Category: The Podcast Engineering Show

Enjoy my brief overview of recent Daily Goody‘s (from April 24 through May 8). Here’s the link to view all those blog posts. And don’t forget that you can sign up to receive the Daily Goody in your email every day or once per week. Sign up here.

Here are the Daily Goody posts that we discussed in this episode:

• Me Watching YouTube Videos on Audio Production
• Rolling Down One Car Window vs Two
• What is a Shotgun Microphone?
• AirPods and Zencastr, like Oil and Water
• Assembling a New Plugin Chain
• Editing a Guest Who Stumbles and Then Restarts
• Soundcloud – Always Upload Uncompressed Files
• Learning New Software, Plugins, Etc.
• The Mackie Big Knob – Passive Monitor Controller
• iLok – Software License Management
• Lipsmacking
• When to Accept a Low Recording Level
• People Breathing Heavy When Not Speaking
• Boosting the Level of Small Sections
• Increasing the Apparent Loudness of Your Final Episodes

Here’s the list of plugins I mention in the episode:

• CLA-76
• Fabfilter Pro-MB
• Fabfilter Pro-Q3
• Fabfilter Pro-DS
• Vocal Rider (Fast mode, with Vocal Sensitivity all the way up)
• Scheps Omni Channel
• soothe from Oeksound
• Kramer Tape
• Ozone 8 Vintage Tape
• J37 Tape
• spiff from Oeksound
• Gullfoss
• Ozone 8 Spectral Shaper
• Fabfilter Saturn
• True Iron
• Abbey Road TG Mastering
• API 2500
• Puigchild 660

A few announcements:

• The next semester of PES starts September 10, 2019.
• Upcoming episodes: Dan Radin, Adam Gordon Bell, Travis Vengroff, Zach Moreno, Barry Gary, and Scott Somerville!

Big Thanks to everyone who comments on the website Daily Goody posts!

I appreciate you listening, and if you have any questions please let me know 🙂

If you know anyone who would like to learn more about the technical production of podcasts, please share this show with them.

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Enjoy my awesome conversation with Evo Terra, host of Podcast Pontifications, and podcast strategist who has been podcasting since Oct. 14, 2004! He’s the 40th podcaster EVER!!! And he’s also the head honcho at Simpler Media Productions.

We discussed TONS including:

• The real history of the beginnings of podcasting!
• Shure SM7b
• Fethead
• Zoom H6
• Mac Mini 2018
• Hindenburg Journalist Pro
• iZotope RX 6
• Waves Sibilance plugin
• Dealing with sibilance with EQ
• On location recording with lavaliers (SM93’s), Zoom H4, H6, and SM58’s
• Visiting France, Copenhagen, Belgium, England, Italy, Bangkok, Thailand, Hong Kong, Australia

Thanks for sharing so much, Evo!

Comment below with any questions or comments.

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Enjoy my brief overview of recent Daily Goody‘s (from April 12 through April 23). Here’s the link to view all those blog posts. And don’t forget that you can sign up to receive the Daily Goody in your email every day or once per week. Sign up here.

Here are the Daily Goody posts that we discussed in this episode:

• Diamond Color EQ 2
• Earbuds Rubbing
• It’s Sunday – Take a Walk and Observe
• Don’t Expect Magic From Audio Processors
• Check Your Input and Output Devices Settings Every Time You…
• The TV in My Vegas Hotel Room Had No Low End
• Subtleness of Transitions When Mixing
• Editing Words That Are Slurred Together
• SiX – The Ultimate Desktop Mixer from Solid State Logic
• Cloud Storage
• RX 7 Dialogue Contour for Finishing a Sentence
• Attending Conferences

A few announcements:

• The next semester of PES starts June 25, 2019.
• Upcoming episodes: Evo Terra, Dan Radin, Adam Gordon Bell, Travis Vengroff, Zach Moreno, Barry Gary, and Scott Somerville!

I appreciate you listening, and if you have any questions please let me know 🙂

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My guest is Nick Dunkerley, Creative Director at Hindenburg! They make the very popular podcasting DAW software Hindenburg Journalist Pro.

