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How to Podfic: A Highly Biased and Incomplete Tutorial

So, a while ago, some of my friends and fellow cast members of the @sansukhpodfic asked about how to make and edit podfic on their own. I created this tutorial for them, as a supplement to the resources already posted by the Sansukh mods. In the wake of the most recent @auralphonic episode asking for technical advice on podficcing in Audacity, I thought I would polish this up and post it. This tutorial explains how, once you have permission to record a story, you go about turning it into a podfic using Audacity. It focuses on technical and logistical details, rather than artistic advice, and is cobbled together from my own experience, my knowledge of the mathematics behind signal analysis, and other people’s tutorials. There's lots of communities and resources out there that give advice on the artistic side (Auralphonic, for example, has an episode for newbies), which I recommend checking out.

Disclaimer: There is no one standard method of doing this! This is the method I have found gives me the best results, personally, but there may be better ways to do this. I strongly recommend checking out other resources for comparison.

Part I: Recording

Okay, so you have your story, you have your equipment, and you are ready to record. Personally, I always rehearse a story at least once out loud before I begin even setting things up, to work out the artistic details, any difficult words, etc. This is totally optional, but I find it helps.

Step 1. Equipment Setup

While setup for individual mics varies a lot, there are some commonalities. Basically, find a quiet space where you can be comfortably 12-18" from your mic. Situate yourself so you can talk directly into mic (Note: some people recommend a slight offset, but I find this interferes with clarity a little). Make sure your mic is on a surface you aren’t going to bump, and that isn’t going to transmit vibration from anything. USE A POP FILTER. If you don’t have a pop filter already, you can buy one for cheap on amazon, or build your own using this tutorial.

If your microphone allows it, plug your headphones into your mic, and listen through the headphones while you record. I recommend you also investigate any gain or pattern settings that are part of your mic’s hardware, and find the ones that work best for you.

Place your text in an easy to see location, where you can easily read it and still face the mic. Personally, I pull the text up on my tablet, and set it on a music stand next to my mic (but not touching it!). I also recommend keeping water nearby, in case your throat suddenly gives out.

Close any doors or vents that noise can come through. Turn off any fans or air conditioners or other loud equipment in your recording space. If your computer setup allows, put your computer somewhere that the mic cannot pick up the sound of the computer’s fan. Also, it is best if you can work with your computer not plugged into the wall, as that can generate electrical interference that will be heard in your recording.

Step 2: Program Setup

Now, open audacity. Check that you have your mic selected as input and output. Check that you're on mono (you might try stereo if you're doing something like recording music, and your mic can do stereo, but we won't go into that).

Figure out best recording volume for you. My mic saturates pretty easily on the gain setting I get best quality with, so I have (through trial and error) discovered that my recording volume should be 40%. You can also mess with the volume of playback, but why bother?

Step 3: Record!

When you are ready, press record. Leave several seconds of silence at the beginning (I have used 5 seconds and 10 seconds in the past, and not seen a significant difference. One second is also possible, but not as effective). Then, start reading!

If a sudden noise occurs, or you need to stop for some reason, you can pause the recording, then press the pause button again to restart. If you have pressed the stop button, you will need to press shift+R on your keyboard to start recording again on the same track. Otherwise, if you hit record again, it will start a new track.

If you flub a line, I recommend that you stop reading, and start again from the beginning of the phrase or sentence. Some people will recommend you go back to the beginning of the paragraph, but I don't personally find this necessary. Do not bother stopping the recording; you can remove the flubs in editing.

As soon as you are done recording, save the project. You might even want to save two copies of it: one to edit with, and one just in case you mess up the editing.

Part 2: Basic Editing

This covers the bare minimum editing you should be doing to your podfic. There is lot of more advanced stuff you can do, but this will let you at least have decent audio quality in whatever you post.

