How to Start a Podcast

Podcast editing: practical podcast editing tips

• Buzzsprout • Season 1 • Episode 6

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In Episode 06 of How to Start a Podcast, you'll learn how to edit your podcast episodes and how to choose your editing software.

Next Steps:

Alban:

I don't care how much Dear John, the Taylor Swift song speaks to the vibe of your podcast. That is not your theme song. I know I probably could have the FBI show up your house, you might go, you will go to jail. You will get kicked out of Spotify and Apple podcasts and your shows not going to get out to the world.

Gilon:

Welcome back to how to start your podcast. I'm Gilon and Alban is here with me.

Alban:

Hey, everybody, and in this episode, we are going to edit your podcast episode The recorded in the last one.

Gilon:

I mean, we're not editing it, you're going to edit it. We're gonna tell you how to edit. And we will

Alban:

teach you how to edit the podcast that you recorded prior to now that's accurate. Yes. Great. Great intro, guys.

Gilon:

Good job, people. So you recorded your episode. That was great. You could just upload that audio, but we strongly advise against it. That's, I mean, we just don't need to do that. We should probably edit it first. You're great. But you're not that good yet, kid. Here we go. We need to edit this audio. So what's the goal of editing? Right? Like, why should you even edit your audio?

Alban:

Well, the benefits of editing are that we can take out a lot of distractions. And we can just clean up what we actually want to say we there's lots of times we stumble over a word, and maybe you went back and reset something, maybe the beginning like we did on this episode, we already are at like three minutes of us trying to get into a groove with the actual content of the episode. So it's not uncommon, you want to clip off the front of the recording, you maybe you're clipping off the back, you're adding you know your intro music. So it's just to clean things up. The goal is to clean up the audio. It's not perfection, like there's that a Tolstoy quote, if you look for perfection, you'll never be content. And I think it's pretty easy for us as podcasters to approach our first episode, like we are recording a story for This American Life, or cereal or like, I don't know, whatever your favorite podcast is, you will not sound like that. In your first episode. Those podcasts have entire teams of recording experts, and expert storytellers, and audio engineers and everybody involved. So don't hold yourself to that level of perfection. Instead be kind and say, Hey, I'm just here to clean this up a bit. And make it sound a bit better.

Gilon:

Right? Like you're a beginner in your closet. Let's be real, right? And no, everybody starts somewhere, right? If I actively avoid listening to my first episode, because I just can't in my soul. I don't, I don't want to see the growth. But growth has happened. Right? So you gotta have a starting point. So don't be hard on yourself. Be compassionate, be kind, you're starting. You're a beginner. Kudos for starting right. Some people don't show up and you're choosing to show up. So edit with that in mind. So some tips for editing we've talked about, if you listen to the last episode, having an outline outline was super important, right? Hopefully you stayed on track with your outline. So you're not doing a ton of editing. Now, like today, you are your future self that we talked about. So either you're kicking yourself in the pants wishing you to listen, or you're like yo, salon, and Alban really saved me some time, I'm so glad I had an outline.

Alban:

When you're editing this episode, it's good to keep in mind all the steps, we talked about writing an outline, focusing on the separate tracks and the recording environment. All those things like you will notice that now in the editing process, why those were critically important because it is so much nicer to avoid audio mistakes in the front end, rather than trying to solve them on the back end. And so anything you noticed that could be improved, we'll write that down so that in your next recording, that you actually are going to take that into account, and really get a much better audio recording to help on next edit.

