In this concluding tutorial of a six‑part series, Shaun Whynacht walks viewers through the final mixdown and export process for a podcast episode using Adobe Audition. He begins by adding ID3 metadata—title, artist, album (podcast name), recording date, album art, and optional copyright—so the information travels with the audio file. He then demonstrates how to set the overall loudness, aiming for a peak around -3 dB, and explains why a uniform volume adjustment can cause inconsistencies between sections. To address this, he shows how to apply Dynamic Processing (compression) using Audition’s presets (e.g., Smooth Vocal, Voiceover) to raise quieter parts and tame peaks, followed by a modest Amplify effect (e.g., +3 dB) to reach the target peak level. Finally, he saves the mixed session as a WAV file, converts it to MP3, and advises on proper export settings (minimum 44.1 kHz, 32‑bit depth), a consistent naming convention, and the importance of uploading the final file to a podcast hosting platform. The video ends with a thank‑you and invitation for viewer questions.
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Alright, you've done it. You've made it to the last lesson in our 6-video series on how to edit your podcast using Adobe Audition. I want to thank you for making it this far in the series. This is an updated version, so there was a previous video and what we found out were some of the pop-up dialog boxes weren't being captured in the screenshot, so I have decided to redo this video several months later. And that's what we're doing right now. So we've edited the podcast. Now we're going to do what's called the final mixdown and get this ready to be published on a podcasting platform of your choice. We use podcast.co. There's Libsyn, there's Anchor FM, there's a lot of ones out there, and I'll leave it up to you to find one that you like the best, as each of them have their pros and cons. So here we go. On the screen, we've got a latest episode of one of my podcasts here, the Content Content Amplification Podcast, and we built it all out in the multitrack view. So what we like to do is we want to put in the metadata. This is the data that gets embedded into the file so that if that file is shared or uploaded to a system, all that basic information about what the show is carries along with that file. So we're going to go up to the window menu at the top, and we're gonna go down and we're gonna find metadata. And when we do, it's gonna pop up here in a side window. I'm just gonna pull it over into another one so I can see it. Now what we want to do is look at this ID3 tab here, and it'll pull in information from the last time you've done it. What you want to do is give it a title of the episode, the artist name, the album— what I tend to do is put in the name of the podcast— and then you can put in the recording date here. You can upload some album art and fill in any of the other information that's here if you choose to do so, including your copyright and elements of that. Now, you'll see a lot of this does relate to music because Audition is used for music recording, so you wouldn't have things like lyrics and composer and all that kind of stuff for a podcast. So making sure that you fill that in there as well. So that's the first step. Next, what we want to do is we want to mix it down, and I'm going to show you a bunch of different ways to do this. Your music may be at a certain level, your voice and your audio tracks may be at a different level. What I want to do is make sure that we are peaking at about -3. Now on the volume level on the very bottom of the view meter, we see -3 is here, 0 is up the top. If you play the audio, I'm going to do that, I'm going to stop talking while I do that. Speaking part. If you want to increase that, you can move the little volume circle here to the left and right and increase that volume as you do so. All right, now there's one thing that will be an issue if you did that clear across the board. As you can see here, the opening where I'm talking at the beginning of the episode, I'm a lot louder than when we go a little further down the track. Okay, so if you did that, you're increasing the whole thing. So what we want to do here is we want to mix it down and then we're going to use some dynamic processing. So let's go ahead and do that. Now to mix down, we're going to go up to the top under multitrack and we're going to say mix down session to a new file and we're going to do the entire session. It's going to take a few moments and it's going to compress it all. Now don't worry that if you do this and you want to come back and redo it again, then you could go ahead and just go back to the multitrack and do it a second time. Now in here, if we played this, they recommend that if you're a B2B, so business to business, this one's not too bad. It's peaking about here. This looks pretty good. But I'm going to show you the dynamic processing because there will be episodes, especially if you have a guest where they speak quieter, and you might want to just, you know, enhance the compression that way. So we're going to highlight the whole track. I'm just using Command+A, or you can do Control+A if you're on a PC. And we're going to go up to Effects. Amplitude and Compression, and we're going to go to Dynamic Processing. Now this is the part that you would never have seen in the last video, these pop-up screens. Now Adobe Audition has a lot of great presets in here that you can choose based on what you want to do. A lot of them are very music heavy, as you can see. They do relate to different instruments and so forth. But they have a Smooth Vocal in here, they have a Voiceover one. That you could choose, and it really is going to kind of change the audio as you go through. If you've got a good set of reference monitors or speakers in your editing setup, those are great to just really go by the ear. So when you choose each of these, you can press the play button on the very bottom and hear what it's going to sound like. Something that absolutely needs to be done. So what compression is doing is it's pulling up the low parts. So if there's soft audio, it's going to pull them up. And if there's any peaks in the top, like these little spike lines that are here, it's going to kind of push them down, right? Exactly what you hear, compression. It's really compression and expansion is what it's doing. But what I tend to like to do, just go back to the default here, is I don't tend to do too much with adjusting this part here. I just like to pull these down just a little bit, okay? And then you can go ahead and click Apply. You'll see it'll change the waveform just a little bit here. It does pull them down, okay? There is still not really peaking at -3, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to highlight it again and I'm going to go back to Effects and Amplitude now, and I'm going to amplify it just a little bit. Now you got some presets in here for boosting, so we're going to go with 3 decibel boost. We're going to apply. It's going to pull it up a little bit higher, you know, or outsource their marketing. And that's okay. It's in that, you know, -9 to -3 range at the peak, right? You don't want it to stay in there. You don't want the— as you can see down here, there's green, yellow, and then it goes to red. But you won't see red because it's not peaking. But, um, but some people— you got green and yellow. So we want it to— so that if it does hit that red, it's going to be touching, just touching the -3. And that's pretty good right there. Now, what I will do next is I will go to File and Save As, and this is where we get to save that final file. Now, by default, it will go as a WAV file when you go here first, but you can then change it to an MP3. There's gonna be some quality loss in MP3, but if you're editing for a podcast, I wouldn't worry about it. Your file size is gonna be really good, Every episode that I've put out for podcasts for myself or clients, I do put them out as an MP3 format. So we're going to do that, and then you're going to give it a name. My recommendation is come up with a really good naming convention so that in the file you can see which episodes. If you got different names or guests, include that in the title so that you can keep track of what they are. The name has no real impact on when you upload it to the distribution system. For how it's going to help promote it or not. It's more so for you to keep things organized. So you can go ahead and do that, making sure that the sample rate is by minimum 44.1 kHz stereo 32-bit. That's the default. You can change that and go higher. You're not going to see a considerable difference in the quality of it, but if you did decrease, you would see that difference. Okay, so default is 44100 with 32-bit depth in there. Then you go ahead and you click OK and it will save that episode. Then you just go log in your system and upload those files for the episodes as you go through it. So again, thank you so much for taking the time to watch this demonstration and learn more about using Adobe Audition for editing your podcast. If you got a question or comment about this video or any one of the other 5 videos in the series, please put them in the comments below the YouTube video. If you're watching it on the blog page of our site on one of the embedded videos, just click on the video, click on YouTube, and you can leave the comment there. Be happy to answer any question that you have, and thanks for watching.