Step 1: Noise Reduction

Select a portion of that silent space from the beginning of your recording. This will be your noise sample, to tell the algorithm what the ambient noise in your recording space looks like. I recommend that you listen to that sample to ensure that it contains ONLY ambient noise. That means no sudden sounds, like breathing, or thumping the table.

If you are happy with your noise sample, then go to the effects menu, and select “Noise Reduction”. When the Noise Reduction window pops up, you will hit the button labeled “Get Noise Profile”.

The window will close automatically. Next, select the whole track you want to do noise removal on, and go to Noise Reduction on the effects menu again. Select the volume you want noise reduced by, and the sensitivity you want to use. I like to use 12 dB for the reduction, and 6.00 for the sensitivity, but sometimes that seems to give the signal a weird hollow sound. If that happens I usually try reducing the sensitivity. You will remove less noise that way, but you will also run less risk of removing actual signal. Press okay when you have the settings you want.

Step 2: Rough Cut

Next, do a rough cut to remove any flubbed lines, repeated bits, inconvenient noises, and (if you're not doing any more detailed editing) any overly long pauses. To do this, I listen all the way through the recording and simply select and delete the parts I don’t want. Some people have a visual editing method where they clap or snap or something when they make a mistake, so they know to cut there without listening, but I’ll be honest; I’ve never gotten that to work. I only do visual editing in multi-voice podfics, and then only to mark the ends of my lines. If you DO use that method, though, make sure you remove the clapping noises before moving on to the next step.

Step 3: Normalize

To make sure your podfic is a volume that won’t either deafen people or be inaudible, select the whole track, and go to the normalize function from the effects menu. (Note: this function also removes an electrical problem called DC offset, where the sound wave isn’t centered at zero, which can cause problems in other editing). In the window that pops up, choose a volume that you want as the loudest average volume of your podfic. A lot of people use -1 dB. I personally use -3 dB, as that is that standard Amazon uses for audiobooks sold through Audible. Press okay when you are done.

If there’s a lot of variation between loud and soft parts of your podfic, you might considered using the Compressor effect. This effect will reduce the difference in volume between the loud and soft parts, but if you have noise behind your recording that the Noise Reduction effect didn’t get out, it can make things worse, so use at your own risk. To apply the compressor, select the whole track again, and choose Compressor from the effects menu. These are the default settings I use:

-- Threshold = -12 dB -- Noise Floor: -40 dB -- Ratio: 2:1 -- Attach Time: 0.20 sec -- Release Time: 1.0 sec -- Compress based on Peaks - ON

Press okay when you are done.

Now, if you are trying to match the volume on something else, your normalization process gets a little more complicated. You still use the normalize setting to match the maximum volume of the thing you are matching. However, even more than that, you want to match the AVERAGE volume. To find out the average volume of a piece of audio, select the track, go to the Analyze menu, and select Contrast. The following menu will pop up:

Hit the button labelled “Measure selection” in the Foreground row to find out the average volume of your audio.

If you have successfully matched the peak volume of the audio you are matching, but the average volume is too low, then you can make the Threshold on the compressor lower (say, -14 dB, or -16 dB) or the ratio higher (say, 2.5:1 or 3:1)

Regardless, if you decide to use the compressor at all, you will need to use the normalize function again afterward. If your original recording had no DC offset, you could theoretically just use Normalize AFTER using Compressor, but since DC offset can be hard to see if it’s small, I just run Normalize before and after, to be safe.

Step 4: De-Essing

This is a step I have only recently added to my editing process, but it makes a world of difference. You may have noticed that s and sh sounds in your recording sound really harsh. This is a common problem in recorded audio, related to the way the microphone picks up high frequencies when recording these sounds. To fix this in editing, select the whole track again, go to the low-pass filter in the Effects menu.

First, choose your rolloff from the dropdown. Your default option, 6 bB, is generally going to work just fine. However, if you try that, and it still sounds to harsh, you could try upping that to 12dB.

