I’ve started using the wonderful app Ferrite on my iPad to edit podcasts. While I still love Ardour, and it is a powerful program for bigger edits, Ferrite is very clean and meant for podcasts, as opposed to being a tool designed for music production that podcasters try to use.
Many months ago I tried using this app and ran into small issues with chapters not working how I expected in my podcast player, Pocketcasts, and just not being able to get my head wrapped around how editing works.
In Ardour, my way of editing is to split the audio into different sections, then I can manually cut or boost the gain of that section. This is not possible to do in Ferrite; any manual audio adjustment must be done with “automation curves”, which I still find way more clunky to deal with. Also, splitting into sections is not the typical operating mode, with outright “removal” of sections being the key. This I’ve gotten used to though, because the touch-first method of editing makes this very natural.
What’s really the killer feature of Ferrite is how simple dealing with chapters is now. It has all the features I could want for both podcasts I do, even more features than I could figure out how to build into my mrmp3 program a few months ago. So, if nothing else, it’s likely going to take the place of that program for post-production of everything because it is so straightforward. I’ve been able to edit every episode of Comical Start in the app for the past month, and I’ve edited an episode of OHAC. (The next episode may not end up being done in Ferrite, because Jack’s audio is a bit whacky and I’m still not comfortable handling that on my iPad.)
Either way, if you have an iPad and want to edit the spoken word, podcast or otherwise, check out Ferrite. In particular, check out this post by Jason Snell (in particular the video), which was vital in getting my head wrapped around the new way to edit in Ferrite. The app makes me want to do more audio work, because it’s so easy, particularly when the audio you start with is of reasonable quality. It’s great to work with, and I’m happy I found another tool to make podcasts more enjoyable.