Edit Podcast Audio Naturally in Riverside (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Reporting good audio is only half the process. You also need to know how to edit audio so every voice sounds clear, balanced, and ready to publish. In Riverside, Magic Audio can handle most of the cleanup with a single click. But if you want more control, you can take it further with EQ and adjust the sound yourself. So I'm going to take you through the exact process I would use to make a recent podcast episode I just recorded sound better, from listening to the original audio to enhancing it, fine-tuning it, and finishing the video. Now before we go into editing the audio, I want to make it very clear that capturing good audio in the first place is very important. Good audio should be clear, easy to understand, and consistent enough that your audience doesn't have to think about it. You don't want to completely change someone's voice. You want to remove distractions and make the recording easier to listen to. So before anything, good audio starts with the recording. Making sure that you're recording with a solid microphone and recorder, keep the microphone close to your mouth, and record in a quiet space with minimal echo. Now Magic Audio can improve a recording, but it can't completely recover audio that was clipped, heavily distorted, or recorded from across the room. So make sure to prioritize a clean audio recording in the first place, and that will make the editing process much, much better. It will also make the end result so much easier to get to. Now one other important thing to mention is that the audio that you're listening to while you're mixing can be affected by the headphones or speakers that you're listening from. I don't know if you've ever seen a behind-the-scenes look at like a recording studio space where they're like mixing professional pop songs, but in that booth they'll have like eight or more different speakers placed all over the place and maybe different headphones, and in some cases that's so they can listen to a song's mix from different speakers to see if it's consistent. Now I'm not saying you need to go out and buy a bunch of pairs of speakers, but I will say that a solid pair of headphones or speakers can make a big difference when you're mixing audio. I personally use a pair of Beyerdynamic DT 1990 Pro headphones and a set of M-Audio BX5 studio monitors. For most people that's pretty overkill, a pair of AirPods or a pair of over-the-ear headphones will do just fine and will help you listen to the audio much closer than listening to like your laptop speaker. So while we open the editor, let's put on a pair of headphones. All right, so now that we're in the Riverside editor, there's a couple things that we want to pay attention to in order to prep. First of all, this has two tracks. This is a recording from a recent podcast episode. My buddy and I just started this podcast, so it's very fresh. So this is just a little segment that I picked out. So let's listen to what it sounds like right off the bat.

[00:02:28] Speaker 2: Weird and very interesting. That might be my favorite part, honestly. Like coming from marketing, that's probably my favorite part of this entire theory.

[00:02:37] Speaker 1: So honestly, the audio doesn't sound that bad off the bat. The first thing I noticed that my co-host microphone has a little bit of noise crackle happening in the background, and my microphone sounds a little distant. We're going to be able to fix all of that, but we're using some pretty nice microphones. My buddy has a nice microphone from Amazon, and I have a very expensive filmmaking microphone. In fact, it's the same one you're listening to right now. It's the Sennheiser MKH416, but we did our best to make sure that we captured the best quality audio possible, and we did record directly into Riverside. So the first thing we're going to do to make this audio sound a little bit better is apply magic audio. To do that, we're going to go up to AI tools, and we're going to go to magic audio. If we just toggle this right here, this will automatically apply magic audio to both tracks. You can also adjust how intense you want the magic audio to be with the sliders right here. So if you want to go by percentage, or if you think maybe mine doesn't need as much magic audio, but maybe my co-host Ryan needs a little bit more. So let's start with 100 and see what that sounds like. They'll already think it's ridiculous or whatever, or it could be that it actually isn't real. I do think it's a little heavy on my voice, so I'm actually going to pull this back and go to 75%. They're just like, yeah, good marketing, good promotion. Sure. But also what international airport needs to market?

[00:03:54] Speaker 2: Let's see what he sounds like. Totally left field. I'm honestly thinking of doing one of the Bigfoot theories.