Next, choose your cutoff frequency. This one is going to be a bit more personal, since it depends on your voice and your mic. The rule of thumb is that you want to choose the highest frequency you can which will still make the s and sh sounds less harsh, but won’t change the rest of the sounds much. For me, that frequency is 9000 Hz. To find where your best frequency is, though, try recording a tongue twister with a lot of s and sh sounds in it (I use “I slit a sheet. A sheet I slit. Upon a slitted sheet I sit”). Then try out different frequencies to find out what works for you. Most people (the internet tells me) will fall between 7000 Hz and 12000 Hz..

Once you have your rolloff and cutoff frequency chosen, just hit the OK button, and the Low Pass Filter window will close.

Part 3: Intermediate Editing

Part 2 told you how to edit so your podfic has bare-minimum quality. This part will tell you how to make it sound polished. I personally do all of this level of editing to all of my podfics, but I know lots of people who don’t, so if you find this intimidating, so ahead and skip it.

Step 1: Silencing

You may have noticed that you can still hear small noises in the pauses between sentences or phrases (like breathing), and that you can occasionally hear little popping or clicking noises at the beginning or end of words where the noises of your mouth, tongue, and throat moving are recorded. To get true silence between words, you will need to use to the Amplify effect on the pauses. When I do this, I zoom into the signal a lot vertically. I then select a whole pause using the cursor, and select Amplify from the effects menu. I usually choose -60 dB as the amount to amplify a pause by to make it effectively silent. Press okay when you are done.

Podficcer beware, though! It is really easy to accidentally cut out sounds you actually want to keep using this method, if you aren’t careful, especially things like consonants at the beginning or end of words. Therefore, I usually silence all the pauses in 10-15 seconds worth of a track, listen to that segment, and then move on to the next part only if it sounds right. This is VERY tedious and time consuming, but I have found it produces MUCH higher quality audio.

Step 2: Manual Pops and Sibilants Removal

You might notice that,as you are doing the silencing, you hear Ps or Bs or Ss that sound really harsh relative to the audio around them, even after you did the De-Essing step above. To fix this, select the (tiny) portion of the audio where just that consonant occurs. You can either use the Amplify effect with an amplification of -1 to -3 dB, or (if it’s at the beginning or end of a phrase), you can use the Fade In or Fade Out effects. No one of these is a magic fix for all occurrences of popped or sibilant consonants, but you can try them out and see which sounds right. I usually do this at the same time as I am doing the silencing.

Step 3: Timing

Often, as we read podfic, we either pause for too long, or we don’t pause long enough. If you have silenced your pauses already, though, fixing this is easy, as you can either delete some of the pause that is already there (for ones that are too long) or you can copy and past some extra silence in. There is no strict rule for how long pauses should be, and it depends a LOT on your natural pacing, but I use the following general rule of thumb: <0.5 sec for comma, 1 sec for a full stop, 1.5-2 seconds for a paragraph break, 3.5 second for a scene break. Mind you, this NOT a strict thing, even when I’m just editing my own recordings. Like with the other editing in this section, I usually do the timing for 10-15 seconds of audio at a time, listen to it, and then move on when I know it’s good. Part 4: Adding music or sound effects

Alright, now you have a gorgeous, polished piece of audio. Many podficcers stop here. But sometimes you want to give your podfic that little something extra: sounds effects, music, things like that. I personally add intro/extro music to all my podfics, unless they are for anthologies that don’t allow it.

Step 1: Effects in Audacity

There are several Effects in audacity that you can use to create various common sound effects you might want in your podfic. Here are a few I use the most.

Reverb: This is the effect I use the most. It makes you sound like you are in a large, echoing space. I use it (on various settings) for telepathy, for text being read silently, or for thoughts. This is really one where you have to mess around with the settings to get the sound you want, though. The nice thing is that, once you have found settings you like, you can save them for future use, and load them in again.

Echo: This will literally just create an identical echo of your audio at a reduced volume. Unlike reverb, you can’t change the shape of the signal that echoes back, so I only use this for one thing: computerized voices. Adding an echo at a delay of 0.009 seconds can make your audio sound like it was said by a computer.

