Episode 5
From Novice to Pro: The Best Podcast Editing Tools
Scott and Kevin dive into the world of podcast editing software, exploring options suitable for various experience levels. They discuss tools ranging from user-friendly platforms like Alitu to more advanced software like Hindenburg and Adobe Audition. As they share their personal experiences with these tools, they emphasize the importance of having quality audio and a well-treated recording environment. The conversation also touches on the significance of consistency in podcasting, highlighting that many creators struggle to maintain momentum after a few episodes. With practical advice and insights, this episode serves as a valuable resource for anyone looking to enhance their podcasting journey.
Takeaways:
- Podcasting requires patience and consistency; many shows don't make it past three episodes.
- Editing software choices vary from free options like Audacity to professional tools like Hindenburg.
- Descript offers unique features for editing podcasts as if they were text documents.
- For better audio quality, invest in a good microphone and treat your recording space appropriately.
- Finding the right editing software can significantly enhance your podcasting experience and efficiency.
- Planning ahead by recording several episodes before launching helps maintain a consistent publishing schedule.
Companies mentioned in this episode:
Mics used
Scott: Samsung Q2U
Kevin: Sure MV88
Transcript
Recording.
Scott:There we go.
Scott:Okay, so we're recording.
Scott:We're good there.
Kevin:We made it.
Scott:Okay.
Scott:That took a little.
Scott:We made it.
Scott:We made it.
Scott:And the nice thing about me being thinking that yesterday was today is my outline is all prepared.
Scott:I, like, I didn't have to do anything today.
Scott:I was already ready to go.
Scott:I was.
Scott:I literally sat here for, like 15 minutes.
Scott:I was like, where, man?
Scott:Where is he?
Kevin:Scott thought that Tuesday was Wednesday.
Scott:So, man, this week, this is.
Scott:That has been one of those weeks for me.
Kevin:Welcome to the Idiots Guide to podcasting.
Scott:So.
Scott:Okay.
Scott:Idiots guide to podcasting.
Scott:I don't know what episode number this is going to be because we don't know what.
Scott:What order we're publishing this, this particular season.
Scott:But, you know, my name is Scott, and here with my brother Kevin, we are both kind of going through the learning how to podcast process.
Scott:I've been doing it for a couple years now, and I'm finally starting to get some traction on my podcast.
Scott:We're starting to get potential book authors and guests and stuff like that.
Scott:It's finally starting to pop up a little bit.
Scott:Our uploads have been up, and Kevin's getting ready to launch his sometime in the not too distant future.
Scott:So we've been kind of going through this together.
Scott:And if you're listening to this podcast, you're probably interested in starting your own podcast.
Scott:And so right now, we are using.
Scott:We've talked about free platforms to use and this that, you know, today we're going to talk a little bit about editing software.
Scott:So, kev, you had talked briefly in a previous episode about editing software, I think, that you use on your phone or your iPad.
Scott:What was that again?
Kevin:Yeah, the one that I used on my iPad was literally called podcast Maker.
Scott:Okay.
Kevin:And that one's very mobile friendly.
Kevin:I think that the mobile version on your phone, again, if you're keeping it real simple, is not actually a pretty good option because it's a flat fee and you're not paying monthly for it.
Scott:Yeah, it's a one time fee.
Kevin:Yeah.
Kevin:And the one that I'm going to be really digging into here is the ferrite one.
Scott:Full disclosure.
Kevin:Go ahead.
Scott:Oh, no, no.
Scott:Which one's ferrite?
Scott:The other iPhone.
Scott:Mobile one.
Kevin:Yes, it is better.
Kevin:It's going to be better for, like, an iPad or some other sort of apple product, but it's also a flat fee.
Kevin:It's got a lot more capabilities.
Kevin:And to get that for, I think it's like $30.
Kevin:It's super cheap.
Kevin:And I think it's going to serve me well.
Kevin:I'm looking forward to really testing it out.
Kevin:But, you know, we.
Kevin:Scott, you had said that in one of our earlier episodes that we've got to make sure that we're recording in advance and making sure that you've got some in the hopper that you can work with before you really start publishing anything.
Kevin:This is at least our fifth one, right?
Scott:Yeah.
Kevin:And it's a good thing that we waited to start posting because we got stuck.
Kevin:I was in between jobs, was looking for some things, so we had to put some things on pause.
Kevin:And I haven't really been able to work on podcast stuff for a little while.
Kevin:So, you know, take Scott's advice to you.
Scott:Yeah.
Scott:And that's a, that's a true lesson learned.