Gilon:

And I would definitely say you want to be mindful about the first 30 seconds to a minute of your audio, right? People have short attention spans, they're listening to your audio giving it a try. You want to make sure that you tell them who you are, what this podcast is about really quickly so that they know okay, this works for me or this is actually not what I was looking for pretty quickly,

Alban:

right? We're trying to get a good hook. Like, what's interesting, what is surprising about this, what are you going to learn, you want to make sure that people know for a fact, I'm in the right place. And if they're coming to be entertained, like be entertaining, and put the very most entertaining bit at the front. If they're trying to learn something, make sure you tell them this is what you're going to learn at the front end. People should be able to listen to like 30 seconds a minute and go I know exactly what is going to come up in the rest of this entire episode. We've seen it on our YouTube channel a ton right where we can actually see the truth drop off rates of when people stop listening. And the first 30 seconds, it's like it falls off a cliff, like a third of people give up in the first 30 seconds. But if you make it to a minute, even on a 15 minute video, we know you're probably going to make it to the end. And so it shows how critically important this first 30 seconds to a minute are. With your podcast, it's exact same thing. Make sure you tell this is what you need to know, here's what is going to be delivered the value of this episode. Don't take seven minutes of banter before you start talking about what's actually going to be discussed. Yeah, that's

Gilon:

really important real estate that you don't want to misuse or miss out on and completely because you haven't been intentional with that space. So some editing pointers, what are important things to make sure are present when you're editing.

Alban:

Well, one you should be thinking about is a theme song. So you probably didn't, you know, sing in the beginning of your episode. Or maybe you did, maybe you did, but you edited that out. And now you want to put in some music. And the reason music is really good is because that along with your podcast artwork are two great ways to brand your podcast. Just think about how powerful music is as setting the tone, and the feeling and the emotion for something. Well, you are going to pick one song to brand your show in the exact way that you want to. If it's salsa music that's very different than like a Lo Fi beat. And that's very different from like, some upbeat pop song. Like they all have different vibes. And if so if you have like a true crime podcast, and you want the ominous music, don't put in some like happy go lucky. You know, music is disjointed, from the content of the podcast,

Gilon:

right? Your music is definitely like a vibe check moment, right? So it should as well as your title and your cover art. explain to people who you are, why they're here, it should all be cohesive as basically what you're saying, right. And so making sure that you have the music that accurately reflects your topic, your type of podcasts, even the way that you're going to be talking about your subject matter can be really important to convey through your theme music. So where are some places that you can find music? And on that note, before we talk about finding music,

Alban:

let's talk about where not to find it. Yes. Alright, so I don't care how much like, dear John speaks to the Taylor Swift song speaks to the vibe of your podcast, you don't care. That is not your theme song. Why not? Because Taylor Swift, her, maybe her lawyers are going to get your podcast taken down, you're probably not going to get sued, you're probably not going to have the FBI show up your house, you might go to jail. Just kidding. You will go to jail, you will get kicked out of Spotify and Apple podcasts, and your shows not going to get out to the world. So make sure that you have the rights to music, don't use copyrighted music. So we should talk about some places to find music. But don't look around on Spotify and other places for your favourite hit track.

Gilon:

The big thing is no copyrighted music you need to own be licensed to just about anything you upload, honestly, but especially music because Spotify don't play at all, you will be surprised how quickly your content will get pulled down. So some places to find royalty free music is really what we're looking for. The YouTube Free Music Archive is one such place. And it's a nice little playlist of music that you can add in there. Where else

Alban:

one of the nice things about that is that you aren't just searching by title, the track, but also like the mood and the type of music so you can really filter down anything in there, you're able to use Pixabay copyrighted free stock music, and it's just a community of music creators. You can also look at like the Free Music Archive, it's just another really large library for podcasters with lots of free music. The downside to picking free music though, and this has happened to me before is your music will get used on other podcasts and in YouTube videos. And in ads on Facebook. Like you'll start to hear your music everywhere.

