How I record and edit podcasts in 2022
Many moons ago, I wrote a post about how I record and edit podcasts on a weekly basis. Over time I've evolved that process, learned about shiny new tools, spent a bit of money on new hardware and software, and also started brand new shows. It feels about the right time to update folks on what I do these days but also talk about how I would podcast today as a brand new podcaster starting out 2022.
But first, who the heck am I and why should you care? I started podcasting in 2007. (that's 15 years ago, wtf!) I've produced shows about comic books, fatherhood, movies, folk's favorite things, tech gadgets, and I still occasionally podcast about Tom Cruise movies. These days, I spend my time on two shows in particular. 70mm is a podcast focused on movies with a different theme every month. Danny co-hosts and produces a beautiful piece of artwork to accompany each episode. The Letterboxd Show features conversations with Letterboxd members, filmmakers, critics, actors, and movie lovers about their four favorite films. We also has a secondary show called Weekend Watchlist focused on new movies dropped that week to help you figure out what to watch. I oversee the recording and editing of both shows, as well as steer direction for both to varying degrees.
Recording and editing your first podcast in 2022
OK, with that stuff out of the way...how would I suggest producing your own podcast in late 2022 and beyond? I'm not saying this is the only way to start a pod, this is just the way I'd suggest doing so. Let's break things down below into a TL;DR and then take each section as its own topic:
Buy this USB Mic and tell your friends to buy it, too.
Chat (and record) with your friends on Zoom while also recording your own local audio on your computer, too.
Clean up the local audio if needed using free services like Audacity (optional).
Edit that audio together in a free app like GarageBand on Mac.
Upload your episode to a free hosting service like Anchor.
Buy this USB Mic and tell your friends to buy it, too.
If you're just getting into this whole podcasting thing and don't have a mic, you are going to have to spend some moolah. Don't get cheap with the mic.. please god in heaven. Maybe you have some rando mic laying around or Apple earbuds around or ..gasp.. a Yeti, but please just think about this. Do you want to podcast? Do you want it to sound decent? If you don't want it to sound decent then I suggest you not start a podcast. Like, what are we doing? You listen to podcasts every day and you get excited and you want to start one. I get that! It's the whole reason I started podcasting in the first place; I thought I could do it better than the shows I was listening to. If you don't think you can do it better than what is out there...why bother? At the very least you should want to sound as good as most podcasts out there that you like. You should have a baseline of quality for yourself because guess what, your friends and family aren't going to tell you that your podcast sounds like crap on a stick. They'll share some tweets at launch but man they will go silent and months later ask if you are still doing that podcasting thing. "You still doing that podcast thing about that whatever? Hey that's great." If you don't think you can sound as good or better than other pods, don't bother. That's my whole vibe for podcasting. Take it or leave it, bud.
You'll want to spend a few bucks on a dynamic microphone. Yeti mics are condenser mics and they pick up all sorts of background audio and mouth noises and it's just not pleasant, imo. If you get your room situation sorted and have perfect mic positional technique, you can get good audio out of a Yeti, but more often than not they just don't sound great to me. So help me god if you think it's good enough to be a podcaster and use Apple Earbuds I will slap you. I recommend using this USB-C microphone. It's $79. Both Danny and Proto use an older model of this mic and they sound great. They also use a mic arm and keep it about 3-6 inches from their mouth and don't record in a giant room. This will become a theme in this walk-through, and I get that you're excited and you want to get things off the ground, but it's relatively simple to make a podcast sound great. It's up to you to put in the work so people will want to listen...and keep listening. I've said it before and I'll say it again...your friends will not tell you they don't like your podcast. People that listen to your podcast will not tell you that your mic sucks. That's just the way it goes..let me be that person. Let me be Batman running off into the night at the end of the Dark Knight. Goofy metaphor but whatever.
I prefer to use a Shure BETA 58A dynamic microphone. I've tested a bunch of mics and I prefer how my voice sounds with this particular one. It costs ~$200. That XLR mic cable goes into a Cloudlifter C-1 ($179) to boost the gain which is plugged into a Tascam USB audio interface ($249), which is plugged into my Mac.
Chat (and record) with your friends on Zoom while also recording your own local audio on your computer, too.
There are multiple ways for you to video chat with your co-hosts and some of which offer free recording right in the browser. However, Zoom is pretty ubiquitous in this day and age and more importantly free/cheap. I'd suggest paying the $10/mo for Zoom Pro so you can have longer conversations and also record the audio of everyone in the call. There is a setting inside of Zoom where you can separate everyone's audio so you can download each person's audio as its own file. Before we get ahead any further, I would not use this audio as the files you'd edit for the show. This Zoom audio should be your backup audio. It will always sound of a lesser quality than your locally recorded audio. In case of some kind of disaster when recording locally, you'll always have your Zoom audio to fall back on. And boy howdy, you will encounter disaster. Might as well just get that in your head now and prep for the worst. "Oh shit I recorded my laptop mic instead of my USB mic!" You will do that one day. You think it won't happen, but it will.