Scott:Right.
Scott:And even last week, right, you and I, we've been trying to record every Wednesday, but even last week, you were on a little mini family vacation.
Scott:The week before that, I think we recorded.
Scott:But before that, like, I think one day I was just worked, and I was just like, I can't do it tonight.
Scott:You know?
Scott:I mean, how many people who are.
Kevin:Making podcasts have a full time job somewhere who are podcasting on the side?
Scott:I mean, probably that's almost everybody, right?
Scott:That that's where it starts.
Scott:And what they say, too, is that the vast majority of podcasts, there's percentages that they throw out there, but the vast majority of podcasts never get past three episodes.
Scott:And if you publish, I think it's more than, like, for either more than six months or, like, it's like, more than ten episodes, you're already in, like, the top 50% of quote unquote podcasts because there's so many people that will start something, that will start a podcast, they get super excited, so they publish their first couple episodes, and then they get disappointed when they don't see any download numbers.
Scott:And I tell you what, and we'll jump into the editing software here just after this.
Scott:But podcasting is a slow burn, right?
Scott:It is a long, slow burn.
Scott:I've been ours, and actually, because today is my middle son's birthday, it's Tanner's birthday, and we actually kind of mark that as the anniversary.
Scott:That's when we think.
Scott:I think we published our first episode.
Scott:We've been doing it for almost three years now.
Kevin:Oh, wow.
Kevin:I didn't realize it'd been that long.
Scott:And really, seriously, it's been about two years, right?
Scott:It's really been about two years because we started it kind of learned some hard lessons.
Scott:Took a six month, nine month break and then finally came back in the, we also moved in there and all that stuff.
Scott:But I mean, it's taken that long.
Scott:It's taken us two years of really consistently doing it almost week by week.
Scott:And we do take kind of a month off, typically in the summer, and we take off like a month over the holidays, even though we don't do seasonal stuff.
Scott:That's just kind of what the routine we've got into.
Scott:And I just need to do that for my own kind of, you know, prevent burnout.
Scott: t's taken us that long to get: Scott: , like this last month we got: Scott:And this month we're tracking to be probably just under that.
Scott: he big one is I'd like to get: Scott:And that's going to take some time, but we'll get into download strategies and kind of titling and evergreen strategies, making sure that you're, you kind of have a topic that can last a long time, depending on your podcast.
Scott:But let's talk about editing software.
Scott:So you talked about a couple mobile options, and that's good because I don't really ever use any of the mobile options.
Scott:So I did a bunch of searching online and I actually, funny enough, I kind of started the initial draft of this outline with chat GPT.
Scott:I just said, hey, give me the top editing software.
Scott:And I checked it and it wasn't super accurate.
Scott:I don't really trust it too much.
Scott:So I did my own individual googling and found some other things.
Scott:And so I liked, there's a couple really good articles out there, and one of the ones that I found, I like the way that they categorize the different editing software.
Scott:There's easiest, there's free, there's hey, I'm starting to go pro.
Scott:I kind of want that prosumer.
Scott:I want some more features.
Scott:And then there's the super advanced stuff.
Scott:Okay.
Scott:And so I searched around.
Scott:I kind of did some of my own, I have my own preferences and I'll say those at the end, so keep listening and you'll kind of hear my workflow.
Scott:But for the ones that were kind of considered the easiest, there's an online service called Alitu.
Scott:Alitu.
Scott:And we'll link some of these in the show notes.
Scott:That one's online and they call it the easiest.
Scott:You do pay a monthly fee for it.
Scott:I think it's like $38 a month or $34 a month if you pay annually or something like that.
Scott:So it comes around probably $350 a year if you pay upfront, which it's nothing to sneeze at.
Scott:Right.
Scott:But they do a lot of the kind of automatic.
Scott:They have a lot of automatic web based cloud tools that will make your audio, clean up your audio, and can automatically do transcriptions, which on all services provide that.
Scott:So that's nice.
Scott:I'm trying to see, I had the websites up yesterday, I didn't pull them up today.
Scott:But elite two, it actually has some pretty cool features in there.
Scott: And this site up to, I think,: Scott:So actually, something I'm over now, but they offer hosting with that all as part of one service, and then you can add additional hosting fees on top of that.
Scott:So if you kind of want an all in one service, like you do the hosting, you do the editing, you do all the stuff, you can probably just use this one service.
Scott:So that's why a couple different websites called Alito, the quote unquote the easiest if you're doing looking for free stuff.
Scott:We had mentioned it before.
Scott:There's two that I kind of know off the top of my head.
