How can I clean up the audio on my podcast episodes for free?
I want to optimize the sound of my podcast audio - you know remove some
annoying background noises and make my podcast episodes sound a bit more... you know podcasty?
Hello I’m Neil Mossey and we're going to do that right now for free online!
I’m a development producer by the way. I help high achieving creators and performers
just like you to get ideas out of your head into the world on YouTube videos
and podcasts and eBooks but today it's the podcast we're going to concentrate
on because we're going to clean one up right now for free online with this amazing website.
It's called Auphonic.com. I use this service so much...
I use it for all of my Great British YouTube podcasts.
Once I’ve edited an audio episode, all I do is upload it to Auphonic and it automatically
cleans it up and gives it a boost. A bit of a nice you know podcast oomph.
Unbelievably they provide two hours of free post-production processing every month,
so let's work through an actual example one of my podcasts right now, and I’m going to take
you through it from the beginning. So this is the website Auphonic.com
All you need to do is sign up, to put in a username an email address and make up a password.
Hit submit, then we need to verify our email address and my Auphonic account is activated!
So now we'll log in for real this time. This is what the dashboard looks like.
It might look a bit intimidating at first. It was intimidating for me:
that's why I wanted to... woah! Which is kind of why I wanted to make this
walkthrough because it's actually really easy. On the left hand side,
you can see how much time you have left. You're allocated two hours every month.
When you upload say a 10 minute piece of audio, that will deduct 10 minutes from that two hours,
and it's reset back to the two hours every month. All we need to do is to hit this big red button
here - “new production” - and you have lots of options so I’m going to walk you through how I
upload my audio file to be cleaned up. So the first thing we need to do is
to choose a file to upload to Auphonic. All you need to do is hit “choose file”
then select your file and hit open and that will choose the audio file that you want to clean up.
This file happens to be an .m4a file. It works with .mp3 files, wavs it even I believe
works with putting videos up - so you can put in an .mp4 video or a .mov and I think it cleans that
up and just takes the audio off for you. I only work with audio files even though
they're audio files from the video file - just because it's a lot easier and quicker to upload.
I could if I wanted add an automatic intro and outro and I could add
basic metadata and extended metadata and chapter marks but I’m not going to do that for now.
I just want to choose the output file and we have a wide variety of file
types that it can output to. I’m going to choose mp3.
The other thing that I like to do is to make my podcast mono, so I click the mono button over here
and you have so many options, but I... I just need this last section here.
There's a leveler. It kind of boosts all the parts
that are quiet and keeps things a podcasty level. That's me doing a “podcasty level” and you can
select that here in the loudness target. You can choose different targets but I go
for the podcast one. It's the... the kind
of loudness that you want for a podcast. There is a very technical explanation for this.
All I know is if I select “podcasts” it makes the audio sound a bit podcasty!
The other crucial box to tick is right here - noise and hum reduction.
Sometimes I turn it on and sometimes I turn it off.
I’m going to be cleaning up some audio. Let's go for a medium strength clean up
of 12db, that has worked well for me. If it creates its own distortion it's
really easy to go... come back to this page and to reduce it a little.
And when I hit “start production” it asks do you want to start the production because this is going
to be taken off our two hours of free credits, so I’ll confirm that with start production
and now it uploads the file to Auphonic. I’m going to put my headphones on now so we can
hear the difference between the original file and the file after it's been cleaned up by Auphonic.
It keeps you informed every step of the way so it's processing the audio now.
Doesn't take that long, only a couple of minutes, a few minutes depending on
how long your podcast audio is - and here we are with the cleaned up file!
That only took about 15 seconds. The section of the audio that I want
you to hear... you can choose between the “output” which is the Auphonic
cleaned up version - so if I hit play here... [AUDIO] “...when I first started it for the
first few years and you know there's different ways to make money on TikTok
and I think some people a little bit um dubious..” So that's the output and you can click on “input”
down here and hear what it sounded like originally.
[AUDIO] “...when I first started it for the first few years and you know there's
different ways to make money on TikTok and I think some people a little bit um dubious..”
Now it might be difficult to appreciate the difference if
you're listening to this on a laptop speaker. I don't know what kind of compression YouTube is
adding to this as well so you'll have to take my word for it that the results are usually
really, really great for my audio files. I’m going to show you now how you can
adjust what you want to do before you download it. If you're happy with what Auphonic has done with
your audio file, all you need to do is click the downloads button here,
but if you want to tweak with it and you can tweak as many times as you like without
it affecting your two hours allowance... All you need to do is to click at the bottom
“edit this production” and you can change any of the settings that you set in the first place.
You can change anything you want. What I’m going to do for a demonstration - I’m
not sure this is going to work - but I’m going to change the noise and hum reduction
to high because sometimes that distorts. Let's see how different that sounds.
So I’ve selected a slightly different output and I’ll hit start production and that starts
the audio processing again for the same file, so you don't have to upload it again
but with that slightly different setting. It's so quick,
so let's listen to this section again - this is with the slightly heavier noise reduction.
[AUDIO] “...back then it was really bad because it was cheaper for gifts and
people some some creators in America got done really well on gifting.”
I can definitely hear a difference there just even on my laptop speaker.
It sounds a lot deader, maybe slightly unnatural for me?
For safety I’m going to download that, so I’ll hit download and I’m going to make a
note for myself that the noise reduction is at 24db and it downloads as easily as that!
Now I want to go back to the previous one and download that version and I’ll
probably use that version, so I’ll go back. Change the noise reduction to “medium”.
“Start production” and let Auphonic.com do its thing.
Oh if you're watching this from Auphonic - if you work for Auphonic I cannot express to you
how happy I am with your service. It is such a good website!
It's cleaned up so many little bits of audio
and I really appreciate I could just buy some credits when I need to.
There we go, so let's hear this one again. [AUDIO] “...it was cheaper for gifts and people
some some creators in America got done really well on gifting, but now TikTok put in like
measures to keep it safe for so kids who can't send gifts from the app you have to be 18 or over”
I’m going to download that one and I’ll call that “noise reduction 12db”,
Save... so now I have two completely different processed versions and I can
just listen to them at my heart's content and choose... choose the right one.
That's how easy it is to use Auphonic.com Is this helping?
If you have reached this point of the video please hit a thumbs up
if you have any better places - please leave a comment down below we'd love to know
how you get to clean up the audio on your podcast episodes or make them sound a bit more podcasty!
And I’m gonna make lots more of these, so please hit the subscribe button if
this is the kind of stuff that you're into. Here's a video right here about how I use
zoom to make video podcasts and here is what YouTube thinks you should be watching next.