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Start hereWhat is a podcast?A plain-English definition: episodes, the RSS feed, subscriptions and how a podcast differs from a video or a radio show.Start hereA short history of podcastingFrom RSS enclosures in 2000 to iTunes support in 2005, the long quiet years, Serial and the video-podcast era.Start hereSeven reasons to create your own podcastWhy people start shows: expertise, community, a voice, teaching, business, creative practice and long-lived archives.PlanHow to podcast: the four PsThe whole process in four stages: plan, produce, publish and promote. Start here if you want the map before the steps.

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Audacity lessons

GUIDE 11 OF 17

Audacity lesson 3: trim and edit your recording

Cut mistakes, tighten pauses, add intro music and fade it under your voice without damaging the original recording.

Updated

Editing is where a conversation becomes an episode. The goal isn’t perfection: it’s removing anything that wastes the listener’s time while keeping the natural rhythm of speech.

Cut a mistake

  1. Find the mistake (the labels you dropped while recording help; see lesson 2).
  2. Zoom in until you can see the gaps between words.
  3. With the Selection tool, drag from the start of the bad take to the start of the good one. Start and end your selection in a pause, not mid-word.
  4. Press Space to preview the selection, then Delete. Play across the cut to check it sounds natural.

Trim the start and the end

Select everything before the first word (keep about half a second) and delete it. Do the same after the last word. Keep a copy of the five seconds of silence you recorded at the start, though: you’ll need it for noise reduction in lesson 4, so do that step before trimming, or copy the silence to a new track first.

Tighten long pauses

Shorten pauses longer than a second or two by selecting the middle of the gap and deleting it. Don’t remove every breath and “um”: speech with no pauses sounds robotic and tiring. Audacity’s Truncate Silence effect can shorten all long pauses at once; use it gently and listen afterwards.

Add intro and outro music

  1. Use File > Import > Audio to bring in your music file. It appears as a new track.
  2. Drag the music clip by its top bar to where it should start.
  3. To make room for an intro, select from the start of the voice track to where the voice should begin, and use Edit > Insert > Silence (or drag the voice clip to the right).
  4. Select the last few seconds of the music and apply Effect > Fading > Fade Out.

Fade music under speech (ducking)

To keep music playing quietly under your voice, use the Envelope tool on the music track: click to add points and drag the line down where speech begins. Or select the music track and use the Auto Duck effect, which lowers music automatically wherever the voice track below it has sound.

Use music you have the right to use. Commercial songs need a licence even for a few seconds. Royalty-free libraries, music you commission, or tracks under a Creative Commons licence that allows your use are safe choices. Check whether the licence allows commercial use and requires a credit, and put that credit in your show notes.

Multiple speakers on separate tracks

If each person was recorded on their own track, edit them together: select across all tracks before deleting so they stay in sync. Where two people talk over each other, you can lower one track briefly with the Envelope tool instead of cutting.

Next: lesson 4, levels, noise and loudness.