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.

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

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.

Theres a pretty good Google doc that gives a general tutorial (+ links to required FREE extensions) on how to get your audio to sound nice post-recording but it leans towards a more bass-ier voice, so take it for what you will.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fmS0Wp6EantjSmQiBnPWyCCOSNpiawjgCOdUJknKbnE/edit?usp=drivesdk

After I've done all the narration, I make sure to go through the following editing.

Noise Cancellation (Absolute MUST to have decent quality)

Equalization (look on youtube for walkthroughs of which settings give you a good EQ curve for voice)

Normalization

Compression

Then re-do the Normalization.

Quality comes out much better than the raw recording before edits.

compressor EQ and limiter

1. Get a mic that is not the Blue Yeti (I love the Rode Podmic USB)
2. Get it about three finger widths from you and point it at the corner of your mouth.
3. Have a windscreen/pop filter
   Check out Mike's Video https://youtu.be/WsmMMKRZp5g?si=dUsIEp7HjXEkvOOi

Moderator Required full disclosure: I am the head of Podcasting at Podpage and the founder of the School of Podcasting.

Define "professional". If you are talking about why your voice doesn't sound like you THOUGHT it should sound, no.

That is just what you sound like. We all went through 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.

So many YouTube videos out there with step by step. That is one of the best things about Audacity.

I don't know if this is the right way, but i based it on this excellent doc put together by Shonen flop.

Also, we are a 2 people podcast and one of us uses a passable mic, the other one uses headphones. So, ymmv.

I merge the tracks, remove the clap sounds, noise reduce, normalise, compress, loudness normalisation, high and low pass filter, de-esser (Spitfish plugin), de-clicker, and finally truncate silence. I've noticed that the background AC hiss gets louder after compression, so i might run noise reduction a second time. Also, I change the tempo to +20% to edit the content/remove overlaps etc. I revert it before exporting the whole thing as MP3.

Honestly i have no idea if this is too much or too little, but I've not received any major complaints about the audio quality yet.

I often boost bass and treble and truncate silence.

I use the process described here as my baseline

https://www.reddit.com/r/podcasting/comments/7s8i60/whats_your_basic_podcast_editing_workflow/dt50f94/

Everything people are saying here is still very dependent on your source audio. For example, if your source is overall quiet but with moments of drastic clipping (like the Impeachment Hearings I've been making a podcast out of), you're probably going to want to run a limiter as the very first thing you do.

I'm going to have to watch this thread, because what I do is somewhat different. I do:

• noise removal.
• hard limit, based on how the track is.
• normalise to (-1.5).
• EQ to basically remove bass (<100hz or so) and treble (>14khz or so).
• compress.

I'm fairly happy with the results, but I'm sure it could be better.

This is the topic of my very first podcast! Editing is a different process form mixing. During an editing pass you want to:

1. Select the best channel for each moment (when someone isn't speaking, cut their mic)
2. Fill and fade any gaps
3. Remove any unnecessary noises
4. Use clip gain to level everything out

Then, you can mix:

1. EQ each track to maximize timbre and notch out any hums
2. Use broadband noise reduction (but ONLY if it's absolutely necessary, it should not be if you recorded it well)
3. De-ess (again, not always necessary)
4. Compress (I use two compressors that each do only a little - one fast attack and release to knock down transients, and one slow attack and release to level things out further)
5. Limit

The reason for this is that each mix process is a reductive one that you want doing as little as possible. EQ, NR, DeS, CMP, LMT in that order gives you the best possible sound quality.

I've got so much to learn

Audacity for PC users is well supported in the Reddit and all over the place. Get a work flow and a step by step list from Chat GPT and get in there and do some test work.

OK, thanks everyone. I’m on a Mac and it seems like GarageBand might be the easiest. I do have music at the beginning and end of the cast to splice in.

If you’re just trying to add intro/outro music, you might want to check out Shanda.

https://www.shanda.studio/

It’s designed specifically for podcasters who want something intuitive and fast. You just upload your audio + music once, and it automatically adds your intro/outro 

If you don't have a guest and its just solo, you can record directly into your editing software in the future

I use Garageband, and it is pretty straightforward. You just have to be using a Mac.