Previously, I talked about equipment tips for podcasting. In this post I want to give some basic tips on editing and processing audio files. These are some of the things I’ve learned along the way:

Editing

Always edit from the end of the audio to the beginning, especially if you have time markers for editing. If you start at the beginning and edit to the end you'll change any time markers you set.

Truncate silence is a wonderful option in audacity. Effect -> Truncate Silence and define the amount of space allowed between audio waves. Once the process is started it will remove all the dead air in the audio file. Again, if editing markers are set make sure those are taken care of before hitting truncate silence.

Setting markers. In audacity it’s CTRL + M. It will set a mark during recording for you to go back to later.

Processing

Levelator is great for processing audio: http://web.archive.org/web/20130729204551id_/http://www.conversationsnetwork.org/levelator/

Export the audio as a wave and drop it in the levelator box and it will clean up and level everything in the audio.

Once that's done put the wav file in iTunes and convert it to an MP3 file. Here on instructions on how to set that in iTunes: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1550

iTunes does a good job of converting wav files to MP3s and is the simplest method I know.

Ask questions or leave any audio editing and processing tips in the comment section below.