Welcome to podcast answers, the show where I help you start and grow your podcast answering any podcasting questions along with that's right. I'm here to help you create, grow your podcast and answer your questions because that's the name of the show podcast answers. So guys, welcome back. It has been an exciting couple of weeks. There is into news. There
is a couple of things going on. There's a new site called episodes.fm. And the thing that I like about episodes.fm is it is great to be able to show your it's a quick links for your podcast. So what you do is you go into episodes.fm and you type in the name of your podcast and it pulls up and it shows a list of all of the apps that you can listen
in. And then the nice thing about it is it actually sorts by device that you're on. So if you're on an Apple device, it shows device, it shows apps that are Apple devices or Apple devices can use and then it shows them also by popularity and alphabetical. So you get it is by popularity if you're using the OP three prefix. So the nice thing about that is you can easily share that link out to anybody that you want. And then they can see your
episode on their device. And so the cool thing is again, because you can send it to them and they can, they can see the, the apps that their device supports. And so that way you have one link for everybody. It doesn't matter if they're on an Apple device or an Android device. And then one of the cool things about episodes.fm is it also shows your live episodes too. So if you're doing streaming like we are, and we're using the lit tag with a new
podcasting 2.0 features, we are streaming this to lots of different podcast apps. And if you are, if you can listen right there. And so the cool thing is it shows upcoming live episodes as well as when you are alive. It has a little red icon next to the episode that's live and a big button that just has listened live. And so that's really cool because you can go and just show, you can listen right on the website or you can go ahead and click
and listen to in one of the apps too. So for instance, true fans, CurioCaster, Podverse, Cass Attic, Fountain and podcast guru, I'll allow you to listen live in the live, you know, listen to the live audio episode. So we again, we are streaming this live and you can hear that in one of those apps or also in the episodes.fm website. And so that's really, really cool because again, you can allow any of your listeners to just really,
really easily listen to your live show. So it's really exciting because again, you can you can pass it along to anybody. You can use that new QR code and say, Hey, listen to our podcast, listen to our podcast and it will then pull up the apps that their device is able to use. And then also if you again, if you were using the OP three stats prefix in your podcast, like we are for this podcast, it also then sorts those apps by popularity.
So if you're, let's say most of your listeners, there's listen on CurioCaster, then it's going to short that sort that at the top of the list. Whereas, you know, if you only have a small amount of people listening in an Apple podcast, it's going to put that lower in the list. So what are we talking about today? Besides episodes FM, we are going to be talking about editing. So there's lots of different ways to think about editing your podcast. And I
do a couple of different actual ways for different podcasts that I edit. So for this episode, for this podcast and for my other podcasts that I record that I'm the host on, I do really no editing. What I do is I just touch up the files a little bit. So I record with a mixer. And so that's why my volume is correct. So for instance, if I'm playing audio files in here and I have a real low, like I do now, it's low and then I bring it up. Recording.
It's loud. And so all of my volumes are relatively the way that I want them as when they're done. So for me, I'm thinking of it more of like a radio broadcasting. I'm doing live to tape. I'm not really doing any editing. And that works really well for me, for single episodes, for single host podcasts, because you, you know how you talk and you can control how
you talk. It works really well for other podcasts too that have co-hosts. So as long as you have a good flow and you guys are both really good at podcasting, then it's going to allow you to, to be able to do that well. And, and realistically, it's going to, you know, because you, you don't really need to do a whole lot of editing if there's not a lot of dead space in the, the podcast or things like that. So for me, what I do is I record with my mixer.
