People will listen to your show because they are interested in your topic. One of the big reasons they will stop listening to your show is poor audio quality. Ensuring your show’s audio quality not only increases your chance of listener retention, but it also conveys a level of professionalism, credibility and investment that is not always found in some podcasts.
As of June, 2019, there are over 750,000 active podcasts (source: Podcast Insights). As more shows populate the podcast landscape you will find yourself competing for listeners. You have only one chance to make that first impression. We know this. That’s why we’ll go over the finer details.
There is audio content editing which involves removing or moving around content within an episode of your podcast. This includes taking out filler words – “umm”, “ah”, “so”. While there needs to be a naturalness to a voice, too many of these filler words can be distracting. Soon, it’s all your listener will hear. We can get rid of those for you.
Then there is audio repair and enhancement. This is audio engineering. There is room sound, mouth sounds, and audio that seems distant. If two or more people are on a recording, one may be louder than the other. We can address these issues for you.
Audio engineering includes just some of the following:
- proper fades
- equalizer
- audio compression
- normalizing levels
- limiting
- lufs standards (what are ‘lufs’?)
- de-essing
- de-clicks
- reverb (aka echo)
- mouth noises – clicks and sibilance
- phase
- saturation
- noise gating
- and much more…
Fixing some of the imperfections will increase the overall audio quality of the show, provide a better experience to your listeners which will result in increased listener retention and attraction. Attraction? Yes, because your existing listeners will tell others about your show. People don’t brag about podcasts with subpar audio!