Things are changing fast in audio editing.
The platform we discuss in this module is called “Descript.com,” and it has recently undergone some significant changes in the way it operates. This has introduced quite a bit of an extra learning curve for users, and the platform is constantly evolving.
The video below covers the previous method, so for now, we suggest looking at the support documentation provided by Descript themselves.
We would also recommend exploring other platforms that have adopted a text-based editing approach more recently, such as Riverside.FM or Alitu.
The major advantage of text-based editing is that you can literally see the words you and your guest have said on the screen and then directly edit out any words, ums, errs, or mistakes that you wish to remove. With Descript, for instance, you also have the option to use a model of your voice to rearticulate things you might have misspoken. If you said “7” instead of “2,” you can make that change.
We have left the original video below for now, as it provides a good overview of the general principles. However, we suggest checking the links provided for the most recent information.
Video Transcript
OK, so how did that go then with Audacity, it’s a powerful tool. If you had a good play with it, then you’ll have already started to get familiar with what sounds start to look like, this sort of abrupt endings and things like that. So you can see the way that sound turns into those sound, literally waves. Those bumps are what helps you edit it. And with waveform editing, that’s the particular technique that I use for most of my radio career for editing all kinds of stuff from documentaries to little clips for news packages. But a new way has appeared over the past couple of years.
And frankly, I think it helps people new to podcasting to get started, but also experience podcasts too, because to be honest, this is how I now edit. And I want to have a look at this now. One thing I should say though is it is not free. You can get a couple of hours to try this but then you have to buy it. And those free hours also don’t give you very high audio quality either way. So Audacity will give you amazing quality of any length for free straight out of the box. So this is what I’m talking about. It’s called Descript. And you can find it at the website Descript.com.
And before I talk about it, just a reminder that there are a lot of other podcast editing programs out there. Just Google and you will find many. So it really is about finding something that you feel comfortable with. And also if you don’t want to pay, you don’t have to. Audacity for example, completely free. The reason I want to show you this particular program called Descript though is because it works in such a different way. And to be honest I like it so much. I actually have a payplan because I think it saves me so much time overall compared to traditional editing, it’s just easier to say.
So let’s do exactly the same process as we did with Audacity but on this particular program. Because I think by doing the same thing, we can see how they operate differently. What I suggest you do is you watch this video first, see how I do it. And then if you like the idea of this, download the program, give that free trial a go with the audio that we’ve already created and see how you get along with it. There’s no need to convert our file this time. So we can actually import it directly into Descript. So let’s do that now. So I’m going to drag my Zoom file into Descript. And you can see it’s adding the file there.
Now because it’s a bit of video, it takes a bit of time to upload this because so much of the stuff is actually done in the cloud. So that’s actually going to take a little while. So I’ll come back to you in a couple of seconds. But you can see already that in Descript, it’s starting to create this waveform already that we saw in Audacity as well, which will help us in our editing. But it gets more interesting when we do the next batch, which I can see straightaway, which is to transcribe the file. So it needs to upload it, it needs to create an audio file, but then it will try and create a good transcript for you. It does say 95% accurate. So don’t expect it to be perfect but it’s still pretty good.
And it just depend a bit on how fast you talk and the kind of guess you have. But you’ll see in a moment. So I’m going to click transcribing this now and then let that get on with it. It’s going to do that once it’s uploaded it and had a chance to transcribe it. You should know, if you’ve got an hour long interview, it’s going to take a little while to do this. But you can go away and have your dinner and let it get on with it. Because you don’t have to do anything, it will do all the processing for you and do the transcript for you as well. You can see now that it’s starting to do the transcript.
And there we go, there’s our transcript. It’s also asking us, because I told it there were multiple speakers in here. This is it you can start to process it. And you can see here immediately, it’s done a good job at trying to transcribe the whole bit of audio. So we know what’s being said rather than trying to guess from our sound waves. Let’s just click to identify the speakers. Thinks there are two speakers in the – who are they? Listen to each speaker and identify them.
Like that. Now that now is recording. You can see it up.
That’s me.
And I know that I’m going to be record –
ADAM (ON RECORDING): Oh, I did train as a journalist originally –
And do you notice? It’s already spotting the two different speakers. And that’s Adam in there. So we can do that. And it’s going to do its best. It’s far from perfect but you can see here it’s done its best to try and work out who is speaking at what point. Let’s see if IT actually got it right, shall we.
ADAM (ON RECORDING): Yeah I had a few beans on toast with a –
OK, I’m going to stop you straightaway because –
Not bad, pretty close. So there’s our transcript which is a great start. So let’s start as we did with Audacity. And the first thing – Oh, by the way, one thought about this is that this is a great way. If you want to do a transcript for your podcast, then obviously you can just copy. In fact, there’s actually an option that you can use, share, export. And you can download, export it to a text file. In fact on a lot of my social media videos I do for my own podcast, I add subtitles to it. So you can actually export this as a subtitle file that could be mixed with a video file. Something else to look at another day, but I just thought I’d mention it because it suddenly popped into my head there.