We discussed LOTS including:

• Lots of specifications of Hindenburg
• Nick’s personal equipment: RE20 microphone and Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 interface
• Nick’s experience building a radio station in Africa
• His engineering team at Hindenburg
• Automated EQ profiles
• Clipboard
• Comparison of the Pro version vs the regular version
• Differences in the podcasting industry and events in Europe vs. USA
• See some screenshots of Hindenburg here

Thanks for being a great guest, Nick!

Comment below with any questions or comments.

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Listen to me talk with each and every 2019 Podcast Movement Technical Track speaker about their presentations, except, unfortunately, for the Hall of Fame podcaster Dave Jackson. Podcast Movement will be held in Orlando, Florida from August 13-16, 2019. Find all the info at https://podcastmovement.com/.

Here are the speakers and what each will be speaking about:

“Skype Alternatives” presented by Jody Maberry

“5 Steps to Building a Sought-After Podcast Production Company” presented by a panel including:

• Steve Stewart
• Darrell Darnell

“Painting Stories with Sound – Podcast Editing for Beginners” presented by Nick Dunkerley from Hindenburg.

“Podcasting Systems: The 3 Key Automated Systems Podcast Hosts and Guests Need to Have in Place to Scale” presented by Yann Ilunga.

“The Most Common Audio Problems in Podcasts and How to Fix Them” presented by Marcus dePaula.

“People Breathe: The Art of Editing an Interview” presented by Carrie Caulfield Arick.

“Help Us Help You: Tech Support Tips for Podcasters” presented by a panel including:

• Mackenzie Bennett (Blubrry)
• Dave Jackson (Libsyn)
• Mike Dell (Blubrry)
• Shannon Martin (Podbean)

“Post Production: Effective Tips & Techniques for a Seamless Edit” presented by Sarah Wendel.

“Great Quality, Low Cost + ROI” presented by Alexis Parris.

“Advanced Audio Production: Waaay Beyond Just Removing Umms, Etc.” presented by Chris Curran, founder and lead instructor of Podcast Engineering School.

Few announcements:

• Note: The music I play as the outro at the very end of this episode was played and recorded by me about 25 years ago 😉
• Have fun exploring previous episodes of this show the Podcast Engineering Show.
• If you ever need help with your technical production, please reach out to me.

I appreciate you listening, and rock on!

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My guest is Shawn Kitchen – host of the Northwest Corner Podcast. He lives in Spartanburg, SC, was formerly trained in radio and tv, and is currently records his show using a Live format to reduce post-production time.

We discussed his production workflow and equipment in detail, including:

• Using a Kindle tablet to play sound FX
• Riding faders Live
• Mixer has one knob compression on each channel
• Mic technique
• Using subgroups: Voices to one group, music to another group, then record each group separately on his Zoom H6
• Chris’s Compression Dynamics plugin within Audacity
• Noise reduction in Audacity by creating and using a custom noise profile (he removes 14 or 15 dB of noise!)
• Record everything 24 bit / 44.1 kHz
• Soundcloud
• Behringer X2222USB analog mixer
• Behringer UMC404HD interface
• Tascam DR-40 field recorder
• Zoom H6 field recorder
• Behringer XM8500 dynamic mics
• MXL FR-355K lavalier mics
• Audacity
• Hindenburg
• Soundpad app for Android on Kindle Fire 8HD tablet
• iRig 2 instrument interface
• Behringer headphone distribution amp and headphones (for up to 8 people)
• All post-production done in-house on Dell desktop with Core I5 processor using primarily Audacity, but have been using Hindenburg more frequently in recent time. Pre-recorded music tracks (except show theme) are separated into new tracks. All vocals are run through a combination of soft limiter, compression, and then amplification to -1.0 dB. Noise reduction is done at the *end* of all other processing, using a 5-second segment of silence with all mics open at the beginning of each recording session. I’ve found that applying noise reduction at the end yields us with the clearest results.

Thanks for being a great guest, Shawn!

Comment below with any questions or comments.

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Enjoy my brief overview of recent Daily Goody‘s (from March 29 – April 10). Here’s the link to view all those blog posts. And don’t forget that you can sign up to receive the Daily Goody in your email every day or once per week. Sign up here.