[00:04:04] Speaker 1: So his microphone sounds significantly better. A lot of that crackle and noise that was in the background is basically completely gone. Things are sounding a little punchy though. It sounds a little bass heavy. I don't think that's a bad thing, but I think that we can adjust things just a little bit. I also think that mine can be taken down just a little bit more. So I'm going to go 65 and I'm going to put his at like 89. It actually isn't real and they're just like, yeah, good marketing, good promotion. That sounds a lot better on my end. So this is sounding really good just with magic audio applied and that's how awesome magic audio is. It's literally just a one click setup. So for comparison's sake, I'm just going to toggle magic audio off when you hear it sounds like before.

[00:04:45] Speaker 2: Putting up murals that are really weird and very interesting.

[00:04:49] Speaker 1: That might be my favorite part, honestly.

[00:04:52] Speaker 2: Wow. And now let's play with magic audio applied. Putting up murals that are really weird and very interesting.

[00:04:59] Speaker 1: That might be my favorite part, honestly, like coming from marketing. Now I'm kind of noticing that my base could be a little bit higher, so I'm going to go back up to 85 for my putting up murals that are really weird and very interesting. That might be my favorite part, honestly, like now magic audio gives us a great foundation and gets us so much closer to a final result. And for many recordings, this could be all you need. But every voice on a microphone sounds a little bit different. So if you want some more control over the final, this is where I'm going to pull up the EQ. So to access the EQ, we go to tracks and then select the track that you want to adjust. And EQ is right here. So if we toggle this on, there's already a bunch of different presets that you can check out. So there's crisp and clear voice boost, muffle free, smooth vocals, bass boost.

[00:05:45] Speaker 2: There's all these different presets that you can check out.

[00:05:48] Speaker 1: And these are a really good starting point. So what I like to do is toggle on one of them, crisp and clear. And this is on Brian's track. So let's find a section where we can just get his voice playing back like right here.

[00:05:59] Speaker 2: See, next week should be good. I have I have a couple.

[00:06:03] Speaker 1: The thing I'm noticing the most is that his base is just a little too punchy for my liking. So we can actually pull up a graph to help us specifically adjust sections of the audio. So if we toggle these little slider dots here, we now have a little waveform graph where we can adjust the actual specific hertz of parts of his vocals. Now, one thing to keep in mind is that male vocals typically live anywhere from a thousand to two thousand kilohertz, depending on how low or high the voice is. And then female vocals are anywhere from like two thousand to three thousand. So you can kind of pay attention to those sections by moving these sliders up and down to increase or decrease the decibel, the decibel amount of that section of the audio. So with this preset that we have here, crisp and clear, it's boosting the highs of the vocal section. So it's boosting this like two to five thousand range all the way to twenty thousand kilohertz. And then it's dropping this twenty thousand kilohertz, which is pretty much nothing like not a lot of audio or vocals can live in this range. So if we want the base tone of his voice to kind of be decreased a little bit, we can toggle on a new slider, drag it over here, and we can just bring this down. This is about where like lower tones tend to live. So we can bring that down right there and we can actually use the mouse wheel. I don't know if you can see this. If we use the mouse wheel, we can get it to kind of like spread up and down so we can show, you know, how much of that range we want to affect.

[00:07:34] Speaker 2: So now if we play hard next week, not a lot. Let's see. Next week should be good. I have I have a couple.

[00:07:41] Speaker 1: So now we can hear that his base tone is a little bit lower. It's getting closer to where I want it. The highs are maybe a little too crispy. So I'm actually going to bring these down maybe to like zero. Play this back.

[00:07:52] Speaker 2: And I have I have a couple a couple of good ideas.

[00:07:56] Speaker 1: That's a really, really good start. I'm liking that a lot. When we're talking audio, we're talking about low frequencies, mid tone and high tone. And that range is kind of split into this graph a little bit. This is like mid tone area. This is high tones and this is low. Right. And so we're adjusting those sections in order to get the sound that we want. And to be honest, a lot of this is subjective. So it's really just going to be to your preference and your liking. One of my favorite things to do with the EQ is to add another dot here. I'm just going to like find this little mid range section and I'm going to lift this way up and I make it really narrow with that scroll wheel again. I'm going to change the width. So I'm going to increase the gain. I'm around seven hundred and sixty hertz. So let's let's hang out about right here and then I'm going to play it and it's going to sound really hard. Right.

