly complicated when it comes to how you actually want to have your setup and the equipment you want to use. You can use mixers, and all kinds of these different things. I mean, there are tons and tons and tons of different microphones. But I can't cover them all in this show here. So I really just go with the products that I recommend, and then how to set those up. And then of course, if you have other ones, you can feel free to reach out. So that's why in last week's episode, I really only focused on the ATR 2100, because that is the microphone I recommend all podcasters start with unless there's just some crazy varying circumstance, which is generally that they can get into a professional recording studio and record their episodes, which most people are not going to be able to do. Or of course, if you are starting off with a podcast editor right off the bat, you're not doing any of this on your own, you're working with someone, they can help you with that setup. If you decide you want to have a mixer, if you decide you want to have a little bit of a different setup besides something super simple, but yet still high quality like the ATR 2100 plugged right into your computer. So Steve, thank you so much for reaching out and asking about that, because there is a chance that someone else was thinking about that as well. So I really appreciate you bringing that to my attention. And if any of you listeners ever have any questions about anything that I'm talking about, feel free to reach out to me I am completely open. And you can reach me at Britany which is b r i t a n y at podcasting for coaches calm, or I do have a contact form on my website. So you can always go there as well. Thank you so much for tuning in today. I know this was an extra long episode. Thank you for bearing with me. And again, I highly encourage you to check out the show notes for this episode to get those audacity keyboard shortcuts, and the instructions on how to set those so you can be much more efficient. And then also to download level later and check out Steve's free audacity course, or at least I should say that first 10 videos in 60 minutes are free. I will see you back here next week where we're going to be talking about something that might seem like it's a little bit out of order, but I'll explain my madness behind it. Have a fantastic week. And that wraps up another episode of podcasting for coaches. If you're wondering if now is the right time to start a podcast for your coaching or consulting business, head on over to podcasting for coaches.com where you can either take a free quiz or schedule a one on one consultation with yours truly, thank you so much for joining me today and I will see you back here for the next episode.