Today on five minute Monday I'll explain how I use Auphonic to polish my audio files. Welcome to five minute Monday where we bring you the best tips and strategies for building your podcast in five minutes or less. So if you're new here, consider subscribing. Now I am always looking for solutions and tools that make my job easier and when I discover a tool that can save me time, effort, or energy anywhere in my podcasting process, I get really excited.
And so I want to share with you one of my favorite tools. It's an audio processing software called Auphonic. No auto phonic does is it polishes your audio to make it sound like it was professionally edited and you can start for free. You can process up to two hours every single month for free or unlock nine hours for just $11 a month. And that's what I use for my personal podcast.
We use it on all the bus route podcasts and Alfonso is just fantastic because when you upload your podcast episode to Auphonic, there are a bunch of different things that you can do in like a post-processing way to polish off your audio file and make it sound more professional. So I want to explain how I use Auphonic, what settings I use to polish off my audio. So you have a good starting place.
So once you log into Auphonic and you start new production, you basically upload the audio file that you want. I'll find it to work on. And then there are a bunch of different fields that you can fill out, but there's only a couple that I actually care about. The first one is output file. All right, I like to output all of my episodes as wave dot wav files. I dislike it more than MP3 because it's a higher definition , uh , less compressed audio file.
And so I am able to save a lot of the quality of my episode versus a compressed MP3 . And then I also make sure that I output the episode as a mono file and not a stereo file. But where Auphonic really starts to come to work for you is when you get down to the audio algorithms. The first one is at the adaptive leveler . So what this does is it smooths out the volume differences between the different sources that you have in your podcast episode to achieve a balanced overall loudness, right?
So what this would look like is you are talking to your microphone, you're conducting an online interview with somebody on the other side of the country and their microphone or whatever they're using has a totally different setting and you bring it all together and it's not exactly the same. And then on top of that, maybe you got some some theme music in the background of your intro and you have all these different pieces, right?
So the be adaptive level or make sure that all of those different pieces play well together to make it sound like they're one consistent volume. The other thing that I like to use, Auphonic for is loudness normalization. So you can think about this is like setting the objective volume for your podcast episode. You know that no matter what device, somebody who's listening to your podcast on that, the volume is going to be consistent from episode to episode.
And you also want it to be in line with the podcasting standard. So when someone jumps to your episode, they don't have to turn the volume way up to hear you or turn it way down to avoid getting their eardrums blasted out. Right? So I use loudness mobilization to set that loudness level and I set all of my episodes to minus 19 LUFS, which is a the podcast standard for mono files. And if you are doing a stereo podcast, then you want to set yours to minus 16 LUFS.
And then the last thing that I use on all my episodes is filtering. And this is just applying a high pass filter that removes unnecessary and disturbing low frequencies in the audio. So it won't affect the conversation and won't affect any of the, the actual talking in the podcast reading the music. But it gets rid of some of the low frequencies that it can actually give you headaches if you listen to them, but they're not necessarily something that you notice. All right? So really important.
Small detail that makes a big difference. And then another audio algorithm that a phonic has that I don't necessarily use but I knew some people to do, is there noise reduction? And so Auphonic will identify background noise and hums and systematically reduce or remove them, which is pretty cool. So with how phonic you can instantly improve the quality and consistency of your podcast audio with just a few clicks.
And it really is the closest thing to hacking your podcast that I've ever come across. And if you're curious with learning more about Auphonic and if you want to use it for your podcast, I put a link in the show notes for you to click on over and check it out. Need some help with your podcast. The Buzzsprout podcast community on Facebook is a great place to find answers and get the help you need to make your podcast as excellent as possible.
So if you're not a member yet, just click on the link in the show notes and asked to join. That's it for today. Thanks for listening and I'll talk to you soon.