Here are the Daily Goody posts that we discussed in this episode:

• Samson Q2U Microphone
• Fission
• Behave as If You’re in a Recording Studio
• Some Audio Apps Will Not Recognize Inputs Beyond 1 and 2
• Doing Post-Production on Audio Recorded at a Live Event
• Reaper: How to Preserve Pitch When Speeding Up Playback
• iTunes Uses Fraunhofer
• Podcast Editors Business Entity and Taxes
• The “soothe” Plugin ROCKS!!!
• Audio Bit Depth
• Audio Daily Double – What Effect is This?
• Focusrite 6i6 Interface

Also hear:

1. A clip of me calling Bob Bergey on the phone and him recording us both on his RØDECaster Pro.
2. A clip of Addy Saucedo, author of The Podcast Planner, starting to interview me in the NAB podcast studio for her Modern Vintage Radio podcast. She decided not to use this interview because of audio quality issues. Hear for yourself.

A few announcements:

• The next semester of PES starts June 25, 2019.
• Upcoming episodes: Shawn Kitchen, Nick Dunkerley, Evo Terra, Dan Radin, Adam Gordon Bell, Travis Vengroff, Zach Moreno and Barry Gary!

I appreciate you listening, and if you have any questions please let me know 🙂

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My guest is Glenn the Geek – founder of the Horse Radio Network (founded July 2008), cohost of Horses in the Morning, cohost of Finding Florida, and cofounder of the Florida Podcast Network.

Every morning he livestreams Horses in the Morning like this:

• Audio only livestream via Blogtalk originally, now via Mixlr.
• Has a 5 computer setup.
• Call-in Studio to take live phone calls via Skype.
• The master Live feed is sent out through Mixlr, which streams through their own app, as well as players embedded on their website.
• Producer sets up guests off-air.
• Hosts and producer chat privately using Skype.
• The final audio podcast is published within 30 minutes after finishing the Livestream.
• Uses a 12 year old Belkin mixer (still, after trying a few newer mixers).
• Uses ATR2100’s or the Behringer XM1800’s.
• All PC’s, no Mac’s.
• Uses Total Recorder to record Skype.
• Uses Mixcraft to edit.
• Uses Auphonic to run all episodes through, to tag and send to destinations.
• Plays sound clips via iTunes.

For the on-location recording of Finding Florida: 

• Go to a place and do ten activities in 3-4 days and record everything.
• For interviews, they record with a Tascam DR-05 and two XM1800 microphones.
• They also record on their phones (as a backup while recording with the DR-05) using the Hi-Q app on Android to record and immediately upload to Dropbox.
• There exists audio of Glenn breaking his ribs in the Daytona beach episode of Finding Florida!
• Post-production of episodes using Mixcraft to add music, transitions, etc.

Other hosts on the Horse Radio Network:

• All connect with and record guests using Skype.
• Use Google Sites for production notes.
• Are all hosts streaming Live? No.

*I asked Glenn if he ever recorded audio of any of his horses. He said YES – and he played some clips in this episode!

Thanks for being a great guest, Glenn!

Comment below with any questions or comments.

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Enjoy my chat with James Cridland. He’s the editor of Podnews which is a daily email and podcast that delivers tons of significant news and info.

Sign up for his amazing daily email here. Listen to the daily audio version here.

We discussed:

• LUFS and Bitrates
• RØDE Podcaster (USB microphone) – V2 has a quieter output, and a level LED that turns orange and red for peaking, etc.
• Auphonic Edit app to record on the road
• Hindenburg to record and edit. Some compression, EQ, etc.
• James publishes two versions of the Podnews daily podcast: An 80 kbps AAC+ at -16 LUFS for his regular feed, and a 320 kbps stereo MP3 at -14 LUFS for Alexa and Spotify. Note: Alexa and Spotify both cache your audio but don’t change the LUFS level.
• Self hosts with Amazon S3, and using Amazon Athena for some stats
• Macbook Pro

Here are a couple of James’ articles that we reference:

• The correct LUFS level: https://podnews.net/article/lufs-lkfs-for-podcasters
• The right bitrate to use: https://podnews.net/article/podcast-analysis

Thanks for sharing so much, James!

