The answer to your first two questions is, unfortunately, feel. You just know. I found it helpful to edit conversations in one go to make sure it felt organic, and I'd always rewind half a minute after making a cut like that to check myself.

On your third point, you'll find that if you cut so that the waveforms you intend to join are similar and at the same level, the edit will most often be unnoticeable. The ability to drag a segment back out a beat or two to nuance this makes it pretty low stress once you get the hang of it.

On your fourth point, I think the conventional wisdom is that some breath sounds are essential to making a conversation feel real. You have two levers for this... one is not to use any more gain than you have to on your mic. The other, in post, is noise gate.

Using EQ is a critical skill, IMHO, more important than the mic you choose. Search YouTube for some instructions for your particular DAW. It will be a big 'aha!'. As for compression, you'll always end up using some, but it's more critical when you're working with material that has big differences between the loudest and softest sounds.

Good luck and enjoy the side-quest!

> How do you balance keeping someone’s natural speech pattern with keeping the edit tight and pacey

If their natural pattern is pretty loose, rambley, and slow-you don't! Art is a lie, production is a deceiver, and the finish product is a half-truth. Find something that feels emotionally honest but is still more concise. If they have a stutter, don't cut that out, but don't leave us sitting there for 15 seconds while this person is finding words for their sentence.

If they use a lot of filler words mid-sentence like

> "It's uhm quite a big process, there's a lot of like- 'small things' to take care of" then leave that alone.

If they speak like

> "It's uhmm.... It's a big process. There's like- ... uh. There's a lof ot small things to uh take care of"

Turn that into

> "It's uhmm.... It's a big process. There's like- ... uh. There's a lof ot small things to uh take care of"

Don't change the meaning of the sentence, don't take a sentence out that change the meaning of another included piece, but trim that content up.

>When I truncate a pause, how can I tell how much to cut to keep it natural or achieve the pace I want?

Depends on what you want! Just listen to it. If your style is more fast paced, you want less time. If you're reading something or have a scripted show, maybe you want more times between lines. For casual conversation, 250-450 milliseconds is usually a sweet spot depending on the flow of conversation and how fast this person speaks. Just listen to the natural rhythm and when you think "This silence is going on a long time" select 1/3 of the middle and cut it out. See if that makes you happy, and if not add more or take more out. You just get a feel for it, and it changes with every single show and speaker.

> If I need to cut between two words that are strung together, how can I tell where the best place is in the waveform or when a letter sound has properly finished (or started) when I’m making my selection?

I would really avoid this unless it's necessary, and I mean necessarry not, "I'd like to do it." Often times tightly packed words just don't have clean edits. Words ending with "ess" sounds that are followed by words starting with "ess" sounds are easy cuts. You want to keep whatever sounds natural, but with english we will slurr our beginnings and endings of words together which makes it hard to add a new word after an edit.

One big trick you can use is if the edited words are common enough that they may have been said later in the podcast, set a marker on where that edit is, name that marker after the word you're editing, and then wait for them to say that word again in a different location that might be a cleaner take. Then just see if you can copy and paste that section in to get around using the original.

If you're editing your own voice just record it again. Be an actor. Capture the sentence you said sloppily in the same tone so it fits, and drop that line in. If that sounds like too much work, then what you wanted to edit out probably wasn't necessary to edit out.

There's times where a question asked by the interviewer came out so mumbled or I couldn't cut the run-on sentence up to be sensible, or we had an unfixable audio problem, I would ask for them to re-record it clean for me.

> Should I cut or reduce all breath sounds, or does that help keep it natural?

Nobody wants to hear someone panting, but breath when it's not too loud is usually ignorable. You can reduce them if you'd like, (There's hundreds per episode so make sure you're fully leveraging your editor to make shortcuts and tools to do this quickly) or you can use an automated tool. Be sure to ensure the automated tool doesn't go too far as it can misidentify breath and make a word sound all jacked up.

Play around with it, see what you like, and see how much work it's going to take.

A general note; for yourself and any permanent co-hosts, it's totally ok to coach yourself during the recording. If you have a sentence and you're thinking about it while speaking and flub; just say it again. It goes back to that acting part. You can stop your co-host and say "that was really good, repeat that for our audience" and just cut the original flub.

You'll develop an understanding when you edit of "Man, I wish I stopped and said X so I had a better cut" and you'll hear those cuts the bad of your mind when you record. You can lean into that and start to re-phrase something during recording giving yourself a clean in/out.

