Speaker 1: In this video, I'll take you through basic podcast editing so you can clean up the sound and get it ready to publish right away. Before we get started, it's important to remember that it's easier to prevent bad audio than it is to fix it. So let's get started with four tips to capture good audio. Monitor your audio levels while you're recording. Most recording softwares will allow you to see audio levels during the recording process indicated by colors. Red for when you're getting too loud and yellow and green otherwise. You wanna try to stick in the yellow green range or minus 10 to minus 12 dB. Record in a small quiet room. This will help with any background noise and if the room is more cluttered and if you have carpet, that's really going to help with any echo in the room. Wear headphones to prevent audio bleed. This is when one mic picks up the output of another mic. When you're recording, don't stop for any mistakes, just laugh it off and keep going. This will actually give an authenticity to your podcast that will really help your listeners connect with you. Have separate tracks to edit for everybody's mic in the recording. This is going to make it easier to take out parts and to edit people's voices more seamlessly. This video will focus on if you do have separate tracks, but you can definitely still follow along to the video and take away some of the tips if you only have one audio file for your final podcast recording. Now before you get into editing, there are a few things that you should gather ahead of time. You're going to want the downloaded file or files of your recording and you're also going to want a podcast intro and outro. This is something that you record ahead of time so that it's consistent across all of your episodes. It usually goes along to music and sound effects and it sets the tone of your brand. You're going to need an editing software. Some free versions are Audacity and GarageBand and if you have a bit of a budget, you can go with Adobe Audition or Pro Tools. In this video, we'll focus on Audacity because it's free to download and available for both Mac and Windows. It's basic and simple and will give you everything you need as a beginner editor. But all of these tips can be transferred over to whatever recording software you're using, it's just a matter of figuring out the navigation differences. Okay, so once you've downloaded your software, open it up. Now the first thing we're going to do is edit the sound of your audio file. So you want to import your audio files by going to File, Import Audio and select the files that you want to import. Now most softwares will do this automatically but you want to make sure that both of your audio files are on separate tracks within the recording platform. You also want to make sure they're synchronized by aligning the beginning of both of the audio tracks to the start of the track in the recording software. Again, most programs will do this automatically. Next, you're going to normalize your audio levels. So this is when you match the volume of all of the audio tracks so that you don't have one really loud mic and one really quiet mic. So to do this, you want to make sure that the selection tool is selected and then you're going to click from the bottom right-hand corner to the top left-hand corner of your tracks, making sure that everything is selected in between. Head up to Effect, Normalize and you want to make sure that this first box here is checked and the second box Normalize Peak Amplitude to minus one dB. You want this to be set to minus one. This is going to make sure that your audio isn't distorted and it sounds good in the final exported file. Once you've done that, you want to cut off the silent parts at either end of the recording and also if you have any talking that you did before the bulk of your episode recording, you'll want to cut that out as well. So head over to the Zoom button, which is the magnifying glass with a plus button on it. And you can see here, I don't have much silence but I do have some talking. So I want to start at the beginning of my episode here. Let's get into it then. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the selection tool, I'm going to click on one track and drag across both tracks and press Delete. Now my episode starts. Get into it then. So how did you feel? And you can do the same at the end. Now one thing that I want to mention, if you do have more than one track, you want to make sure to select the same selection from both parts of the track before you press Delete in order to not mess up any synchronization in the episode. Okay, so at this point, you just have to add in your intro and your outro and your episode is ready to publish. But just in case you did want to edit out any mistakes or long pauses, I'll show you how to do that. You're going to do it the same way you deleted the beginning and the end of the episode. You're just going to click on the section that you'd like to delete and make sure you click and drag on both tracks and press the Delete button on your keyboard and it will be deleted. Now you want to add in your intro and your outro. So I'm going to zoom out here so I can see everything on my timeline. And I'm going to add in my intro and outro by going to File, Import, Audio, Intro and Outro. Now I just want to align everything properly. So I'm going to click this box here and drag it up so that my intro comes before the bulk of my episode and my outro. Now you want to align them chronologically. So it goes podcast intro, episode, outro. Now what we're going to do is highlight all of the tracks from the mic so that you're selecting both tracks and you want to hover over the top of one of the tracks until you see the hand icon come up and that means that you can click and drag it. And you want to align the beginning of your podcast episode with the end of your intro. And now you're going to do the same thing with your podcast outro. Align it to the end of your podcast episode. At any point you can press the space bar to play back your episode so you can make sure everything is aligned properly. So once you have everything aligned properly, you want to export this because your episode is ready to publish. So we are going to go to File, Export and then you can choose if you want to export it as a WAV or an MP3. I prefer WAV. Make sure that you're saving it to wherever your content is organized and name your file something that you'll be able to find easily. Here you can add any metadata that you want to add. I don't worry about that. And now your audio will be exported as a WAV. And that's how you edit with Audacity. The basic editing takeaways are to normalize your audio levels, to trim the beginning and the end of the main bulk of your episode and to add in your intro and your outro. Now I'll give you a brief overview of how you can do all of this with Riverside. Head over to Riverside FM. Sign up for a free trial and then you're going to create a new studio. In the studio you can add in live intros, outros, music and sound effects using our media board. You can preview the sounds but if you want them live in your show, you want to make sure that you toggle the live button. Powered by Riverside FM. Now when you're done recording, you want to make sure to stay on the page until the upload is complete. Click view recordings. And you'll see here that you have separate tracks for everything, including any sounds that you used during the recording. Now you can download these tracks and follow all the steps that I mentioned previously or you can use the editor which will do everything that you need to do. Now when you first go into the editor, you'll realize that it's already merged all of the tracks together. In this video we're just focusing on audio so click tracks and select audio only. You can trim the audio on the timeline in case you talked a bit before or after the intro and the outro. And when you're ready, click export. You can choose if you want to download in WAV or MP3 and here you can have Riverside normalize the audio levels for you and you can also remove background noise. So if you have a fan running in the background or any traffic, this is a great tool to use. Now your episode will process and it will be ready for you to download and publish right away. We hope this video has helped you edit your podcast. Make sure to subscribe to our channel for more tips and tricks. If you want to know more about the different functionalities of the editor tool and how to edit with video, you're going to want to watch this video next where I'll walk you through it.