Gilon:

One of the things that I did was I actually went to like a place like Fiverr and got someone to create the theme music because I definitely didn't want to hear my music on someone else's podcast, especially for it to be like so integral to the branding of my podcast. So that's an option too. If you're interested in looking at music that you'd be willing to like pay for

Alban:

if you want to spend a little bit of money places we recommend are like Audio Jungle dotnet you're starting at like$5 a track, you can license music. And if you're paying $5 That means everybody else is probably not spending money. Just that little bit of a hurdle will stop a lot of people. I think there's some where you can actually decide if you want to have the exclusive rights to a song You're gonna pay quite a bit more, but just it being a $5 charge I guarantee is going to stop a lot of people from using that music. Another one that we like a lot and we use for our own stuff is sound stripe. So sound stripe is more important if you're going to have music that's different in lots of episodes. So think back to the scripted fiction, maybe you're having a lot of sound beds, which is the music beneath the talking to kind of sets the mood, well, those sound beds are probably going to be changing every episode. So what soundstripe does is you get to pay a subscription $19 a month, and you get access to tons and tons of music to use in all of your content.

Gilon:

Yeah, so it's a really nice resource if you're willing to spend some money on it, which is not a bad place to spend money.

Alban:

Yeah. And we'll just talk again about the copyrighted music a couple of myths that like, these are myths, put your lawyer hat on. Alright, so putting my lawyer hat on. I am a lawyer, I am not your lawyer. This is not legal advice. This is just good advice for like, don't get sued. Some people think if you're not making money off your podcast, you can put in Taylor Swift songs. That is incorrect. You cannot that is a myth. People have these beliefs are like well, if you only play 10 seconds or 30 seconds, you can get away with it. Again, that is a myth. It is copyrighted. That is still plagiarism. So urban legend, that is people will claim Well, it's fair use. But they forget fair use is a defense to copyright infringement, people can still sue you. And then you will argue to the judge that it was appropriate. If you're arguing to a judge that you're allowed to use some music, instead of spending $5 at audio jungle.net You have made a very bad decision. So like, just get away from all of this copyrighted music, because even the really big podcasts that when they're licensing music, it's a big ordeal. And so really, if you're thinking I'm going to use copyrighted music, you're probably not it's going to be really expensive. It's a cumbersome process to go through. The licensing for music framework really has not been figured out for podcasting yet. So maybe someday in the future. But right now, we're not using that stuff.

Gilon:

Alright, so we're still editing, right? So when we're editing, how do we decide kind of what to give our attention to? Because everything can feel like a big deal when you're editing, right? So like, what should have priority in editing.

Alban:

So this is the same way that I edit writing, start with the content, start with the big ideas, should this whole section actually have been said earlier, like I'm moving big parts, I'm deleting big parts. I'm editing for content first, not distractions. Later on, I will then come back on my second pass and edit for distractions. So what does that mean? In reality, if you start listening to your podcast, and the first thing is like, Oh, I think I heard a little cough, I'm gonna edit out that cough. Hope there's an um, I'm going to edit out that I'm going to edit out that second arm, okay, there's three times in a row and edit them all out. And then you realize, oh, we actually redid the intro where we didn't have any of those issues. Well, now you've already you're 20 minutes in on editing out stuff from a whole section that will be deleted. And that's not uncommon that you have big chunks that might get taken out. So edit for content, if you're thinking about it as if you're editing, writing, edit the paragraphs first, and then go and edit the sentences in the words. And so first one, we're trying to make sure it's at least understandable and cohesive. And then we will go back and actually do all that filler, word removal and audit. You know, there's little audio hiccups.

Gilon:

Yeah, I like to think of this as like, did you accomplish the mission? Right? Like, did you get the content out that you wanted to get out in the way that you wanted to get it out? Let's edit for that first. And then we have the luxury of going in with a fine tooth comb and saying, Oh, well, I said, um, three times, you know, in the span of two minutes, let me go and then kind of pull that out. And this really just make sure that you spend your time wisely. As well as you focus on the majors and minor on the minors. Major on the majors minor on the minors. Yeah, there we go. There it is. Because editing is a part of podcasting. But you know, as you're starting a podcast, you're not always certain where all of your energy and time is going to go. Editing can take up a good amount of your time. And so when you listen through, you really want to be listening for the content piece first. And then you have the luxury of like I said, going back in with a fine tooth comb and hitting those smaller pieces that you may be going to person that will notice right, other people may not notice that but for your own peace of mind. You might want to get some of those arms that silence or those things out of the way.