Comment below with any questions or comments.

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Enjoy my chat with Carrie Caulfield Arick – podcast editor, host of Just Podcasting, and owner of Ya Ya Podcasting.

We discussed tons, including:

• Adobe Audition: Essential Sound, Spectral Heal as needed, sometimes a De-esser, light compression, speech volume leveler (careful setting), dynamics processing, Match Loudness
• RX7 Advanced: De-plosive, EQ, Normalize, De-Ess, Mouth De-click, Voice De-noise
• ATR-2100
• Samson Q2U
• Squadcast
• iZotope Nectar and Nectar 3
• Adding a tiny bit of reverb
• Export as .WAV (32 bit float for Audition)
• Dell Inspiron 8th gen, i7 quad-core, 16GB RAM, 2-in-1 hybrid drives
• iBuyPower i7 7th gen processor, 16GB RAM, hybrid drives
• On location: Zoom H4N, Tascam DR-40, two ATR-2100’s

Thanks for sharing so much, Carrie!

Comment below with any questions or comments.

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Enjoy my brief overview of recent Daily Goody‘s (March 15 – 27). Here’s the link to view all those blog posts. And don’t forget that you can sign up to receive the Daily Goody in your email every day or once per week. Sign up here.

I also recapped my experience at NAB last week — see below.

Here are the Daily Goody posts that we discussed in this episode:

• Wavelength
• Headphone Amplifiers
• Temporary Podcast Studios at Events
• You Can’t Evaluate the Sound of a Microphone While You’re Speaking Into It
• What are Others Using for Hardware and Software?
• ERA Voice Leveler
• Need More Mic Gain: A Chat with Johan
• Accurately Hearing Low End vs. High End When…
• The Difficulty of Re-recording the Hosts Track
• Safe Peak Level for Final Episodes
• Finishing an Episode vs. Tweaking it Forever
• Publishing Episodes Immediately After They Are Recorded
• My Previous Studio Setup

Announcements:

• Enter to win a win a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 here!: https://focusrite.com/Focusrite-Podcast-Engineering-School-Giveaway
• The next semester of PES starts June 25, 2019.
• Upcoming episodes: Carrie Caulfield, ‘Glenn the Geek’ Hebert, Shawn Kitchen, Nick Dunkerley, Evo Terra, Dan Radin, Adam Gordon Bell, and Travis Vengroff!
• Podnews – a daily briefing in your inbox every weekday about podcasting and on-demand.

My NAB Recap

• My awesome booth mates at the Ask The Expert booth in the Podcast Pavilion area!:
  • Addy Saucedo – The Podcast Planner. She also interviewed me for her Modern Vintage Radio podcast.
  • Ralph and Carol Lynn Rivera – Podcaster’s Toolbox.
• Interesting: The podcast studio across the aisle. Condenser mics with no pop filters. Hmm.
• I met Brandon Gonzales in person! (my guest on episode 84)
• Dan Hughley from Focusrite interviewed me in their booth for their upcoming podcast.
• SSL – I met Fernando who lives in Denver. He let me mix for a bit on a Live console. I also saw the new SiX in person!
• Waves – I dropped by their booth.
• Dan Dugan Sound Design (my guest on episode 101) – dropped by his booth and thanked him in person for being my guest.
• Joel from Sound Devices.
• Michelle from Heil.
• Mark Bakos from Cleanfeed.
• Ira from Samson.
• Greg Laney from Apogee.
• Gina Clement from Gator. We discussed the Gator Frameworks GFW-MIC-0822 Telescoping Boom Mic Stand.
• Arielle Nissenblatt from EarBuds Podcast Collective.
• Ever Gonzalez in person! He’s the founder of The Outlier Podcast Festival, a traveling national event held in major cities across the U.S. *In Denver July 12-13!
• Zachary Davis from Sound Education, a conference for educational audio producers and listeners. October 10-12, 2019 at Harvard University.
• Audionamix, regarding the IDC: Instant Dialogue Cleaner plugin.
• Philipp Sonnleitner, CEO of Mikme!
• Soren Pederson, Sr. Product Specialist (Wired Microphone) at Shure.
• Sarah Logan Gregory – Host of the Emerging Infectious Diseases Podcast.
• Mark Ethier, CEO of iZotope!
• Rodger Cloud – He gave me a Cloudlifter!
• James Cridland from Podnews!
• Didn’t get to meet: Durin Gleaves from Adobe, and the RODE rep at the B&H booth.