But as I say, let’s look at what we did compared to Audacity. And the first thing we did there was we looked at taking it out a little bit. So let’s find something there. So that’s definitely – let’s have a listen to this and see what we can remove.
So that’s definitely – so if you can – can you tell us a little bit again, just say anything you like just so we can hear your voice.
Well, let’s say that we didn’t want to include that bit there. So these couple of words here. And we want to go, yeah, can you tell us a little bit again. So I’ve highlighted the bit I don’t want. You can see it appears here in the waveform editor at the bottom like so. And I can actually just delete that sentence so let’s see how that sounds.
Is this better?
ADAM (ON RECORDING): Yeah.
Can you tell us a little bit again, just say anything you like, just –
And it’s gone, completely gone. So again here, I haven’t had to listen to it and check what it is, or, where the sound starts, where the word starts. I’ve just gone straight into it. Now, the reason I mentioned it a little bit earlier about the waveform editor and about the value of learning Audacity first is that it does its best, it can try and get these edits right. But sometimes it can be not quite perfect. And in which case, you just go down to your soundwave editor here. I’ll expand it just so you can see it better. And you can see, it looks exactly the same as it did in Audacity. And I can highlight a bit, there, delete that. If I want to, I can tweak it a bit more, move it backwards and forwards in exactly the same way as Audacity to get it exactly the way that I want.
So this sound wave editor down the bottom allows you to do that fine tuning. Let’s say move on to move an entire sentence again. So what’s he saying here, is this better?
ADAM (ON RECORDING): Is this better?
(ON RECORDING) Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit again, just say –
I’m going to say we wanted to move his sentence from here up there so I can highlight it just like we did in Audacity. I can click cut and it’s like a word processor if you think about it as well. And then I’m going to just paste it in here. And I’ve literally just moved my sentence.
(ON RECORDING) Could you move up as close as you can to the microphone on your computer.
(ON RECORDING) ADAM: Yeah I’ll see what I can do. Well, that’s better. Is this better? Sorry, I’m just adjusting the lights as well. There you go. Is that?
(ON RECORDING) Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit again.
And so I’ve moved my sentence around. It’s as simple as copying and pasting text. And it’s moved the whole thing in there. Now what about with ums and uhhs? As we saw in audacity, we want to get rid of them. And we can see there’s a few down there straight away. So [INAUDIBLE] for myself. So like umm there. Now, what we can do is within our file here in our composition, I can actually choose to remove these filler words. And we’ll select that there. You can see that it’s highlighted all the umms, all the different umms that we’ve got in there.
You can also select more with the pro version but I haven’t got that. So I want to – I can either remove it or ignore those things within it so that it sort of jumps over it. But I want to delete those words complete. So I’m going to select Delete like so to make sure that’s highlighted and then apply to all. And it has literally removed all the umms and uhhs. So if we have a listen to that now.
(ON RECORDING) Could you hold onto that microphone that I can see which is connected to your headphones there?
And it’s remove the umm from that one and it’s remove the umms from everywhere. Again, you may have to tweak it using the waveform editor just a little bit when it doesn’t quite get it perfect. But it’s done a huge job for us straight away without having to listen to the whole thing cutting them all out. Now the next thing we did with Audacity was we recorded our voice for a little bit of an introduction. In fact, let’s just get rid of the beginnings and ends and let’s find where the podcast starts a bit again. So we’re going to remove the whole of that early segment because we didn’t want that anyway, because it was nothing to do with our interview. That’s our preamble so I’m just going to delete that, that’s all gone.
And find the end of our interview as well. And in this case, instead of trying to listen to it, I can see that that is where it ends.
ADAM (ON RECORDING): If you’ve got a spare five minutes.
(ON RECORDING) Thank you very much, Adam.
I can cut it straight away, I know that, thank you very much. I just checked it without a listen but I knew where it was. And that’s it. So there’s my podcast episode. But I want to start adding in now my extra bit. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to click Record on there, on the option at the top and start recording. Here it goes. And so what it’s going to do is add in my voice tracking. You can see, it also tries to transcribe it as well once it’s underway. “So hello and welcome to this amazing podcast, which is all about making a podcast.” And I click “Stop.” That’s recorded it and is processing it. And now we can take out the stuff that I said in the preamble when I was just recording the audio there. Hello and welcome to my amazing podcast.
(ON RECORDING) Hello and welcome to this amazing podcast, which is all about making a podcast.
Now the other thing that we did in Audacity was to add some music to it. So I’m going to do exactly the same thing again. I’ve got my file on my computer. I’m going to drag it into the program. So that’s added my music here. And what I can now do is add that music directly into my script. So where did I want to do it? I wanted it somewhere like that. What you can see is that that has now added the music into the waveform editor there. So what we need to do is actually adjust that in the same way as we did with Audacity. The first thing I want to do is find out where exactly I want to start with this. So let’s have a listen, making a podcast.
