Author: Chris Curran

Sometimes when you’re producing or editing a client’s podcast the relationship starts out really well — expectations are clear, preset boundaries are respected, both parties perform their pre-determined responsibilities in a timely manner, and things go smoothly.

But somewhere along the way your client may start demanding more from you — thrusting some of their own pre-determined responsibilities onto you, introducing new tasks and production that were never part of the agreement (known as Scope Creep), delivering audio to you last minute and expecting you to drop everything to produce and publish the episode immediately, or asking you to pick up the slack last minute because they neglected to plan ahead properly, etc.

I’ve had several relationships crumble in this manner and I’ve never been hesitant to end the relationship.

As a podcast producer/editor you have no obligation to indulge a clients poor planning, laziness, and disrespectful behavior at the expense of your time and sanity. ZERO OBLIGATION. Don’t do it. There are many other fish in the sea.

And if the client perceives you as a “bad” person for ending the relationship, so be it. If they’re not intelligent/aware enough to understand how egregiously they violated what they agreed to, then nothing you can say will get through to them. Just let them go.

Have you experienced this?

Want to receive the Daily Goody in your email, daily or weekly? Subscribe free here.

And please keep in mind, the Daily Goody is only a tiny little tip, fact or lesson everyday. Please don’t expect any of these posts to be long, earth-shattering masterpieces that instantly answer every single question you can think of and completely transform you into a world class podcast engineer. “Little by little, a little becomes a lot.”

I use iZotope RX to set all the episodes I produce to either -19 Mono or -16 Stereo.

How do you accomplish this task?

Some folks use Auphonic; others simply eyeball the meters in their DAW. There are no doubt many other ways.

If you’d like to share your method in the comments we would all be very grateful!

Want to receive the Daily Goody in your email, daily or weekly? Subscribe free here.

And please keep in mind, the Daily Goody is only a tiny little tip, fact or lesson everyday. Please don’t expect any of these posts to be long, earth-shattering masterpieces that instantly answer every single question you can think of and completely transform you into a world class podcast engineer. “Little by little, a little becomes a lot.”

When someone slurs together the words ‘and’ and ‘umm’ (so it sounds like Ann Dumb) it’s nearly impossible to remove the ‘umm’ and still have the resulting ‘and’ sound natural. Actually, there are several good tricks to do this type of edit but they all typically take a significant amount of time – and it’s still not guaranteed that the resulting edit will sound good in the end. That’s why I ignore each and every “Andumm.”

Of course you could try to find some other audio of the person saying “and” cleanly, and then use that “and” in place of the “Andumm.” But even that is not guaranteed to sound natural due to possible differences in tone, intensity and microphone proximity, etc.

How do you handle “Andumm” in the editing process?

Want to receive the Daily Goody in your email, daily or weekly? Subscribe free here.

And please keep in mind, the Daily Goody is only a tiny little tip, fact or lesson everyday. Please don’t expect any of these posts to be long, earth-shattering masterpieces that instantly answer every single question you can think of and completely transform you into a world class podcast engineer. “Little by little, a little becomes a lot.”

De-essers are used to reduce sibilance, usually in the 5-8 kHz range where sibilance is typically most prevalent. But sometimes a recording will contain harsh, irritating frequencies starting around the 3-4 kHz range and from there extend up to the common range stated above, 5-8 kHz. In cases like these it helps to de-ess the entire range from around 3-4 kHz all the way up to 7-8 kHz or higher if needed.

If you’ve ever applied a de-esser and still thought the audio sounded harsh, it’s probably due to harsh frequencies in that 3-4-5 kHz range.

*Be careful, though — if you remove too much information in the 3-4 kHz range the audio can start to sound a bit dull, unclear or muffled. (not crisp) …and that’s not good either. As always, you have to find that happy medium 😉

Have you de-essed audio down that low? (3-4 kHz)

Want to receive the Daily Goody in your email, daily or weekly? Subscribe free here.

And please keep in mind, the Daily Goody is only a tiny little tip, fact or lesson everyday. Please don’t expect any of these posts to be long, earth-shattering masterpieces that instantly answer every single question you can think of and completely transform you into a world class podcast engineer. “Little by little, a little becomes a lot.”

It’s a smart move for organizations who have a podcast to take advantage of the fact that many of their key members will attend their annual conference each year. This can make it easy to arrange in-person interviews and record many conversations to be published in the weeks and months after the conference.

Interviews can be recorded in a private room away from the hustle and bustle of the event, and they can also be recorded in front of a Live audience which can be a pretty cool “event” to offer attendees.

I’ve done this many times and it’s a great way to capture good content from multiple key members.

Have you ever done this?

Want to receive the Daily Goody in your email, daily or weekly? Subscribe free here.