I appreciate you listening, and if you have any questions please let me know 🙂

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Hang out with me and Emily Prokop. She is the host of The Story Behind podcast, a podcast editor and consultant, and author of The Story Behind: The Extraordinary History Behind Ordinary Objects!

We discussed Emily’s equipment and workflow, and lots more:

• Blooper track: She copies clips onto a dedicated track for bloopers.
• Handling loud breaths: She moves all the loud breaths onto a dedicated track where she lowers their volume!
• Noise reduction
• Hi-pass filtering
• In her “studio”: Moving blankets around her desk and curtains to dampen room noise, white shears
• Reaper and Reaper templates
• iZotope RX 6: De-plosive, Mouth De-click
• ATR2100 microphone
• Sony MDR-7506 Headphones
• Publishing a 96kbps mono MP3 for her show
• Auphonic leveling to -16 LUFS (! her mono track!)
• Hardwired to internet
• Previously Emily was on Dave Jackson’s show discussing structuring and presenting good content on podcasts because she has more than 10 years editing experience in print journalism. That episode is titled Journalism 101 For Podcasters.

Thanks for sharing so much great info, Emily!

Comment below with any questions or comments.

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Hear and discern the audio quality differences between 3 popular podcast recording services – Zencastr, Squadcast and Ringr. Then let me know which service you think I used to record clip #1, #2 and #3. I play each of them twice and also give my evaluation of the 3 clips.

Also enjoy my brief overview of recent Daily Goody’s (March 1-14). Here’s the link to view all those blog posts: https://podcastengineeringschool.com/category/daily-goody/

And don’t forget that you can sign up to receive the Daily Goody in your email every day or every week. Sign up here.

Here are the Daily Goody posts that we discussed in this episode:

• Volume Spikes at the Beginning of Sentences
• Be My Guest!
• What is Monaural, Stereo and Surround?
• Fast Processor, Lots of RAM
• The Pressure of a Publishing Schedule
• If Two Guests MUST Share One Microphone…
• Helping Guests Connect via Online Recording Services
• Intro Music That Goes on Way Too Long
• Making Edit Cuts on Words and Syllables
• Small Tweaks When Mastering
• Know Where Distortion is Coming From
• Continued Learning
• Adjusting the Phase of Recordings

I made some announcements, too:

• PES starts April 16th, and we conduct the course Live every quarter.
• Upcoming episodes: Emily Prokop, Carrie Caulfield, ‘Glenn the Geek’ Hebert, Shawn Kitchen, Nick Dunkerley and Evo Terra!
• NAB conference – we will be manning the Ask The Expert booth in the Podcast Pavilion area from April 8-11 in Las Vegas. Addy Saucedo with her Podcast Planner, and Ralph & Carol Lynn Rivera with their Podcaster’s Toolbox.

If you have any questions please let me know 🙂

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Colin Gray joins me! He is the founder of The Podcast Host, host of Podcraft and Hostile Worlds, and founder of the podcast app named Alitu.

We discussed many areas of Colin’s podcast production:

• Studio in his office
• Rode PSA-1 boom arms
• 3 Rode Procaster microphones
• Yamaha MG10 mixer
• Zoom H5 and H6
• Mac mini
• Adobe Audition
• iZotope RX7
• Editing in Audition
• Final MP3’s: 128kbps stereo or 96kbps mono
• Hosts at Blubrry, Buzzsprout, and Transistor.fm

Thanks for being a great guest, Colin!

Comment below with any questions or comments.

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Enjoy my brief overview of recent Daily Goody posts.

And don’t forget that you can sign up to receive the Daily Goody in your email every day or every week. Sign up here.

