3 Different Categories of “Noise” to Avoid When Recording Podcasts

1. Noise due to a bad microphone — scratchy, crunchy or distorted sound. This is extremely rare.

2. Background noise from air vents, air conditioners, fans, cars driving by, etc. Avoid this by recording in a quiet environment.

3. Bleed/Echo from other participants contaminating the recording due to a remote participant NOT wearing headphones or earbuds. The bleed/echo happens because their computer speakers’ audio goes directly into their microphone, causing an “echo” for all other participants as well as massive bleed of all other participants on the non-headphone-wearer’s recorded file, which of course is terrible and frankly unusable. Good recording services like Riverside, Squadcast, Zencastr, etc. offer Echo Cancellation for folks who are not using headphones/earbuds and this eliminates the bleed/echo — but this feature can also create a nasty muting/ducking effect when two or more participants speak over each other at the same time, and this is why no one should ever default to relying on this echo cancellation feature — every participant should ALWAYS wear headphones or earbuds, period, unless they literally don’t have any.

May you avoid all these types of noise on your recordings and produce audio that sounds great!!!

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