Please help :) How can i make my podcast sound warmer

Hi all,

I’ve recently started a new job in marketing and one of my roles is to edit our company podcasts. I’ve some experience recording my DJ mixes on audacity but non really sound editing with the program. I’ve been working away on the podcasts and have been doing the following:

Noise reduction
Levelling
Equalisation - Bass boost
Normalise
Compress
Normalise

It’s sounding ok but my boss wants the grating high ends removed. With the podcast recorded with a mac speaker and over skype this is gonna be hard, any suggestions would be welcome. Here’s a link to the podcast i’m working on now. Again any help would be much appreciated.

https://soundcloud.com/user-910706127/ad-joe-burridge-podcast-mixdown/s-jqSI0

Thanks Audacity community.

Liam

Skype is the bare-bones of speech. Not a lot can be done to put flesh back on it,
apart from amplify the most-skeletal parts of the spectrum with an equalizer …
waveform & spectrogram views of ''joe-burridge-podcast'', before-after equalization & compression.png

Installing a real-time equalizer plugin into Audacity helps speed up the process of equalization.
Here are two free ones which work in Audacity …
http://www.voxengo.com/product/marvelgeq/
http://www.tokyodawn.net/tdr-nova/

Also see my response to the copy of this posting you also made. It’s a terrifically bad idea to double post.

The forum elves see all the postings, so the only thing double posting does is muddy the responses.

Koz

Thanks for the help everyone, sorry about the double post its my first time on the forum and i didn’t see that posts needed approving by moderators so when my first post didn’t go up immediately I though something went wrong, i didn’t actually post it or something.

Thanks though.

Liam

You’re the odd duck with two different valid questions with the same post. I had to go lie down for a while.

But that points to a forum problem. It’s intended that it warn you as you post. Enough people miss it that I wonder if it’s working right. Your first few postings are inspected to make sure you’re not trying to sell us anything.

Any idea why the sound clips in the other post failed?

I know this seems like a Help Desk, but it’s a forum and if you get something to work, post back and say how you did it. The list of Skype recorders used to be much longer and people posted that many of them didn’t work very well. So we dropped them.

Once you get deep enough in. You’re not “cleaning up” any more. You’re in Disaster Recovery. Paying attention at the recording step is stunningly valuable.

The worst condition is having to rescue somebody else’s work…ahem.

Koz

Hi again sorry for the late reply, I’m only checking this during office hours.

I’ve went back and i’m re-editing the podcasts I did last week. Before I was just deleting the recording from our guest speaker and changing my bosses recording to mono, this seems to be causing most of the problems.

Bit silly of me but i seem to have sorted it now.

Thanks again for you help

changing my bosses recording to mono

That could be a danger sign. Do you know how that recording was done? There are recording techniques that produce damaged voice files that only occasionally fail. They drive people crazy.

Yet another problem with flying blind and trying to correct somebody else’s work.

If you got a show to work, that’s what counts.

Koz