In terms of recording your own audio locally, QuickTime lets you record audio right in the app. Open the app and go File > New Audio Recording, choose your Mic and hit record. You can also use a free app like Audacity, but you will need to double and triple check you are setting the app to record your USB microphone.
If your podcast is your Zoom call audio stitched together I'd love for you to ask yourself why. Is it because it's easier? Faster? Maybe it's faster...but is it better? I would say 100% no. If the show is you and one or two friends, just go the extra mile to have them record their audio locally. You are putting yourself out there and people are going to listen to you for the very first time and get one giant impression of your show. If you don't care about giving the highest quality audio when possible...why should they care?
Clean up the local audio if needed using free services like Audacity (optional).
In a perfect world, the audio you and your friends record locally will sound great! Or at least, "good." In some cases, maybe things don't sound great, or there is some background noise, or someone's nose is whistling and maybe you want to clean it up a bit. What I wrote in 2020 still stands in terms of using a free app for cleanup, so I'm going to paste it here again:
Since none of my hosts/guests have audio studios, there is inevitably going to be some random background noise happening in the audio files they send you. That could be nose whistling, your own audio coming through someone else’s headphones by accident, and maybe even a fan in the corner of their room that you asked to have them turn off but they still wont listen to you.
Knowing this, I add the audio file into Audacity and run a Plug-in on the entire thing called Noise Gate. This essentially lets me tell Audacity, “hey man remove any audio in this file that isn’t the person talking or laughing.” It’s incredibly helpful! More technically said, it can lower any audio beneath a decibel level that you set. I run that Plug-in on the file, and export that file as an .mp3. I do the same thing for the other host’s files as well. Here are what my settings look like for Noise Gate plug-in below:
Again, you might never need to do this, but worthwhile knowing these tools are available to you. If you need to raise the levels of you or your friends audio so they sound the same and don't want to use Audacity, this site offers that for a small fee.
Edit that audio together in a free app like GarageBand on Mac.
I've used GarageBand for years and years to edit my podcasts. It's free and super easy to use. Some of my friends are on PC and they use Audacity, but tbh I don't really have any experience editing there. Below is what an older project looked like in GarageBand. (Evergreen comment, but YouTube is a godsend for anything podcast related. You can legit teach yourself everything with some good tutorials.)
Upload your episode to a free hosting service like Anchor.
If you're just starting out, you're probably already annoyed that I recommended a $80 microphone but calm down, ok? Anchor is free and since Spotify owns them, it's super easy to get your show onto Spotify, too. You'll need to submit your show to Apple as well so follow this guide to submit your RSS feed that Anchor will provide to you. If you're cool with spending some cash monthly, I love Simplecast, too.
Once you have your show edited, exported, and uploaded into Anchor, publish! Tell your friends! Have fun! That's the main thing after all, ya know? Most podcasts don't produce more than 7 episodes and kinda stall out for whatever reason and the top 50% of podcasts in the US average 120 downloads after 30 days, give or take. Maybe one day I can get into the nitty gritty of pulling together an entire plan to launch a podcast and why you'd want to start a podcast, and how to keep a podcast growing but for now let's stick to the production side.
Recording and editing my podcasts in 2022
Now that I've laid out how I would start a pod in the year of our lord 2022, let's chat about how I produce and edit 70mm and The Letterboxd Show every week.
Video chat and record using Riverside.fm
Clean up local audio in Izotope RX 9
Edit and export episode using Logic Pro
Upload episode to Anchor, etc
Video chat and record using Riverside.fm
Riverside is a website that lets you video chat and record your own local audio right in Chrome. It's also $29/mo sooooo just saying. But it's so good that I don't even asks my co-hosts to record their audio locally anymore. Riverside takes care of everything right in the browser. I click record, and your guests audio starts being recorded and uploaded into the cloud right then and during the entire recording. Once I hit stop, it finishes uploading the last 1% of the audio and from there I can download it to my computer and get ready for editing. In rare cases, something went wrong with the file, where I've heard some kinda funky background audio, or my audio coming from their headphones that were turned up too loud that I didn't catch while chatting, etc etc. The nice thing is that even if their local recording is kinda crap for whatever reason, you can still download the lower quality "call audio" that you heard while chatting. There are a few other similar web apps like Riverside but I don't have experience with them.