Alban:

If you find yourself running into a lot of these filler words. You talk more like me then, like former President Barack Obama who had no filler words like in any speeches, then what you want to look at is the script. And the script has this thing called filler word removal.

Gilon:

Voodoo.

Alban:

It's awesome. It is so cool. This is like total magic. Because it's transcribed your episode, you say, Hey, do I have filler words and like, Oh, I found 64 arms and you go, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete all, and it takes them all out, and they're gone, and does a really good job of finding and removing stuff. So there's some you have to be a little more careful with, like, the word like, often uses a filler word, but sometimes used correctly in the sentence. So go through and remove those. And that's where we're editing out distractions. But again, we're talking like humans here, right? Now use the example of former President Obama, he actually learned to add filler words in to be more relatable, it's okay that you have some filler words, it's not the end of the world, you just sound like a human being when you talk that way. So don't stress yourself out too much.

Gilon:

And this is one of those things where, you know, we talked about your future self, like, don't be so caught up in your head while you're recording to try to like, get around some of these things, right? Like, just talk like yourself, be yourself. The editing is where you can clean that up, right? So then we've got all these pieces in our editing software, we've got hopefully, Non copyrighted music, and then we've got you know, our audio and all that good stuff. What is a good way to kind of mush those pieces together? Can we just stick them one next to the other? How do we need to like seamlessly transition from all those pieces,

Alban:

sometimes they fit perfectly well next to each other. But there's some YouTube videos, you can watch where like, you can tell, there's just lots of hard cuts, and almost looks like glitchy how quickly the person's faces jumping around the screen and like how their cadence changes and their voice, the tone is different. If you're finding that that's how it sounds, when you're looking back at this audio recording, or listening back to the audio recording, then you want to look at fading the tracks, fade the first one out. And then as the next one starts fade that one in, it will make things feel much more cohesive and natural when you're dealing with totally different, you know, sections that were recorded, maybe 20 minutes apart, are now right next to each other, fading in and out makes it seem much more seamless.

Gilon:

And if you don't know how to do this, because you're just now learning about how to start a podcast, you can definitely hit up our good friend, YouTube. And whatever your editing software is, you can just put that in to the search bar and put fading next to it in the search bar and someone on YouTube will show you how to fade in and out with your audio.

Alban:

If you're using any of the software, we recommend that person will probably be Travis because he's got a bunch of tutorials for all of this. So we will be sure to mention those at the end of this episode. One of the final tips, I guess, is creating a punch list. So first, listen through is for content. And we want to write a punch list. So when you walk through you build project, maybe a house or remodel. At the end, you have the punch list. And it's like all the small things, you still need to pick up and clean. You need to repaint this wall, I need to fix this pipe. And what that allows you to do is say okay, here's the final list, let's go knock that stuff out. Because what you don't want to do is be the person who's editing as you're noticing things, the first podcast I ever recorded. I went through and wrote down a list of like 60 things that need to be fixed. And then my editor wrote right back to me and said, You are out of your mind, if you think this is going to happen on the timeline that you want. That's gonna take me like eight hours. And you want this tonight went, Oh, okay. Well, if that's how hard it is, then how about take out these four things, because the rest really weren't a big deal. And so you want to write the punch list, so that you have a good feeling for like, which of these things needs to be removed, which things are critical, and which can I maybe improve the next recording, but I don't have to get this right.

Gilon:

And for my overachievers out there, I see you and I already hear your wheels turning in your mind. Don't try to make this punch list while you're recording. It's very easy to get caught up and go oh, I'm going to need to like edit that out later in the middle of recording. Don't do that. Stay present and wait until you're doing the editing. To be able to write out your punch list. It's really important to stay present while you're recording. Because you might miss something if you decide to try to pick up in the moment the things that you're going to want to edit out.

