Basic Podcast Production with Adobe Audition - Lesson 6

All right, you've did it. You've made it to the last lesson, the final lesson in our podcast production training. And this one, we're going to talk about mastering. And what do we mean by mastering? That is making your multitrack project into a master audio file, one that you save as an MP3 that you'll then eventually upload to a podcast service of your choice, uh, that's out there. So in order to do that, once you've got this ready, what we're going to do first is we're going to add an element to this called an ID3 metadata tag. So how do we find that? Well, the first thing you want to do is make sure that the metadata, metadata window is turned on. So we can go here and metadata. There it is right there. So what we're going to do is we're going to make sure that the session file that we created is the one selected, and it is if we're in the multitrack, and this won't show up if it isn't. We're going to add in as much of this information as possible because this is going to help when you upload it to different services and help in the searching of the files so that it's readily available. So we're going to make sure that you're using the ID3, and we're going to give it a title. So we're going to call it The Test Podcast, right? And I give title like the episode name. The artist would be, um, yourself, and the album I would give it the podcast, um, name, right? So The Test Podcast is more of the, the subject title of it, and the album name would be the name of the podcast. So we'll go in here and say Shaun's Let's go here. Shaun's Podcast. Well, I can't type. Album art is not going to allow me to upload that. The recording date, okay. Genre, this is all music stuff, so I wouldn't worry about that, right? There's no thing in here for podcast. Lyrics, composer, none of that stuff really matters. Copyright, or if you have a copyright URL, you can put that in. But really, this is the stuff that you want to have on file. So that's the first thing you want to do. Next, what we're going to do is we're going to go to Multitrack and we're going to say Mix Session to a New File, and we're going to do the entire session. It's exporting, and now it's mixing it down. As you can see, there's the opening, the main body of the podcast, and then the closing. Now, think about your business. Doesn't sound too bad. If you want to bring up the audio a little higher, I tend to try to bring it up so it's, it's touching on around -3. So you see this grid. This is -3 decibels here. You don't want it to touch the top. So in order to increase the volume, we're going to highlight it all or select all. We're going to go to Effects, Amplify and Compression, and first we're going to go and we're going to do something called Dynamic Processing. Now everybody has their different options for compressing, and what compressing does is it It moves in the high points and it fills out the low points so that the audio is more level across the board. There's some defaults in here that you can go through. So like voiceover and so forth. What I like about it is you can hit play.

Welcome to the Content Amplification Podcast, where you will gain insight into real-life tactical and strategic elements to help you scale.

I tend to bring this down to about -15.

Let's get started with today's episode.

That's really the only adjustment. So you can hear me. That's really the only adjustment I make within the system when I'm doing this. I'm going to click OK. You can see the file will change just a little bit. It just kind of brought it down and made it a little more level, brought the high peaks down. Now with it selected, I'm going to go back to Effects, Amplify, and I'm going to amplify it. If I want to go from like a -9 to -3, Right, that's about 6 dB in boost. So I can go in here and I can say +6 dB boost, apply, and there we go. Right, this to me is a really well-balanced audio file for a podcast. It's going to be a little louder when I play. The way you feel about yourself. Okay, so that's good, right? That's what I want to do now. It still is not an MP3 file. So now what we need to do is we need to go to File, Save As, and in here we can give it the name. It's going to pull in the name of the session, which in that case may be the name of the file that you want. You're going to pick where you want to save it. I'm just going to save this one to the desktop. And then the format. So by default, it's going to choose WAV file. It's going to be a large file. You're going to want an MP3 file. It's going to compress it a little bit in file size., but most of the systems you upload to will want an MP3 file. And we're going to keep all the sample types the same, and we're going to say okay. It's going to come up and it's going to tell you that it is a lossy format, which means it does remove some frequencies, but you won't hear the difference. And you're going to want to say yes. If you don't want to see that every time, you can check this off to say don't show me this again and click yes. It now saves that file. If I go to my desktop, there's my file.

I can hit space. Welcome to the—

You may not see that, but I am sharing just the actual application here. So, on the desktop, you can actually play that file, but it's also over here on the left-hand side. That's the file that you're going to use. So, in all these lessons, I covered the basics of how you can do the different elements to produce your podcast. All you need to do now is start to come up with the ideas of your podcast and start recording. If you have any questions about anything you watched here, please do not hesitate to contact me where you find me online on social media, or go to my website, bluecowmarketing.ca, and you can reach me there. Thank you for being part of this. Take care.