Scott:Garageband, if you're on a Mac, or you could even, I think, do it on iPad.
Scott:It's not.
Scott:Garageband is more for music than for podcasting.
Scott:So it works?
Scott:Yeah, Kevin's giving it the thumbs down.
Scott:It's not really made for podcasting, so I tried it, but it's free.
Scott:So you can do it.
Scott:You absolutely can do it.
Scott:Audacity is the other big one that's very popular for a laptop.
Scott:Right.
Scott:And I think that's, regardless of what kind of laptop you have, it's open source software and it's free.
Scott:And that's actually pretty popular.
Scott:There's a lot of folks who use that.
Kevin:You can't run it on a chromebook.
Scott:Oh, you can't.
Scott:Okay.
Scott:All right.
Scott:So that's good to know.
Scott:That's good.
Scott:Then from there, if the going pro category is actually an app that I use, and part of my workflow, it's called Hindenburg, just like the, you know, the airship that.
Scott:The blimp that exploded.
Scott:Right.
Scott:It's the same thing.
Scott:I don't know.
Scott:They probably have another reason for using Hindenburg.
Scott:I hope so.
Kevin:That's not the case.
Scott:But they have.
Scott:They have multiple options on their website, and they just came out with a big update that includes transcriptions and this, that and the other.
Scott:So you can either pay monthly and there's various tiers, right?
Scott:So I won't kind of get into all the different various tiers, but.
Scott:Or you can pay once.
Scott:You can pay like, kind of like what they call a perpetual license, which means you pay once, you pay upfront.
Scott:And it just doesn't come with some of the add on services.
Scott:I paid for that one upfront for version one, and I really like using it because it's very similar.
Scott:If you come from video editing, like Final Cut pro, the workflow is similar, the tools are similar, and I just, I like the control it gives me.
Scott:I can, I can add in special effects and musicbed and fades and all the stuff that I like to do to kind of help craft a story now that I'm more comfortable with it.
Scott:You can do that really well.
Scott:And it's really made, specifically made for voice oriented media.
Scott:So whether that's podcasting or folks who are making, doing news, like, you know, audio clips, and they actually have a version, like, they call it like Hindenburg narrator for people who are doing audiobooks.
Scott:So they have special features for that.
Scott:They've got like a little kind of clips bar on the side where you can drag files over if you want to use them.
Scott:So if you have your music, a bunch of music files, like ten music files, and you don't want to just drag them in there, you can put them there and they just sit there until you want them, and then you can drag them over into your project.
Scott:You can save templates.
Scott:I really like Hindenburg, and they've been slowly kind of advancing that.
Scott:The big 2.0 version just came out a little while ago.
Scott:So Hindenburg's a very popular one.
Scott:It is pricey.
Scott:If you buy it up front.
Scott:I mean, it's.
Scott:It can be about three, $400.
Scott:I think I got it.
Scott:If there's sometimes about twice a year, they'll offer a decent discount.
Scott:There's like a national podcasting day.
Scott:I forget what day it is, but look it up, because a lot of times they offer a discount on only on that day.
Scott:I think it's like August September timeframe.
Scott:So if you're, so if you're, if you're, if you're listening to this and you're considering a tool like Hindenburg, Google what the national podcasting day is.
Scott:And that's usually when they offer a decent discount for Hindenburg.
Scott:And then there is like the monthly options as well.
Scott:That'll add things like transcription services.
Kevin:September 30.
Scott:September 30.
Scott:There you go.
Scott:I was right.
Scott:September and then if we start getting into the advanced tools, and these are like, for the professionals that are doing high end audio, this, that, and the other.
Scott:There's Adobe audition.
Scott:There's a tool called Pro Tools, and that is like high, high end stuff, Adobe.
Scott:And then logic Pro, which is a paid Mac app.
Scott:Again, that's more oriented towards music and all these tools together.
Scott:Sometimes if you start finding other podcasts much more professional than, than ours, I will say they will call them daws, or, yeah, they'll call them daws, which is digital audio workstation.
Scott:And so that's kind of the industry term for, you know, whatever software, little happy birthday symbol there.
Scott:So that's kind of the industry term for the software that we have for these tools.
Scott:There's some other ones out there I think we had talked about briefly, like podcastle, Riverside FM, which is more.
Scott:They kind of started with remote recording first.
Scott:There's one last service that's pretty big on the market now, and it's very popular.
Scott:It's called descript.
Scott:And that's actually what I use typically before Hindenburg.
Scott:I've had Hindenburg for a while, and descript has gotten really good in the past, I'd say, like year and a half.