Equalization: This one changes the frequency content of your signal. The pre-set options include one for making your audio sound like a telephone, one for making it sound like a radio, and several others. Like Reverb, this is one you really have to mess around with to figure out what works for you, but you can also save settings for future use. For example, here is one I altered from the telephone setting, which I use only for one specific series of Star Wars fics, when I need to show it’s a transmission:

Change Pitch: This effect lets you raise or lower the pitch of an audio segment. You can use it to make a voice sound higher or lower than it is, but I generally recommend being SUPER careful with this one. You can usually get away with making something up to half a semitone higher or lower without too much trouble, but if you do much more than that, it can sound REALLY distorted and unnatural. It also changes the length of a signal, and can result in odd clicking artifacts due to changes in wavelength, so you need to have silence on either side of a segment you are using Change Pitch on. Raising or lowering the pitch by a quarter to a half a semitone can sometimes be helpful in differentiating when a particular character is speaking, though.

There are so many other Effects in audacity that you can try, though! I definitely recommend messing around with other features of the effects menu to see what you can achieve.

Step 2: Effects Outside Audacity

You might want some sound effects that can’t just be achieved by altering your own voice. For that, there is FreeSound. Freesound lets you download free sound effects, and has all kinds of things.

To incorporate a sound effect you have in another file, use the import function in Audacity. This will bring in the sound effect into a new track, separate from one where your speech is located. I personally ALWAYS keep each sound effect in its own track, as that makes it much easier to adjust things later. Since sounds effects are recorded at all kinds of different volumes and qualities, you may need to use the noise reduction and/or silencing methods discussed in previous sections to get a sound effect up to the quality of your speech.

It is very important that the volumes of your sound effects match your text volume, so the user isn’t deafened by a sudden sound effect. To achieve this, I usually start by normalizing each sound effect to the same volume I normalized the text at. I then use the volume slider (shown below) to adjust the volume of the sound effect until it sounds right. This is a REALLY subjective process, so if you use a lot of sound effects, it might be wise to have a beta listener.

Step 3: Music

To add music to your podfic, simply use the import function the same as you would for sound effects, to bring the music in contained in its own track. There is even a website similar to FreeSound, but for music, called Jamendo. Jamendo has lots of music that is under Creative Commons licensing and is free for download. For intro/extro music, or music that goes under text, though, there are some additional considerations.

First, you need to make sure that music going under text is not too loud for the text to be heard and understood. To accomplish this, I usually first normalize the music to the same volume as the text (just like for sound effects), then lower the volume using the volume slider until the text is easy to understand over the music. Depending on the genre of music, I have found that I had to lower the volume by anything from 6 dB to 20dB. It also helps sometimes to use the Amplify effect on the text that goes over the music, to make it louder by 1 or 2 dB.

You also need to considered how you will cut segments out of the music, if you are not using the entire song. For intro/extro music, I usually use the first 15-30 seconds of a song for the intro, and the last 15-30 second for the extro, which means I have to be careful about where I cut these segments. Try to listen for natural breaks in the music, and have your cuts begin or end at those breaks. I also recommend using the Fade In or Fade Out effects over a period of several seconds where the music goes in/out at a cut you made. This will help to cover up the fact that you cut a song partway through.

Part 5: Exporting You are now almost done! Your podfic is totally complete, and ready for the world to hear. Now, you need to get it out of Audacity. You can export from Audacity in a variety of formats. The two most common are mp3 and m4a formats. For either of these, you will need plugins, which you can find here. Note that, if we wanted to IMPORT audio in either of these formats, you will need the plugins for that too. And that's it! You've made a podfic! Now, it's time to find places to host and post. Here is a great post that talks more about that. Please note, though, that (at this time) Paraka Productions is not accepting anyone new to be hosted there, so you will have to choose one of the other options in the linked posts.

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