So my volume is correct, like I said, and then I also, when I'm done with it, I normalize the loudness to negative 16 LUFS as I export that from my roadcaster. And you can do that also in your audio editing app. But for me, I'm using a roadcaster. So I normalize that. So any, any audio that I have is going to be normalized. So it's going to sound essentially at the same loudness as all the other tracks. Then I also compress to, if your mixer does
not do compressing, I have a compressor in it. And what that's going to do is it's essentially when you have audio recording, you're going to have peaks and you're going to have valleys and they're going to be highs and lows and highs and lows. And essentially, if you don't do any compressing, your, your listener is going to basically have to ride the volume because there may be things that are going to be really, really soft and they need to
bring them up so that they can hear them. And then there's going to be things that are really, really loud that they're going to need to turn down. That way it doesn't blow their eardrums out as well as their speakers. And so if you compress it, essentially what it does is it just as your audio gets up to a certain level, it starts to level that out. It takes it down by a ratio and usually that's like a three to one ratio or something like
that. And, and so that way you can kind of keep those things more of an even pace if you're looking at the, the waveform. And then you can bring your volume up to the correct level and it all sounds really good because it's going to be compressed and you're going to do that. So I, you know, compress it. And then I, I also recorded in multi-track and even though I don't do a lot of editing and I wouldn't need to do multi-track cause for
me really what I'm doing is I'm just trimming the ends. So when I hit record, I may take a second or two before I actually get the episode going. And so what I do is then I take those ends and trim it off. So it starts almost immediately. I'll leave a little bit of a blank spot in there just in case another episode of a podcast was ending. You want to have a little bit of a blank spot in there. So for me, I really don't do editing. I hit
stop and I export it, bring it in, do those a few things to it. Like I said, and then I export it out into a MP3 file. I tag it and upload it to my, my host. And then, you know, really quickly it's ready to go for your listening pleasure. Now the, so again, that's one style of editing. Another style of editing is light editing. And what I'm
saying by that is you're going to pull the major blank spots. So if an episode has, and this happens a lot with, let's say guests, you may have guests that are not super ready because they may not know what questions you're going to be asking. And so they may take a little bit to think about that. There may be spaces. And so there may be times that it's five, 10 seconds of space. Well, they think of their response and it doesn't really flow
real well for a podcast episode. So what I like to do is I like to pull most of my major spaces out. And so that way things are more coherent when you ask a question and then someone answers it. I leave a little bit of a space for someone's response between speakers. And then I also leave it between sentences. And the reason for that is because you don't want me, the host to ask a question like, so how did you feel when this happened? And
then immediately the person to answer that. So in other words, that would sound like, how did you feel when the car crash happened? Well, here's what it did. It hurt me a lot. You know, and it doesn't sound natural when you're pulling the, when you're pulling the spaces out so much that there is not any, any space left in that for, for, it doesn't sound natural. And so I leave a second or so between spaces. And so that way between,
between speakers. And so that way they, that way they don't sound unnatural. And so that's, that's what I do. And then again, at the end of sentences, I leave a little bit of space to that way it's not just one big giant run on thing. So hopefully that makes sense. Now I pull out some of the filler words if I can. So if there is a um, or an ah, or a, you know,
or a like, where I can get in there with my razor of an editor and edit that, I do. But if it's in the middle of a sentence where you're saying something like this um, and you go on to this and um, you say this thing like that, it's really hard to cut those out and sound natural. You can, you can try, but a lot of times that's going to be, if, if their ums are running into their words, it's going to be, it's going to have trouble pulling,
you're going to have trouble and it won't sound natural. So I would say not all of them need to be gone. Just some of them to make it sound a little bit cleaner and a little bit more like your guest knows what they're talking about and doesn't sound like they're just pulling a lot of stuff out of the air. But again, if they're not podcast ready, they're probably going to have more of those filler words because they're not used to doing podcast
and things like that. The another thing that I would do is make sure your volume of your music is appropriate. So for me, again, I, like I said, I record in multitrack, meaning that I have one recording file for every thing that I'm doing. And so I have a recording file for my mic. I have a recording file for my music. I have a recording file for my guests. This allows me to take and adjust those if I need to. So for instance, I started
my music way too loud as my recording. I could go in and turn that down because I have the ability to do that as well as it makes editing a little bit easier to do because you have the ability to take and let's say your guest coughed or something and what you were talking, you could mute their track while you were, while you were talking and then you would be able to not hear them cough or interrupt the edit like that. So it gets a cleaner,
a cleaner recording in the long run. Then I would also say too is the next kind of editing is full editing. And this is really editing for content. And while I, this is the longest type of thing. This is, you know, I've had podcast interviews where the guests just really went off the rails and they were talking about some things that didn't make sense. And they were talking about things that didn't, that weren't really what we wanted to focus on
in the podcast episode. And so this is where you, you're editing your content, not just your spaces and kind of doing the light editing. And so this, what I would suggest in this is listen to your full recording first. So you kind of know where the flow is going. I got again, this may be different if you were the one and you were the host and you were there while it was recording, but for me, when I was editing this, I was not the
host of the podcast. And so I didn't know what the episodes sounded like. So for me, I listened to the full recording first. And so I got an idea of where the conversation went. I also generated a transcript of the audio. And so I could see what the whole flow was like a Word document. And you can use something like Mac whisper or otter.ai or there's an unlimited amount of websites and places and software that you can upload your
audio to that will generate a transcript for you so that you can see this. And so what you can do is then take and mark up your transcript and things you want to keep and get rid of. And think of it kind of like, like, you know, your teacher did back in the day when you were in high school or college, your teacher took your paper, marked it up, said, get rid of this, you know, marked it full of red. You can do that with your podcast audio.
