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Editing Podcasts
This page is for instructions on editing the tracks from a podcast. For instructions on how to host/participate, see this page
The basic steps for editing a podcast are:
- Import each participant's track into Audacity
- For each track, remove the background noise
- For each track, mute all areas where the participant isn't talking
- Remove extended silences and, where practical, any "umms" and "errrs"
- Clean up sections where multiple people are talking
- Merge all tracks together (Mix and Render from the Tracks menu)
- Run the Compressor effect on the merged track
- Import the music and the introductory narration
- Export as MP3
- Upload the podcast to Azure and create an episode in LibSyn
- Create and publish a Markdown post
- Profit
This helps to remove ambient noise from a track. In Audacity:
- Select a small section of the track where there is no talking
- Select Noise Reduction... from the Effects menu
- Click Get Noise Profile
- Select the entire track
- Select Noise Reduction... from the Effects menu
- Click OK
The process takes about 30 seconds
NOTE: When selecting a small section of the track, do not select a spot where the participant has muted themselves. The goal is to select a section where the candidate is actively recording but is not speaking. If they are muted, the microphone isn't picking anything up so the noise profile will not be useful.
The recordings will often pick up background sounds, like typing, or cell phone notifications, or people talking in the background. These don't get removed with Noise Reduction.
To mute a section, select an area right after a talking point and right before the next talking point. Then press Cmd-L (or Ctrl-L) to mute it. Other useful shortcut keys: Shift+PgUp and Shift+PgDn to quickly navigate within a track. Shift+. will also move forward slightly
When removing silences and hesitations, you must remove them from every track so ensure everything stays lined up. Audacity can be a little flaky here so here's one reliable way to do it:
- Click in the top or bottom track roughly where you want to start deleting
- Press Shift+Up or Shift+Down until you have a vertical selection line on all tracks
- Press Left or Right until the line is positioned where you want to start deleting
- Hold Shift and press Left or Right until the line is positioned where you want to end deleting. NOTE: You can also hold Shift and left-click where you want to end the selection
- Press Cmd-K (or Ctrl-K) to delete the selection in all tracks
Other useful shortcuts: Cmd-1 (or Ctrl-1) to zoom in for finer grained control; Cmd-3 (or Ctrl-3) to zoom out
In some places, more than one person is talking at the same time. Usually one person "wins" these overlapping discussions and the others eventually shut up. To make this sound better, it's a good idea to mute the "losers".
The shared DropBox account contains two Audacity projects for the music, both in the Podcasts | Miscellaneous folder:
- Doctor Man Intro Loop with effects.aup
- Doctor Man Outro Loop with effects.aup
The first contains the intro music on a loop and with a fade out effect at the appropriate spot. The second is the outro music with a fade in effect for the very end.
After the tracks have been merged:
- Open the intro loop and copy it into the podcast project as a new track (Ctrl-A to select all, then Ctrl-C to copy)
- Align the podcast to start when the music begins to fade (Cmd-F5/Ctrl-F5 for the Time Shift Tool)
- Pick a suitable break in the podcast where the music should be gone completely
- Delete everything in the intro music track from that point on
- Add a Fade Out effect to the end of the intro music track
At this point, it's easier if you import the introductory narration track before importing the outro music. To do this, import the intro narration as a new track, then follow similar steps as above to move the intro music track to start after the narration ends.
Be sure to time shift both the intro music track and the podcast itself. You can select both tracks by clicking on the information box at the far left of each one. First click one, then hold Shift and click the second. Then use the Time Shift Tool to shift both tracks at once. Audacity can be a little flaky here so Cmd-Z/Ctrl-Z is your friend.
With the beginning of the podcast finished, follow similar steps to do the outro. The fade-in should happen very shortly after everyone says goodbye. (Tip: Don't be afraid to move everyone's goodbyes closer together.) Once you've found this point, find a good spot to start fading in the music and mute (don't delete) before that in the closing music track. Then fade in starting from that point.
This is straightforward. Just be sure to set the following fields:
- Artist: Western Devs
- Title: --title of the podcast--
- Year: --year it was recorded--
For now, Azure is a backup and probably isn't necessary. All the same, use whatever tool you like to upload the finished podcast to the podcasts bucket of the Western Devs Azure account. Ask on Slack for the storage account and storage access key values required for the upload.
In LibSyn, create a new episode on the Western Devs Podcast show. On this screen, you can select the MP3 file for upload, then set the title and subtitle to the same as what they will be in the podcast post on the website. Set the category to technology and the iTunes rating to clean and then click Publish.
(For now, leave the description blank. You can copy and paste this from the podcast post after it is published.)
Make a note of the ID that LibSyn created for the episode.
This is a normal post with a few extra fields. Run the following to create a new draft podcast:
hexo new podcast "Title"
Don't include the word Podcast: in the title. This will get added automatically when the site is generated in Hexo.
Here is some sample front matter:
---
layout: podcast
title: "Barriers for Women in Technology"
date: 2015-12-14T13:12:40-05:00
categories: podcasts
excerpt: "Special guest Rachel Thomas and the Western Devs discuss the barriers facing women when they enter and when they stay in technology"
comments: true
podcast:
filename: "BarriersForWomenInTechnology.mp3"
length: "46:38"
filesize: 44773146
libsynId: 1234567
participants:
- kyle_baley
- dylan_smith
- lori_lalonde
- dave_white
- james_chambers
- wendy_closson
- donald_belcham
- jason_row
- peter_ritchie
- rachel_thomas
links:
- Rachel Thomas (Twitter)|https://twitter.com/math_rachel
- Rachel Thomas (Medium)|https://medium.com/@racheltho
- It's not just a pipeline problem|https://medium.com/@racheltho/if-you-think-women-in-tech-is-just-a-pipeline-problem-you-haven-t-been-paying-attention-cb7a2073b996
music:
- title: Doctor Man
artist: Johnnie Christie and the Boats
url: https://www.youtube.com/user/jwcchristie
Some notes:
- Make sure you include an excerpt to show in post listings. It should be a quick one-liner summarizing the podcast, preferably witty but you don't have to break with tradition.
- If there is a guest speaker, you can include their name as if it were an author ID (e.g. scott_guthrie). It will get converted to proper casing (without a link) when it is published
- Each link should be a pipe-limited list. The first item is the text and the second, the actual link
For the body of the podcast, you can copy an existing one for reference. It usually consists of a simple bulleted list of main talking points.
After publishing the podcast, copy and paste the body of the post to the Description of the episode in LibSyn
// TODO