leveling out the audio on a podcast with multiple guests

Whether you have just started podcasting, or are a veteran, you get it. The challenge being that you can spend your time in pre-recording to get all who are attending at a balanced volume.

Now if you are doing livestreams, this is critical. So you have to spend your time with your guests and hosts.

Apps and software when recording

Now if you are recording, there are post-production solutions. These typically range from the monotonous task of doing it manually, using features that are built into the app you are using or in various software.

But the truth is, and I know from first-hand experience, many of those do an okay job but still not quite the results you may be looking at.

When I am online with host and guest, as the producer, before we record, I run into this a lot. What I have discovered is that it’s not always a matter of someone just turning the volume up. It can become a real hassle due to some technical setting and their equipment.

And then there are things you cannot control that happen during the recording. Someone moving into and away from certain mics or perhaps they just have the tendency to speak louder, than softer, than louder, etc.

Personally I don’t like to stress out about this or hassle my guests about these issues. But fortunately, I do not worry about it as much, as long as everyone can hear each other. I do use some of my apps that have a noise leveling control, but in the end, for the last touch, I run it through Auphonic.

Once you have the settings down…

So with Auphonic you upload your file and wait while it uploads and processes. As you can see here there are a bunch of options available and you can decide what to use.

First, focusing on what may have brought you here, there are the Audio Algorithms. There we find some cool stuff, but specifically, Loudness Normalization.

Loudness Normalization:
Adjusts the global, overall loudness to the specified Loudness Target, so that all processed files have a similar average loudness.

Now I have tweaked my settings and save them as a preset. This gives you the opportunity to save them specifically to your needs, or have various presets that might be like a studio preset and a event preset.

The point is the end results. Upon discovering it our host Adam Weeks said one word. Magical. Other podcasters that I have shared it with often said, Where has this been all my life? In any case, you can see the results here, with the bottom being the original file and the top, the processed file.

Or this one was done live at an event.

Now as I pointed out earlier, there is a lot you can do with this. And it gives you a well-compressed final file.

If you check out their docs, you will understand why this tool is so amazing.

You can try it out for free with 2 hours monthly, but you may need to buy hours or a subscription. As someone that I has used this for years, I can safely say it’s worth its price.

And hey, we do buy ourselves a good chunk of time here at Do the Woo, but if you would like to donate some one-time credits to use, you can do that here.