Alban:

And one warning here. This spot like where we are right now editing the first episode is I would bet one of the most likely places for people to stop podcasting because we all are passionate about what we're talking about. We enjoy buying the equipment. We like recording, and now the process of listening to your own voice and editing it and it's not sounding as good as the best part. Cast we've ever listened to, we get really hung up in our own heads, we start being perfectionist, a lot of self doubt starts creeping in. And we start being very critical of ourselves and what we built. If this is your first podcast, it probably is. Why would you expect to be very good at this yet? Right? You know, you are valid, that you're doing this, this is a great thing for you to do. You can't let these thoughts of like how people are going to perceive it influence. You're just have to get this out there. If you want to help. Go listen to your favorite podcast, like listen to the very first episode. And it can't be someone like one of the NPR shows where everyone on it was our hidden expert. Go listen to your favorite indie podcast first episode, it will be so much worse than episode 30 or wherever you are. And that can give you the confidence to remember, this is just normal imposter syndrome that you're feeling. Everybody feels this way I felt this way. The sound your own voice is weird to you the first time you hear it in a recording. Editing your own voice makes you very critical of yourself. This is all normal. But the only way to improve is to actually publish episodes, start getting feedback and start getting better. So don't get stuck here. I could tell so many stories of people I've seen year after year at podcasting conferences that have never launched because they are hung up on this exact step so don't let this one be the one to trip you up. If you can get past this. You will get past anything

Gilon:

Alban definitely did to real heavy into his life coach bag, his podcast there, tip him on the way out. But it's so true. It is absolutely so true. I joked about actively avoiding my first podcast episode, because I'm sure there are so many pieces of it. I'm sure tons of plosives. I'm sure I sound like someone that I am not. He's you're trying to figure all the things out, right. But you're starting and you're going to be a beginner, there's no way to be great without beginning. You have to begin this is a necessary step. This is part of the process. And so I double down on all the things Alban said, you do just need to start you need to put it out there. And once you start, you'll have more momentum to keep going. If you can kind of battle that self critical bully in your head. Final Episode, right? We have edited, it sounds great, because we started. It sounds great. We're gonna export it so that we can upload it to, you know, our hosting site, what have you anything that we need to be mindful of, in that process, just export

Alban:

it as a mp3 or a WAV, pretty much anything you throw Buzzsprout can be fine. But those are two that we would recommend for different reasons. They're both good. You may see other tutorials at this point, say, hey, you've got anything about ID three tags. Id three tags are just metadata that put in your mp3 file. Your podcast host should be able to take care of this for you. So if you upload a podcast episode to Buzzsprout, we will do all that work for you on the back end. So if you keep seeing the step show up, no, you can safely disregard it. So export the file, and you're going to be ready in future episodes to upload it to your podcast host Travis, before we go on to the next episode, what should people be checking out and thinking about with editing their episode where all the tutorials that we promised them?

Travis:

I'm so glad you asked Alban. So we have a lot of tutorials on our YouTube channel that can walk you through how to edit your podcast episodes in a variety of softwares. We have mentioned audacity we've mentioned GarageBand and Alvin's personal favorite descript. We have software tutorials for each of those that I've linked in the show notes if you want to know how to do that fade in and fade out how to add tracks how to mix things together all the things that we discussed in more. Each of those tutorials will walk you through how to do it in that particular software. So just check the show notes for this episode to find the links for those. And then when it comes to music, we just actually posted a video recently on where to find music that is safe for your podcast. And we mentioned some free options. And then also some paid options, give you some examples of podcast music that you can download and essentially cover everything front to back that you could ever possibly want to know about using music in your podcast. So if you scroll down in your phone in the episode show notes, you'll see links to descript audacity and GarageBand tutorials how to edit your podcast there. And then also the video where we cover how and where to find podcast music for your episodes.

Gilon:

Thanks so much Travis. So hopefully, you'll get into those resources get sharper on editing. And so just in preparation for next episode, we are talking about podcast artwork, why you needed, why it should be great what the requirements are, how to design it and some fancy tips and integrations we have to help you get that done. So definitely come back for our seventh episode of how to create a podcast podcast and thanks for listening as always keep podcasting