And please keep in mind, the Daily Goody is only a tiny little tip, fact or lesson everyday. Please don’t expect any of these posts to be long, earth-shattering masterpieces that instantly answer every single question you can think of and completely transform you into a world class podcast engineer. “Little by little, a little becomes a lot.”

To ensure good quality audio from their guests, some podcast hosts/shows actually mail each guest a microphone or headset to use during recording. This strategy solves some issues but can create additional issues. And the host still has to do a full soundcheck on each and every guest.

Pros:

• The guest doesn’t have to own or buy a microphone
• The guests audio recording will sound good (as long as their computer’s settings are set correctly)

Cons:

• Helping each guest set up the microphone properly and adjust their computers audio settings can sometimes be a major task
• What about a stand for the microphone? Will the host/show ship this as well?
• If the guest is in a bad sounding room then their audio will not sound great even with a good microphone
• The host/show will have to keep careful notes about who has their microphone(s) and if/when they have been shipped and received, etc.
• The guest will have to go through the trouble of mailing the microphone back to the host/show
• Shipping costs
• Audio equipment can be damaged in the shipping process

I’ve never mailed microphones to guests but I know some people who do.

Have you ever done this? Have your results been good?

Can you add any more pros or cons in the comments?

Want to receive the Daily Goody in your email, daily or weekly? Subscribe free here.

And please keep in mind, the Daily Goody is only a tiny little tip, fact or lesson everyday. Please don’t expect any of these posts to be long, earth-shattering masterpieces that instantly answer every single question you can think of and completely transform you into a world class podcast engineer. “Little by little, a little becomes a lot.”

This has happened to me in the past and I totally understand if a client wants to save some money this way.

If you review the quality of their audio production you may spot some audio mistakes and issues including:

• Different voices being different volumes
• Voices not being EQ’d well, if at all
• Editing out sections of a voice which already had music underneath it so the music “skips” whenever there’s an edit
• Music fades being abrupt, jarring and/or misplaced
• Edits that sound very unnatural because they weren’t cleanly made

These sound like small issues but they add up to creating a listening experience which is sometimes not good.

I offered to help one client improve her skills and she seemed open to it but never took me up on my offer.

Do any of your clients do this type of thing?

Want to receive the Daily Goody in your email, daily or weekly? Subscribe free here.

And please keep in mind, the Daily Goody is only a tiny little tip, fact or lesson everyday. Please don’t expect any of these posts to be long, earth-shattering masterpieces that instantly answer every single question you can think of and completely transform you into a world class podcast engineer. “Little by little, a little becomes a lot.”

Silence them! It’s as easy as highlighting the umm and then silencing or muting that selection. Then, to ensure that the silent space is not too long or awkward-sounding, you could delete about half of that silent space.

*Beware: If the audio you’re editing has significant background noise, creating a small space of silence may stick out like a sore thumb and actually be more distracting than a regular umm. In such cases you may want to simply delete the umm, or replace the umm with some “room tone.”

Want to receive the Daily Goody in your email, daily or weekly? Subscribe free here.

And please keep in mind, the Daily Goody is only a tiny little tip, fact or lesson everyday. Please don’t expect any of these posts to be long, earth-shattering masterpieces that instantly answer every single question you can think of and completely transform you into a world class podcast engineer. “Little by little, a little becomes a lot.”

Many online recording services (Squadcast, Zencastr, Riverside.fm, etc.) have a feature called echo-cancellation which users should enabled if/when any participants are NOT wearing headphones. Without this kind of echo-cancellation you will hear participants voices echoing back and forth which makes a conversation virtually impossible. And unfortunately with echo-cancellation enabled there are ducking/muting issues when people talk over each other, which is very annoying and literally disrupts the conversation. But, if someone doesn’t have earbuds or headphones you are FORCED to use echo-cancellation.

In a recent episode I produced for a client I clearly noticed the audio degradation caused by the echo-cancellation. This was the first time we had to use echo-cancellation with this particular client and afterwards I noticed that the recordings sounded quite a bit worse than usual. In previous episodes (without echo-cancellation) the host sounded very clear, but in this episode (with echo-cancellation) he sounded quite midrangy, dull and not very clear in the high frequencies.

I compensated for those deficiencies in post-production but of course you can never make a bad sounding recording sound AS good as a high quality recording.

What about you — have you noticed this type of audio quality degradation?

Want to receive the Daily Goody in your email, daily or weekly? Subscribe free here.

And please keep in mind, the Daily Goody is only a tiny little tip, fact or lesson everyday. Please don’t expect any of these posts to be long, earth-shattering masterpieces that instantly answer every single question you can think of and completely transform you into a world class podcast engineer. “Little by little, a little becomes a lot.”