If you've generated a transcript, you can take that and say, no, I don't want this section. I want to delete this out of this because it doesn't make sense. You can draw arrows and say, you know, move this content up here. So you got more of a show flow of how you want to actually edit your podcast. And that will allow you to get to go back and actually cleanly kind of get an idea in your head of how you want to move things around if you,
especially if you need to move things around. This gets really tough to do that and just an audio to try and remember where things are at. And so that's why I would say go ahead and, and, and mark it up. So that way, you know what your content is going to look like in the end. And then you're going to go back and start editing your content for, for, you know, consistency and things like that. So you may move things around and things like
that. But again, I would say generate your transcript. That's going to be a whole lot easier when you're editing for content, because you can take that and, and get a high level picture of what your actual content looks like. And then lastly, just kind of some general things to think about when you're editing in general is get used to the shortcuts in the tool that you use. So for me, I'm using Adobe audition to edit podcasts and I, there's
a lot of different shortcuts in there. So V is just kind of the general select R is going to razor and T is going to time select. And so for me, I know these things really easy as I'm listening. I can switch back and forth between the tools just by clicking those
shortcuts on the keyboard. So most of the time I'm actually listening in razor mode, because what I'm doing is I'm listening to the audio and then I, I click, if there's a place I'm going to click a spot out, I click, I stop it, I click, you know, at the end of the word, I move up to the next place that I want to, to actually cut and I, I razor
that. And then I just hit command as I select the audio files and then I shift delete, which then, uh, ripple deletes everything and moves everything to the right of that to the left as it deletes it. And then, you know, sometimes I need to go into time select mode. And so let's say I want to mute somebody because my guest is coughing around while I'm talking. I use the time select mode and I select all of their coughing. And then what I've done
is I've actually mapped a shortcut. So the cool thing about Adobe audition is you can map shortcuts for most of the commands in Adobe edition. So I've mapped a shortcut. It's just option S for silence. And what that does is that takes the audio and it lowers the volume in that section. So instead of cutting it out, because you don't want to cut it. I mean, you, you could, you could cut that out and delete the actual audio.
But for me, usually what I do is I just go ahead and silence that with the volume level. And then I hit control or, you know, just G to, to clear that time selection and continue doing it. So the last thing too that I would say as far as editing goes is, is listen back to your final product and make sure that it sounds good. If you do too much editing and you try to cut out things, sometimes that doesn't sound natural. You want to your podcast
to sound natural. When people are listening to it, they don't want to know that it's been edited highly. They don't want to know that it's been edited. They want to see it as a conversation. So if you cut it out too much and you cut out too much of the silence and you make the words run into each other, it's not going to sound natural. So you're going to want to go ahead and listen back to your product to make sure that it sounds good before
that you put it out to the world for everybody to listen to. Now that's, that's what I have to say. That's how I edit all of the shows that I edit. You know, I do a combination between all three of those. I go from no editing really at all for my podcast edits, podcasts that I host and then for ones that I'm editing for other people, I do light editing for the,
for the things like just getting spaces. And then sometimes I have to do the full editing for content just because we want it to say something different because the podcast interview went way off the rails. So guys, this podcast actually is value for value. What that means is we don't have sponsors for this podcast. We don't have corporate sponsors. We don't have anybody advertisements that come in and interrupt your listening to this podcast.
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In closing guys, go ahead and get out there, create your podcast. If you need any help editing or have any questions about podcasting, you can contact me at podcastanswers.com/contact. And I would love to answer your question. I would love to help you out editing your podcast because it's a lot of fun. I love doing podcasting and I love helping people get out there and podcasts also. So guys with that, go out, have a great week and get out there and keep podcasting. [Music] (upbeat music)