>Any YouTubers, free training or other resources you can recommend??

Find someone that has good tutorials on your editor. Time is everything. You'll lose creative ideas because an edit you want to make takes too much time, or you don't know how to do it in the software. If you're not on a full featured editor, find one that works for you and learn the hell of out it. Reaper is one of the most dominate and flexible DAWs I've ever used. I own 4 major DAWs and I just can't get myself out of reaper for editing podcasts. The shortcuts scripts and automations they can leverage is just nuts and it saves me so much time compared to other software.

You may never love editing, but if you don't learn to be effective, you'll stop editing because it will be so much work. It's not very cost effective for smaller shows to hire an editor. You'll be doing this for a long time unless you've got cash you're willing to spend. Get comfortable at something and really take a deep dive into understanding it.

Good luck!

I've seen people (in this sub) who are snobbish about Audacity, but it really is an amazingly versatile app, that's more than powerful enough to put together a podcast. And it's free.

Very informative. This all stuff that I know and use every time I produce and episode, but I am completely self taught and it's nice to see that I am not doing things the hard way.

Are you serious? I've been using Audacity for like 6 months and never understood how to do multitrack. We just had to make sure the levels were perfect before we hit record. Wish I'd watched this video sooner.

This is exactly what I needed. Just downloaded this app yesterday to try out.

I use audacity when I don’t have access to my regular equipment.

It is perfectly fine for a podcast.

Thank you so much for this! I'm incredibly new to editing and I've been trying to gain a better understanding of a good order of operations to make things easier for me, but more importantly better for my listeners with each episode. This is super valuable!

This is such a useful guide! Thank you for sharing this!

This is a really great guide for any podcasters who want to get into learning Audacity.

Thanks everyone for the kind words! If anyone has any advice for updates to the guide I'm all ears

On mobile the text is super thin. Nice write up though

This is a very broad question. I'd start by learning some audio fundamentals. There's plenty of free info out there in both text format as well as video.

I used to use it many years ago. I've moved onto bigger and better things, and coming back to Audacity just to see what's up, I honestly don't like it.

Just listen to the podcast and if it sounds bad, make it sound better. Others have mentioned best practices, and some of those things will work for you and some won’t. Try stuff and see what you like and what sounds good.

Do use speech compression (loudness, not data rate - two totally different things with similar names).

Use it, but don't overdo it.

Why? Because you only have so many 'bits' of loudness before you get distortion, and the loudest sound (aka 'normalized') sets that maximum in your track. But most speech in your track won't be nearly that loud.

With speech compression, you grab those loud peaks and pull them down some. Now your track is all well below that digital ceiling, and you can pull everything up and make it (somewhat) louder. That's where not overdoing it comes in. A little is good. A lot is fatiguing to listen to.

The deets: While recording in Audacity, make most of your audio peaks hit about -15 dB. That leaves you room for someone to get excited and loud - hitting maybe -5 or so - without clipping. But that's a uselessly low audio track, so in 'post' (in editing) you have to bring it up. Set your 'threshold' at about -18, and your ratio about 4:1. Now any audio that rises above -18 is held down. If it starts 4 dB above your -18 threshold (so the peak hits -14), the result will be only a 1 dB increase. Finally raise the output (sometimes called 'makeup gain') so peaks reach around -3. Set a hard limiter at -0.5 dB and you catch those occasional transients that get really loud and keep them from clipping.

These are my steps for editing:

1. Clean up each track
   1. Noise Removal on Audacity (best NR I know)
   2. Run it thru Levelator, it's free and will help you a lot
2. Sync your tracks
3. Clean all tracks together
   1. Remove stutter, dead air, breathing, coughing, etc...
   2. Rearrange any time someone is talking over another person
   3. Remove anything that's not needed. Ex.: someone goes out of topic for a couple of minutes that don't add anything to the conversation
   4. Remove repeated lines. Sometimes people repeat themselves, keep the best version, remove the rest.
   5. Resync as needed. Sometimes tracks can desync after an hour or so of recording.
4. Separate talking topics in blocks
   1. Yes, even if your recording is not organized, organize it. Pull things left and right to make more sense to the audience
   2. Don't be afraid to remove anything that doesn't add to the cast
5. Add soundbites (optional)
6. Add background track (get freeuse songs)

Always start your podcasts with the same intro, then fade into the recorded audio tracks for the introduction. This creates a sound signature that your audience will quickly relate to and know who/what they are listening to.