Scott:And that what you do is you put your audio files in there and you can edit the podcast like it's a word document.
Scott:It's really cool.
Scott:And so you basically, you can edit it.
Scott:What it does, it transcribes everything.
Scott:And it says, hey, if there's two speakers, tell me if there's two speakers.
Scott:And then it'll detect the two speakers and let you label them.
Scott:And so it'll label it.
Scott:It does the transcription, and then you can go through, and if you delete all the Uhs out of there, which actually has an automatic function to do that, it'll automatically delete all of those Uhs and uhs and filler words out of the file.
Scott:It basically does the cutting for you.
Scott:It's really, really cool.
Scott:It's, yeah, it's amazing.
Scott:And they actually just, um, acquired the, the platform that we're using to do, to record this remotely, which is squadcast.
Scott:So squadcast was a remote recording video tool, like kind of better version.
Scott:Think of a better thing than Zoom.
Scott:So they just acquired it.
Scott:And so now if I wanted to, even though you're the one editing these files, once we're done recording, I could automatically open this session up in descript and just start, bam, editing it right away.
Scott:And it would have all the transcribed things, and I could start doing all the stuff you can do music, you can do sound effects, you can do fading and all that stuff.
Scott:I don't, I prefer Hindenburg for that.
Scott:So what I'll, what I'll typically do, and I don't think a lot of people probably do this.
Scott:This is just what I found that I like the best, is I'll edit the basic text in descript, export that into Hindenburg, and that's when I'll add my music and my sound effects.
Scott:And sometimes I add like a fancy initial minute where I kind of set the scene.
Scott:It's almost like a full blown storytelling, immersive sound effects and all that stuff.
Scott:To me, I find that easier to do in Hindenburg.
Scott:And then descript, if you want to get into video podcasting, that's kind of, that is the front runner right there is video podcasting because you can do the same thing as editing the text document, but with a video file.
Scott:So you could, we could, if we were recording the video for this conversation right now, we could drag the video into description.
Scott:It would transcribe it all.
Scott:And then same thing, we could edit, edit the words, and it would just cut the video file to match that.
Scott:It's pretty cool, and I've done it before, so if people are curious what that looks like, you can check out my YouTube channel, walk with history on YouTube.
Scott:It's the first thing that will pop up.
Scott:And we have like a podcast playlist, a video podcast playlist.
Scott:If you're curious, you can overlay, you can do all sorts of video editing stuff.
Scott:That's kind of what they're, what they're doing with that.
Scott:So I like my two favorites.
Scott:You know, like I said in the beginning, my workflow is typically, we'll record something like this.
Scott:Or actually, when I record with Jen, we record talk with history.
Scott:I have kind of an external recorder with a different microphone, and we'll talk about, you know, those kinds of tools later in a future episode.
Scott:But I record the files externally.
Scott:I put them on my laptop, and I just drag the two separate audio files, a separate track for Jen and separate track for me into descript.
Scott:It puts them into, it matches them up because they're the same length, right.
Scott:And then it says, okay, we can tell that this is a conversation.
Scott:So it transcribes it.
Scott:And then the nice thing is, too, is it'll say, hey, we notice what's called mic bleed.
Scott:And mic bleed is if you're sitting in the same room and Jen's voice is carrying over to my microphone.
Scott:And so you get some of her voice in my audio file, it'll notice that and it'll say, hey, do you want us to fix that?
Scott:I was like, yep.
Scott:And so it'll fix it.
Kevin:Technology, man.
Scott:Yeah.
Scott:Descript, honestly, if you're going to kind of go for the all in one service and you're willing to pay for that annual, annual fee, and I like it enough that I actually do, descript is amazing.
Scott:If you're going to pick one and you're willing to pay for it, that's my recommendation.
Scott:They're opening it up.
Scott:You can work on it with teams with multiple people.
Scott:Kev, if you and I had ever wanted to do that, we could do multiple people using descript in a single project at the same time, like a Google Doc.
Scott:You can do it in the browser.
Scott:They just started enabling it, so you could do it in the browser.
Scott:You don't have to have it on your device.
Scott:It's pretty amazing what they're doing with descript.
Scott:So I'd say, in my opinion, they're kind of one of the front runners right now as far as podcast oriented software.
Kevin:Cool, man.
Kevin:That's good stuff.
Scott:Yeah, they're probably about 250 a year, which to me I think is justifiable.
Scott:I mean, you operate in the red for a while before you ever operate in the black.
Scott:I'm still operating in red.