[00:08:46] Speaker 2: Let's see. Next week should be good. I have I have a couple a couple good ideas, but I might do the Stargate program.

[00:08:54] Speaker 1: So I'm kind of finding sections where maybe his voice is popping a little too harsh and I want to bring that down. So that's why I start with this narrow so I can narrow down exactly what I want to bring down, where sections maybe like of his vocals are a little too harsh. And then I'm just going to drag that down. So like right there.

[00:09:13] Speaker 2: Let's see. Next week should be good. I have I have a couple a couple good ideas.

[00:09:18] Speaker 1: We got rid of a little bit of that mid range mud that was happening. So then his mid range is a little bit clearer. And honestly, I don't know if there's much more I'd want to do to his voice is about as much as I would do. So I'm going to click out of his. We're going to go to my track. So same thing. You just open tracks, click on the person you want to edit and turn on EQ. And then in this case, we're just going to directly open the waveform. We're going to start with a fresh waveform track here. So let's play back. So we can only come up with so many. So if there's some that we don't talk about or you think would be really interesting for us to learn about. So I know my voice really well. I listen to it all the time. So I know that the first thing I want to do is take this four here and I'm going to boost my high tones just a little bit somewhere around here. And I'm going to take the five and I'm going to do a little shelf right here, a little high cut filter. And I'm not going to do it by much, just a couple of decibels. Bring that down. And then in this section, we did this with Ryan's voice. We're just going to boost this little section where I know there might be some high tone mud. So if there's some that we don't talk about or you think would be really interesting for us to learn about, hey, hit us up in the comments or somewhere around there. I'm going to drag that down right there. Any theories you want us to learn about or dive into? Obviously, you know, we can only come up with so many. So if there's some that we don't talk about or you think would be really interesting for us.

[00:10:38] Speaker 2: I'm also going to boost the low tone bass section just a little bit, like five decibels up with so many.

[00:10:45] Speaker 1: So if there's some that we don't talk about or you think would be really interesting for us to learn about. And that sounds pretty good. If I turn this off, obviously, you know, we can only come up with so many. It sounds super good still with just magic audio applied, but with the EQ applied, learn about or dive into. Obviously, you know, we can only come up with so many. So if there's some that we don't talk about or you think would be really interesting for us to learn about, I think that sounds really good. So I'm going to stop there. But yeah, you see, you can adjust the EQ. You can get very specific with your audio so that, you know, you can clean up certain areas. If a microphone is picking up the high tones a little too much, you can bring those down, picking up the bass tones a little too much. You can bring those down or you can boost either one if that's what you need. Now, the easiest mistake to make when editing audio is assuming that more processing automatically means better audio. In most cases, that couldn't be further from the truth. Kind of like baking a cake. If you cook it for too long, you'll burn it. Bake it not long enough and it becomes a gooey mess. The timing has to be just right for the best results. The same principle applies here, too. Keep comparing your changes to the original. If the voice starts sounding thin or harsh or unnatural, you've probably gone too far.

[00:11:56] Speaker 2: You want to make the recording clearer and more enjoyable to listen to.

[00:12:00] Speaker 1: Now, once the audio sounds good, I can go ahead and finish the rest of the video without leaving Riverside. Riverside lets me edit the recording through its transcript. So removing a mistake or cutting an unwanted section is as simple as deleting text. I can also adjust the speaker layout, add captions, include images or video and make the final edit match the platform where it will be published. That means I can take the same recording from raw audio and video to a finished piece of content inside the editor. And that's how I would edit audio in Riverside. Literally step by step, this is my exact process. So hopefully you guys were able to find some insight on it. If you want to try Riverside for yourself, you can check out the link in the description to get started. And if you want more videos and insights on how to use Riverside to improve your video content, you can check out these videos up here. Don't forget to like and subscribe. And if you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments. I'll be happy to answer them personally. Thank you so much for watching and we can't wait to see what you create.