Curious to hear others' takes on this: I'd say upload as uncompressed mixed wavs if your platform auto converts to 128kbps mp3, because I've heard of people uploading at 128 only to have it re-converted to 128 by the platform - especially if they're adding any ads (not that that's an immediate prob for the OP, but I'm talking about best practice moving forward). You want only one stage of data compression. What's the current state of play with auto-conversion on the various platforms?

Goes without saying but make sure you get a separate audio track for every person.

I create an entire script in Word. I record it in Audacity. I make a lot of use of plug n roll (Shft-D) to correct on the go which means minimal issues later when I go through to edit and check. Big recent win -Shift mouse scroll - to scroll horizontally!!!!!! Most sound treatment via Auphonic. Upload.

Here's my advice: be honest about how you edit, the tools you use to edit, and why you do things the way you do them. I do not recommend asking for tips on here for how different editors do things. That's because it wouldn't be honest about your abilities or how you complete an edit.

Here are a few reasons why:

They want to see if you have the basics down within the DAW(s) you use.

They will want to know if you understand the principals of editing.

They will definitely want to hear you talk about how important deadlines are to producing a podcast, how quickly you turn around an episode, and how you will work to support the production team.

If you aren't a picture perfect candidate, but you have the personality, disposition, have most of skills and strengths they are looking for, and you're trainable, they'll hire you. Tell them how you are looking to bring in your skills and experience to contribute to the production, but you're also looking to grow and thrive within as their employee. They can always train you in their way of doing things or help build your skills by working under a more experienced person -- as long as you aren't significantly slowing things down They just want to make sure you have the personality and disposition to fit their team and the ability to be a responsible editor who contributes to the team's effort of getting their episodes edited in a timely manner.

Be honest. Be yourself. Be absolutely honest about the DAWs and equipment you are familiar with and have actual experience on. Do not be deceitful about any of that stuff. What do you think would happen if you got hired because you said you used DaVinci for color grading (but you don't actually know how to use DaVinci), then you get hired because of that, and the producers later find out you actually don't know anything about it and they were counting on you to hit the ground running with color correcting? If you didn't get fired, you would definitely tarnish your standing with the team and have a hard time earning their trust back. Additionally, what if they want to see your color grading demo reel and you don't have one? Or, worst of all, your demo doesn't show you can color grade or do it in the manner you said you did it in?

Finally, if you don't land the job, follow up with one of the interviewers to see why you did't get it. Ask them how you can grow and be a better candidate next time. That shows you are trying to grow and be a better candidate, which they will definitely remember if another position opens up. Hell, they may just call you directly and offer the job.

I wish you the best of luck with your interview and hope you land the gig!

Disclaimer: I own a production company

For noise reduction, reafir from reaper's free reaplugs works great.

For color grading, look up a DaVinci resolve tutorial. Focus on color correction first. Using a clapper board with middle grey, or a color checker/spydercheckr/one shot can speed that up quite a bit. Don't buy LUTs, those are sold as snake oil.

Run a declicker in your process as well. Helped me a ton.

I'm not a professional editor, but decided today to make a quick note of the steps I take for one of my shows:

1.        Add video files to a new Descript project. Apply Studio Sound and Compression.

2.        Edit for clarity.

3.        Export rough cut audio.

4.        Import rough cut audio into Castmagic, Amazing Apps - Rough Cut space. Use this for a draft title, to help draft the intro, and find a hook.

5.        Write the intro and outro.

6.        Record the intro and outro.

7.        Add the intro and outro to Descript project and edit scenes, transitions, graphics.

8.        Copy the video composition to a new audio composition.

9.        Edit the audio composition by removing filler words, adding in Randy Woods “Free” music track in intro and outro.

10.   Export the audio and video compositions from Descript.

11.   Export the transcript from the audio composition.

12.   Export the subtitles from the video composition.

13.   Upload the audio to Castmagic, Amazing Apps space. Use this for timestamps.

14.   Upload the audio to Captivate and write the episode description.

15.   Upload the video to YouTube and write the episode description.

16.   Create square and landscape thumbnails in Canva and download images.

17.   Upload square thumbnail to Captivate

18.   Upload landscape thumbnail to YouTube

19.   Upload subtitles to YouTube

20.   Upload transcript to Captivate

21.   Publish YouTube video.

22.   Copy YouTube video URL and add it to episode in Captivate.

23.   Publish Captivate episode.