I made some announcements, too:

• If you can help me out I would greatly appreciate it. If you know any 18-25 year olds who might want to produce podcasts and earn really good money doing it, please mention PES to them. I appreciate it!
• Podfest was awesome. If you want to grow a podcasting business or grow your presence in the podcast industry, the major podcasting events are SO helpful.
• PES starts April 16th!
• Upcoming episodes: Colin Gray, Emily Prokop, Carrie Caulfield, ‘Glenn the Geek’ Hebert, Shawn Kitchen, Nick Dunkerley and Evo Terra!

If you have any questions please let me know 🙂

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Brodie Brazil is here! He’s a TV broadcaster and hosts the Oakland A’s & San Jose Sharks Pre/Postgame Live on NBC Sports California. Check out his YouTube. He has won 13 Regional Emmy Awards and nominated for 32!

Also check out his podcast, Brodie Brazil.

We discussed a ton, including:

• Packing blankets and rug in his home studio
• Mics: TLM103, SM7B through Fethead, RE320’s, MD46’s, HMD26
• Mixer: Soundcraft 12 MTK
• Channel strips: dbx 286’s
• Remote interface: UMC202HD
• Recorders: Zoom H5 & H6
• Computer: MacBook Pro running Audition (old version!)
• Headphones: Beyerdynamic DT-770’s
• On-location: Zoom H6 w/ two RE320’s
• TV mic: Sennheiser MD-46
• Because I do a lot of live streaming – need most of my processing (comp, EQ, de-essing, gate) baked in. So I have that for both the Neumann and Shure mics. I do add a little post-processing for podcasts and YouTube videos with just some light compression… normalization, then clip gain matching to -16 lufs.
• Everything exported to .wav for videos and editing. eventually .mp3 for podcasting to… Soundcloud(!) I know, but it works best for me (I can explain).

Thanks for hanging with us, Brodie!

Comment below with any questions or comments.

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Great discussion with Allan Tépper. He is the host of Beyond Podcasting, as well as a  a Pro Audio/Video specialist, tech journalist, broadcaster, author and consultant. (and my previous guest on episode 74)

*DISCLAIMER: We are not advocating for anyone to switch from MP3 to AAC (.m4a). If you’re contemplating it, please do more research and decide for yourself.

We discussed many aspects of MP3 vs. AAC (.m4a):

Advanced Audio Coding is designed to be the successor of the MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, known as MP3 format, which was specified by ISO/IEC in 11172-3 (MPEG-1 Audio) and 13818-3 (MPEG-2 Audio)

The widespread reluctance to even THINK about publishing podcast episodes in any other format than MP3.

.m4a is the most common extension, but not the only extension, used for AAC.

Sound quality: AAC sounds better than MP3 especially when encoded at lower bitrates. This means that your final episode file can be smaller in size and still sound as good or better than MP3.

Chris’s experience: “When I convert my .WAV file to MP3 using iZotope RX 7, the resultant MP3 is 0.4 LUFS lower in volume than the original .WAV. Whereas when I convert to .m4a the resulting LUFS level of the .m4a is exactly the same as the original .WAV file. Interesting…”

Compatibility with ad insertion platforms: Rob Greenlee says, “Hey Chris, Most of the platforms that utilized dynamic ad insertion technology, oftentimes require MP3 files only.”

TPES episodes that published in .m4a:

• 118 – Chris’s Goody Bag
• 119 – Bryan Entzminger

ID3 Tags: Bryan Entzminger says, “I did a test with an episode. I didn’t like that Libsyn didn’t pull the id3 info from the file (because it’s not an MP3) but that’s not a really big deal.”

A few popular shows that use .m4a files:

• Podnews (James Cridland’s show, @ 44.1 kHz so far)
• 60 Sec Torah Byte (Zalman Levin / Podbean 44.1 kHz so far)
• Morning Mantra (Coach MK / Anchor)
• BeyondPodcasting (Allan Tépper’s show, @ 48 kHz)
• Podcast Engineering Show (Barry and Chris’s show, @ 48 kHz)

Technical analysis of top podcasts – James Cridland’s post looking at bitrate. LUFS, mono/stereo, etc.:
https://podnews.net/article/podcast-analysis?utm_source=podnews.net&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=podnews.net:2019-01-17

AAC’s improvements over MP3 (from Wikipedia)

Blind tests in the late 1990s showed that AAC demonstrated greater sound quality and transparency than MP3 for files coded at the same bit rate.

