I decided it'd be much easier for me and potential clients that visit my website to have a fill out a form of questions about their podcasts to help understand where they're at and what they need done on their podcast.

Here's the list I made:

• How old is your podcast?
• How many hosts does your podcast have?
• How many guests per episode does your podcast usually have?
• Do you want us to *scrub your podcast episodes? *Remove uh's, um's, mouth clicks, aspirations, repetition, dead space, call interruptions, and fixing of any other little inconvenience during the episode
• Do you want us to *mix and master your podcast? *cue, mix, and overlay music and clips with the main recorded interview file, such as your intro, sponsor segment, or ending theme music
• How long are each of your episodes?
  
• What is your episode release schedule?
• Do you want us to *publish your podcast episodes? *We will make sure your episodes get to outlets for your listeners to listen from, such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and more. You may add your own description, titles, or artwork
  

All of these questions help me determine the work it'll take to work for their podcast, and from that, I will understand a better and more fair price point to charge them. The questions are all multiple choice to make the process a little easier (I can't put the choices here since posthaven won't let me).

Someone approached me who is reviving a recorded series of old recorded lectures from many years ago, but wants to clean up the audio quality to make it more bearable to listen to. It was digitized from raw cassette tapes to mp3 files. I prepared him a series of presets for him to use ready for all of the recordings, including dynamics processing and noise remover.

Here's what I sent him:


1: Select 1 second of ONLY white noise (no voice in it, just a sample of what you want removed). Right click the select > Capture Noise Print

2: Effects > Noise Reduction / Restoration > Noise Reduction (process)...

3: Turn Noise Reduction to the highest level 100%, then apply the effect


4: Favorites > Dynamics Preset (already installed on your computer)

5: Highlight frequency above the voice where the voice isn't there, and delete all the unnecessary white noise. Last recording was done at -9k Hz

I suggest you have the volume peak at -3 DB



When the prep for the episode is done, then it is ready for scrubbing.

As I've blogged about twice before, I was working on a fun edit of a music video by a big music artist named Tyler the Creator. I really liked his music for his song "See You Again" with Kali Uchis, and to get a bit back into sound design I wanted to recreate it without the song and with my own sound effects synced up with whatever was happening on screen to make it seem as if you were watching a real recording with all the regular sounds in it like footsteps and car sounds and dishes being moved. 

I spent about 3 hours to do roughly the first 90 seconds of the music video. I got burnt out pretty quick and didn't have time to finish it all, but I still wanted to upload it to Youtube. When I tried re-uploading the video to Youtube, Youtube told me there was a copyright claim on the content in the video. I thought copyright claims were only for audio, and I obviously didn't keep the song in the music video. Apparently it was the video content, and instead of a usual copyright claim where I can't monetize the video (AKA put ads on the video to make money), which wasn't my plan in the first place, it wouldn't even let me upload the video to the public. This is a very frustrating and terrible rule, as the only reason it exists is to prevent me from stealing the video art and making money off of it, which they can already do by just demonetizing it. Obviously I can't put ads on the video, which wasn't my intent in the first place, I just wanted to show off my creation. 

One of my clients emailed me about an edited episode not being sound leveled enough to his liking, so he asked if I could fix it to make it more level. Usually I level the audio with the Dynamics processing, but I wanted to learn if there was a way to do specifically audio leveling instead of the whole dynamics process.

I simply searched "how to level audio Audition" on Youtube, and quickly found a tutorial video for the speech volume leveler tool in Adobe Audition. The video was just a few minutes long and I followed along with the tutor easily, and quickly learned how to use the tool. Once I customized it to how I wanted, I saved it as a preset to use for the future. It did the job perfectly for my client, and now I can use it every time for all the future episodes I edit for him.

If you already have your first episode recorded and are ready to publish it to the world, follow this video using BuzzSprout to get started: