How I Podcast: Editing

As promised, I’ve recorded myself editing a podcast (published at 2X speed), which you can find in the middle of this post. Beyond that, this post will just be an overview of my editing workflow.

Luckily for me, I learned that Audacity has an amazing built-in feature that magically takes care of this: noise reduction. You select a small patch of a track that is representative of the background noise, then you just select the entire track and it does its best to remove it. It’s just fantastic, and has not failed me yet.

After everything is set up with those tracks, the heavy lifting gets done in Ardour, which is an open source piece of software. You do have to pay to get a fully functioning download, but if you want to compile it from source, the code is there for the taking. I paid the “lifetime” fee so I get all major updates forever.

You may notice right away when Ardour is opened up, the first thing I do is get rid of some small text. Ardour is a full Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) that is also used for music production. Since I don’t need any of that functionality. I only leave time stamps and “Markers”, which are tags that I put in as notes for when a new section begins.

I import all the tracks, including what I still reflexively label as a “Skype” track, that contains all voices. This is used to align the individual tracks and is promptly removed. From that point on, it’s just cleaning up audio, inserting various transition noises as necessary, and deleting small bits of unnecessary silence.

The final step is exporting the master track in Ardour to a WAV, because Ardour does not play well with MP3. I then open up this master track in Audacity, where I do a final export to MP3. I have XML files that populate some metadata fields for the episode, and I enter other items like episode number and title. Then it’s exported to MP3 and we’re done! Here’s a video of it all.

Originally, I edited every podcast in Audacity. It works for the basics. However, it can be a clunky piece of software with some real annoying ways to get stuff done. A big thing you’ll see me do in Ardour is boosting or cutting volume in a section of track. I was able to quickly map a single keyboard shortcut to each of these tasks, whereas Audacity would require selecting that section, and going to a right-click menu every time you want to change the volume.

Overall, Ardour has provided with a beautiful, clean editing interface that works for me every time. I have a set of keyboard shortcuts that lets me only use my left hand (with one exception) on the keyboard, leaving my right hand for doing whatever is necessary for the mouse. I’ll list those shortcuts here, for anyone who is interested:

Basically everything is done between those keyboard shortcuts, and a little bit of clicking around to select sections and change the volume of an entire track. I have a very good system worked out which optimizes the use of Ardour for me.