Improvements include:

• more sample rates (from 8 to 96 kHz) than MP3 (16 to 48 kHz)
• up to 48 channels (MP3 supports up to two channels in MPEG-1 mode and up to 5.1 channels in MPEG-2 mode)
• higher coding efficiency for stationary signals (AAC uses a blocksize of 1024 or 960 samples, allowing more efficient coding than MP3’s 576 sample blocks)
• higher coding accuracy for transient signals (AAC uses a blocksize of 128 or 120 samples, allowing more accurate coding than MP3’s 192 sample blocks)
• much better handling of audio frequencies above 16 kHz
• more flexible joint stereo (different methods can be used in different frequency ranges)

Encoding:

*NOTE: NONE of these lists is exhaustive. We did not investigate every single program in existence 😉

Programs that can encode .m4a files:

• iTunes
• Fission (Mac only. Also can tag and create chapters. Allan Tépper’s favorite 1-track audio editor for Mac. Unique because it can also edit lossy formats without generation loss. Can’t save tag data but can copy and paste tag data. Chris was confused because Fission’s tag data doesn’t have a ‘Copyright’ field.)
• Hindenburg Journalist Pro (also can tag and create chapters. Allan Tépper’s favorite multitrack audio editor for conventional computers)
• TwistedWave (Mac, PC and online. Good program but no playback speed adjustment!)
• Amadeus Pro
• 3rd Party Encoder Plugins (Paul Figgiani suggested Sonnox’s Codec Toolbox ~47 USD and Pro Codec ~400 USD.)

Programs that encode MP3s using the Fraunhofer MP3 Encoder algorithm:

• Adobe Audition
• iTunes (Source: Cliff Ravenscraft on October 27, 2010)
• Windows Media Player (Source: Richard Farrar)

Programs for which you can buy an optional Fraunhofer plugin for US$339.15

• Pro Tools
• Logic
• Cubase
• Nuendo
• Sequoia
• Wavelab

Programs that DON’T use the Fraunhofer MP3 Encoder algorithm:

• Hindenburg
• Reaper
• iZotope RX

Players

Compatibility with players and apps: .m4a files are compatible with all podcast players we could find.

Thanks for sharing so much great info, Allan!

Comment below with any questions or comments.

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Great conversation with Bryan Entzminger, host of Engaging Missions and podcast engineer/editor.

We discuss his podcast production and quite a bit about his preferred DAW which he is quite skilled in using: Hindenburg Journalist Pro.

Here is Bryan’s Live Demonstration of Hindenburg Journalist Pro, and here’s a 90-day free trial of Hindenburg Journalist Pro.

Here are Bryan’s production details:

• Electro-Voice RE320
• Rolls cough switch
• Sound Devices MixPre-3
• For remote internet calls, I use a second computer (an old Dell) into the line in for the MixPre-3 using a hardware mix-minus in the MixPre
• I record 2 tracks right onto the SD card in the MixPre. I also run 2 tracks via USB into my MacBook Pro and record into Hindenburg Journalist Pro
• Voice profiler in Hindenburg can create custom profiles!
• For editing, I use Hindenburg Journalist Pro along with iZotope RX7 for audio restoration and Ozone 7 for mastering and a variety of Waves and other plugins depending on the need. I mix and edit in multitrack mode, export to WAV fully mastered but not normalized to -16/-19.
• I then bring that mastered file back into Hindenburg to level using the loudness matching and either convert to MP3 using Hindenburg or RX7. If I use Hindenburg, I’ll also apply the id3 tags and upload right to Libsyn from there.

Also, Bryan got back to me about the Hindenburg auto-leveling feature that we discussed in the episode: “I did several checks with the auto-level with effects and it appears my original assumption was correct. The auto-level is at the “region” (clip) level upon input – prior to ANY processing within Hindenburg.“

Thanks for sharing so much great info, Bryan!

Comment below with any questions or comments.

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