Scott:Not in the black yet, but we're getting there.
Scott:I've got some potential leads out there.
Scott:Those are the big things that I use for those listening.
Scott:Remember the categories?
Scott:The easiest, free, starting to go pro, and then there's the high high end stuff.
Scott:If you're looking at thinking about the high high end stuff, I don't know why you're listening to this podcast.
Scott:Because we are.
Scott:We are not at that level.
Scott:No, we are by any means at all.
Scott:So, kev, what were the two mobile ones that you used?
Kevin:Podcast maker and ferrite.
Scott:Okay.
Scott:And those are iPhone, iPad specific.
Scott:Do you know if they're like Android.
Kevin:Type apps or I.
Kevin:Podcast maker is not ferrite.
Kevin:Maybe, but I don't.
Scott:Okay.
Scott:Yeah.
Scott:A lot of these tools that I mentioned, I believe they're platform agnostic.
Scott:I don't think anything is Mac specific or anything like that.
Scott:In fact, I know the only thing that's Mac specific is garageband and then logic Pro.
Scott:But again, those are kind of music oriented tools there.
Scott:So everything else, descript, Riverside, Hindenburg, those are all Mac or PC or whatever.
Scott:So again, for those listening, I encourage you to check out the free ones, but don't be afraid to try out some of those other ones that have some of those features, because the first thing that you're going to do to get your audio quality better is get a decent microphone.
Scott:The second thing after that really should be kind of treating the space around you.
Scott:It's not necessarily the software.
Scott:Like if you're recording in your bathroom with nothing but hard surfaces around you, that's just going to create tons of echo and audio bounce back.
Scott:But if you're recording in your closet with all these soft hanging clothes around you, it's going to sound a lot more subdued and you're going to get cleaner audio out of that.
Scott:The next thing after those two things, to me, in my opinion, is kind of the software that can help clean up some of that audio.
Scott:It can do things like auto leveling.
Scott:So if I lean away from the microphone and you can't hear me as well, or if I talk up really close, right up on the microphone like this, what auto leveling will do is it'll level out the far away and the close up to a normal level for you, rather than you having to do that manually.
Scott:So there's a lot of cool things that do that.
Scott: think that we can cover in a: Scott:But kev, do you have any questions about any of those specific ones, those tools that I talked about?
Kevin:No, I do not.
Kevin:That's good advice, man.
Scott:Yeah.
Scott:I mean, again, there's so many resources out there.
Scott:The best thing that anybody listening to this episode could probably do after this is go find a podcast that's better than ours and listen to them.
Scott:They don't exist.
Scott:I'm a big fan of the Buzzcast podcast.
Scott: and they've been doing it for: Scott:They started the inception of podcasting.
Scott:They've got a great series.
Scott:So look up buzzcast, or just buzzsprout is the service.
Scott:It's one of the hosting services.
Scott:And I don't think we've talked about hosting services too much.
Scott:I can't remember.
Scott:We've got, maybe that's a future topic or maybe we've already recorded, but Buzzsprout actually has a whole series.
Scott:They got a whole article of how to start a podcast.
Scott:So after you listen to all of our episodes, then go over there and read their article for all their recommendations.
Scott:But again, these are great ones.
Scott:This is just kind of what I use.
Scott:I like descript.
Scott:That's probably my top recommendation to anybody, if you're willing to pay for a tool, because it really, it does everything, but it can be as basic as just editing a word document to edit your podcast.
Scott:I recommend not over editing because it'll sound choppy.
Scott:But that's also why, just like Kevin said in the beginning, you record and you do a handful.
Scott:My recommendation is at least ten.
Scott:Record at least ten, edit all of them.
Scott:Have them ready.
Scott:And then when you launch your podcast, launch with three, and then launch weekly after that, keep the master files.
Scott:You can always remaster things if you need to.
Scott:And that's the nice thing about podcasts, is you can update the episode after the fact.
Scott:It's not like YouTube, where you upload the video, and it's that for forever.
Scott:For podcasts, you can update the audio files later.
Scott:So, yeah, I mean, that's all I got.
Scott:So hopefully people got something out of that and we'll try to toss a couple links into the show notes.
Scott:But if not, you can Google this topic and you're going to find plenty of help online.
Scott:Don't use chat GPT, though.
Scott:It's not, don't trust too much.
Scott:Google is a little bit better.
Scott:Find those websites.
Scott:All right?
Scott:Yeah, man.
Kevin:Cool.
Kevin:Until next time.
Scott:All right.
Scott:Yeah, peace out.
