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Quick Guide to Mastering Your Podcast using Audacity

| July 28, 2006 | Category: Music, Wordpress

This post aims to provide a simple and fast set of steps non-audiophiles can perform to improve almost any
speech recording; especially recordings that were made by running an average microphone into a sound card.
I’m using Audacity for this walkthrough as it is available
for a wide range of operating systems and comes at a bargain price.

I am not an Audio Engineer. There are better tools and techniques available. I suggest these because they’re fast, free and easy.

Steps

  1. Open the uncompressed version of your recording (try not to start with an mp3 or similar)
  2. Select All (Ctrl/Cmd + A)
  3. Effect > Normalize…
    1. Tick Remove any DC offset only.
    2. Press Enter
  4. Effect > EQ…

    Screenshot of the the EQ adjustments described below

    1. Add one point just before the 100Hz marker and one at the 100Hz marker. Drag the left-most point all the way down to -24dB.
    2. Add one point at 1000Hz, one at 2000Hz and one at 3000Hz. Drag the 2000Hz point up slightly.
    3. Add one point at the 10,000Hz marker and one just after. Drag the right-most point down to -24dB.
    4. Press Enter
  5. Effect > Amplify…
    1. If the audio was recorded at a low volume, you will want to run the Amplify effect over it to bring up the overall volume.
    2. Set the New Peak Amplitude to -0.3dB and allow the Amplification slider to adjust itself automatically.
    3. Press Enter
  6. Effect > Compressor…
    1. Threshold: -10dB
    2. ratio: 4:1
    3. attack and release times: 0.1s
    4. Press Enter

To provide an example, Stephanie was kind enough to send me a sample of a direct-to-PC recording she had made for her own podcast. Have a listen to the short before and after snippets to hear the difference for yourself.

12 Comments

  1. 1
    Stephanie Booth said:

    So what quality mp3 and other settings did you do?

    Comment posted on:
    2:20 am, 28th of Jul 2006
  2. 2
    Ben Buchanan said:

    *jumps* yikes! you posted! ;)

    Here’s me thinking the way to improve a podcast was to remix it into a song or two…

    Comment posted on:
    9:33 am, 28th of Jul 2006
  3. 3
    Jay said:

    Get ‘em Andrew! :)

    Comment posted on:
    11:58 am, 17th of Aug 2006
  4. 4
    Stephanie Booth said:

    You know what? I’ve started using GarageBand now ;-)

    Comment posted on:
    5:08 pm, 15th of Sep 2006
  5. 5
    Ben Tremblay said:

    HiYa -
    I was just looking at your Admin/Modal mockup … clocked on WordPress category and was suprised that only this showed up.

    cheers
    –bentrem

    Comment posted on:
    10:26 am, 5th of Feb 2008
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    Comment posted on:
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