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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 12 OF 17

Audacity lesson 4: levels, noise and loudness

Reduce background noise, even out voices with a compressor and hit the loudness that podcast apps expect.

Updated

Listeners notice uneven volume before almost anything else. In this lesson you’ll clean up background noise and make the episode consistently loud, in this order: noise reduction, compression, loudness normalization, limiting.

1. Reduce background noise

Noise reduction learns what your room’s hiss or hum sounds like, then removes it.

  1. Select a few seconds of “silence” (room noise only) from the start of your recording.
  2. Open Effect > Noise Removal and Repair > Noise Reduction and click Get Noise Profile.
  3. Select the whole voice track (click its control panel, or Ctrl+A for everything).
  4. Open Noise Reduction again. Start gently, around 6–12 dB of reduction, and click Preview.
  5. If your voice sounds watery or metallic, lower the reduction. Apply with OK.

Noise reduction can’t fix loud, changing noises like traffic or a dog barking; cut those, or re-record in a quieter room.

2. Even out the voice with a compressor

A compressor turns down the loudest moments so quiet and loud words sit closer together.

  1. Select the voice track and open Effect > Volume and Compression > Compressor.
  2. As a starting point for speech, try a threshold around −20 dB and a ratio of 3:1, with make-up gain on.
  3. Preview. If the voice sounds squashed or pumping, raise the threshold or lower the ratio.

With several speakers on separate tracks, compress each track on its own so their levels match.

3. Set the loudness

Podcast apps play episodes back to back, so shows aim for a similar perceived loudness, measured in LUFS (also written LKFS). Apple’s audio requirements for podcasts recommend around −16 LKFS with a true peak no higher than −1 dB. That’s a good target for every app.

  1. Mix any music and voice tracks first, or select all tracks together.
  2. Open Effect > Volume and Compression > Loudness Normalization.
  3. Choose perceived loudness and set it to −16 LUFS. For a mono episode, tick the option to treat mono as dual-mono.

4. Catch the peaks with a limiter

Raising loudness can push the odd peak past 0 dB. Apply Effect > Volume and Compression > Limiter with the limit set to −1 dB to keep every peak safely below clipping.

Check your work

  • Listen through once: speech should sound full and steady, with no sudden jumps.
  • Compare with a professionally made podcast on the same headphones. Yours should be about as loud.
  • Listen on phone speakers. Quiet guests and loud laughs show up there first.

Next: lesson 5, saving and exporting your episode.