Clean up local audio in Izotope RX 9
This past year or so I finally jumped in head first and spent some real money on audio cleanup software. When I started working for Letterboxd and chatting with guests without a good mic, you'll sometimes just get what you get in terms of audio. Maybe they are using ear buds, maybe they are using their laptop mic, and maybe they are using the biggest room in their entire house. After that call, I need to do what I can to clean up that audio as best I can to make sure that people have an OK time listening to that episode. RX Elements is $99 and comes with tools like de-hum, de-click, voice de-noise, de-reverb, and de-clip. It's a legit magic tool that has been an absolute lifesaver sometimes. I use voice-de-noise a lot. Sometimes you're editing and you hear a click and you have no idea wtf it is, RX can help you remove that noise. There is even a setting in RX Standard called "de-bleed", where if someone's headphones were too loud and another person's audio was bleeding into their mic, you could have the app learn those tracks and do its best to remove the bleed. RX Standard has that larger suite of tools and costs $299. Yes, I bought it, and yes I would do it again.
This section I wrote about Auphonic years ago still stands as well. It's possible that my guests audio levels are kinda funky so after recording I put their audio through Auphonic ($89) to level their audio to around the same levels before I edit to save time. It's possible I could do this step using RX 9 but I haven't really investigated. Here is what I wrote years ago:
Background on Auphonic: A few years ago I finally sprung for Auphonic Leveler for Mac ($89). When you’re recording a podcast with others, or even on a H1N Zoom recording device with more than 1 mic, it can be difficult to make sure everyone’s voice sounds the same and comes across at the same audio level. You could even get an audio file from a host/guest and their audio could be super duper quiet. Throw the audio files into this app, adjust the settings to what you want, and it exports new audio files where each one is set to the same level. Even if you weren’t recording in the same room, this helps create that atmosphere.
I’ve recorded a podcast using a Zoom using 2 XLR mics plugged in where there are 2 guests, one speaking quiet and one speaking loudly on the same audio file. Auphonic saved my bacon big-time and brought us both to the same audio levels.
Once I have the audio files from my guests, I throw them into Auphonic with these settings screenshotted below. That brings everyone to an even playing field in terms of audio levels.
Edit and export episode using Logic Pro
I've used GarageBand for 99% of my editing career and it's great! Many "legit" podcasters still use it. Whatever floats your boat, ya know? During the pandemic I wanted to up my game a bit. I wanted to improve the overall sound of 70mm, add some equalizers, add some filters, remove echo, adjust compression, and pretty much just make us sound legit. Like, I know we sounded good before, but I wanted to go higher. Logic Pro X from Apple is pretty much GarageBand Pro and costs $199. It let's me do some fancy keystrokes to save time moving clips around, remove dead-air sections. Below is a recent episode of 70mm and you'll notice lots of blank space where that host is not speaking. I can remove all that dead air or anything under a certain Db level and that makes it super easy to move stuff around if needed. I also use a few different plug-ins to reduce echo on someone's audio track. If you're ever curious about deeper details about how I edit, feel free to reach out with questions. I'm always happy to help!
Here is a screenshot of me adjusting the EchoRemover too.
Upload episode to Anchor, etc
Listen you've seen how much I've spent on software so far, let me live a little and pay $0 for Anchor, OK?
With 70mm, there are several other check-boxes I need to complete depending on what episode we are about to release. We have Patreon, Apple Subscription episodes, and also Paid Episodes on Spotify. Anchor lets me take care of those paid episodes on Spotify right in the dashboard but everything else requires its own upload. When we do a supporter-only episode, that means I have to upload it to Patreon, Anchor, and Apple. When we do a regular episode, I have to upload it to Patreon so our supporters listen to it first and then Anchor.
One of the perks to our 70mm Patreon is access to our VHS Village Discord. Every Thursday, we stream our recording directly into Discord so folks can listen along together. Patrons also get access to that uncut recording right after we get done. That gets uploaded to Patreon only. Initially, I was super hesitant to have a loosey goosey unedited episode floating about but tbh folks love it the three of us have hit a nice groove in our convos and there is not much overlap while talking if any.
As I mentioned earlier, too, Danny creates a beautiful piece of artwork for each episode and there is an important step I need to do to ensure it shows up in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Cast, etc. Here is what I wrote years ago:
Forecast is free and very easy to use for Chapters. It does other things like encode your show into an MP3, but I don’t really use that. Below is a screenshot, but I right-click on my audio file and Open With Forecast. I type in all the info and then add in my Chapters for the show and drop the podcast image on each one. Apps like Logic Pro and Audition allow you to add markers as you edit, but for now I’m still using GarageBand, and it’s not that big of a pain to just add the few segments 70mm does have. If you have custom artwork for each episode, this ensures podcasts apps will show it as they listen, but it also will let your listeners easily find specific segments. If you do convert to MP3 using Forecast, it may default to exporting at 64kbps, so be sure to change that setting for a higher level of audio quality.
Not too bad, right? jk jk Podcasting can be a lot of work but more importantly, if you put the time in, it can be extremely rewarding. I think I covered just about everything and I'll go back and made additions as I find things that I left out. If you have any questions feel free to DM me on Twitter.
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