Video Transcript
Welcome back. So the final thing on my list of three things, you remember was a microphone, headphones, you need software. So we’re going to look at how to actually edit with this software a little bit later in this whole module but I just want to introduce you to some of the options out there.
So you can get on with downloading the software and get it on your systems. So that we’re ready for that point. Now there’s really two different approaches to editing now. One of them is using soundwave editing and the other is text-based and I actually spent most of my career editing with sound waves. But I have actually moved on to text-based editing now because I think it adds a lot of extra advantages but see what suits you.
Let’s have a look at both and then you can decide which one do you want to download and which option you prefer. So sound waves first. Now, one of the stone words of podcasting software is called audacity. It’s free and it is immensely powerful. You can record your sounds and export it ready to be uploaded.
Here you can see that I’m editing sound waves here. Quite simply you can see the shape of your voice or the sound of it in a waveform. You can see it graphically in the way that it goes up and down. And you actually start to get used to the way that “ums” and “ahs” and things like that start to look.
So then because you can see that shape, you can highlight a bit of it and you can cut it out. So if you want to remove an um, you would highlight a bit of that section. And you would remove it. Now audacity allows you to amplify the sound, add all kinds of equalizer settings to it, boost it, all kinds of stuff, all kinds of plugins. And it is all completely free.
And I’ve added a link into the resources and it works also on both Mac and PC as well. So you can download that straightaway, if you want to. Now the other approach is a text-based one. A new platform came out about a year or two ago and it was called descript. And what you do here is you upload an audio file or in fact, you can actually record directly into it.
And then you transcribe that audio file, which creates your words. Once its transcribed, you can then actually edit it just like you would a word processor. So you can grab a bit of audio or a bit of text or like a sentence and you can copy and paste it to somewhere else. So you can cut it and move it to somewhere else and this allows you to actually start to build almost a visual script of your podcast as you’re going along.
I’m going to show you as I say how to work with both these systems a bit later on in the module but I just wanted to show you the two options now and put the same links to both of them in the Resources. So please do download the software that you like.
If you like start playing with it as well. And see what you think of it but as I say, I will give you a full tutorial on both styles a little bit later on. Once that’s done and if you also have your microphone plugged in as well, and we can move onto interviews, which we’ll do in the next video, so that we can start recording your first podcast.
Resources
Learning Action
Download either Audacity or Descript and install them on your computer.
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