So I want my music to be – I’m going to drag it along like so to get it into the right place. And I’m going to add with this particular one a couple of points which allow me to create that shape of the sound again. So I’m going to add a couple of those in there and I know I’m going to need four them already. So I’m going to get my volume roughly right for the first bit at the start of the show. So I can just – there where I want to go from and hit Play.
(ON RECORDING) Hello and welcome to this amazing podcast, which is all about making a podcast.
And I want to put my volume up during this sort of quiet bit there where I don’t say a lot. I’m going to put up my volume quite a bit. And then I want that to just completely fade out just like it did before. But the only difference here is that we’re using a line instead of that whole sort of squeezing of the whole sound wave that you saw with the Audacity. So if we play that again.
(ON RECORDING) Hello and welcome to this amazing podcast, which is all around making a podcast.
ADAM (ON RECORDING): Well, I did train as a journalist originally. And I was doing word pressing and blogging on the side. And I was looking for a niche –
So you can see the way that I’ve added the music, mixed it in, and then I could adjust it. If I had headphones in, I could get it exactly right to the exact sound that I want to get. There’s one final thought actually, which I should have probably mentioned on Audacity as well. But let me show you how Descript does it. And you can apply the same techniques of using an equalizer and the compressor to help your audio sound a bit better. It’s very similar to what we saw with [INAUDIBLE] when you ran the audio through the system which converted the audio from an MP4 to an MP3.
So we’re going to have a look at these settings here. And we can see there that we have got a script which is me talking and my music. So we’ve got two active tracks. So there’s my script. And on here then, I can then add some effects. So on my script, I want to add, let’s say, a compressor. And I can choose one of the presets like a classic voiceover with a nice deeper sound. And it’s going to be very hard to hear through this video. But that’s automatically added some process into the sound to make it sound.
ADAM (ON RECORDING): Word pressing and blogging on the side. And I was looking –
A bit deeper and a bit richer. Best if you play with that yourself on that one. As I say, you can do this with audacity as well. But it’s nice and easy that you can apply it within Descript. OK, so that’s Descript. Again, there’s loads more things that you can fiddle with and play with. And the support guides just like with audacity have tons of information about how you can do it even more effectively. There was one thing actually I do want to show you actually. Let me just does do this quickly. Because I can illustrate how you can really use the power of this text based editing by having a look actually at my own podcast. Let me just go through to my own show if I can find it here. Where are we?
And what I had here was I had three guests and myself, so there were actually four people speaking in my last show. And if you have a listen to this, you can hear how I use music but also multiple people at once.
Does advertising work?
No. I’d say probably yes. I don’t think it can hurt you overall.
Is it easy?
In order to get really hard data, you have to do a lot of scientific testing.
Well, can you make it work to build an audience for a podcast? Can you buy listeners with paid ads? You’re listening to “Can I Make a Hit Podcast,” the real time story of an attempt to make a hit show that will rival the big podcast production companies, but with none of their time or resources. I’m Richard Midson, a former news editor and journalist.
And as you can see there, what I did was I clipped these from the program. These little clips like, no, is it easy, yes, I’d probably say so. I can literally construct my script like building blocks. I can say, I want this bit there. And I can copy and paste it just like I would again a word processor. So you’ve got Mike Winter speaking.
No.
I’d say probably yes –
And then my, Mike Fisher.
I don’t think it can hurt you overall.
Is it easy?
And I can do that by copying and pasting those sentences. That’s what I really like about the power of this. I’m making another podcast called, how not to get old and boring. And I had five hours of raw audio interviews with lots and lots of different people. And I’ve been going through that raw audio like you can see here from the transcript. And I can copy out of it. So I could say, my aunt gave me a gold medal. And I can literally copy that and add that into the script of the program that I want to put out. I could talk about podcast editing for hours. But I will stop there because I think that’s giving you the basics to get underway.
Oh, one final thing I completely forgot to do and that is how do you export your file? In this particular case, I’m clicking share. I’m clicking export. Because we’re going to get this file onto the computer so you can share it. Audio. And here you can see I’m doing an MP3 format again. I’m doing it stereo. Sample rate of 44100 which is a high quality rate. 192 again kilobytes. And this is the quality level which I’ve mentioned before. So 192 is a nice good style. And then I click Export. And that is going to put it onto my hard drive.
There’s one final thing I want to talk about with editing because I think you are so close to getting underway now with this. And it’s about music. Because you’ve seen me using music in both Audacity and with Descript as well. And before you release anything with music in it, I really want to have a chat about it. Because there are some very serious implications if you get it wrong. Now m going to do that in the next video. What I suggest you do for now though is if you like the look of this sort of text based editing is download Descript. Remember, there’s a couple of hours free that you can play around with it. You can try and see how it works and see if you can relate to that better than using waveform editing.
And remember, also you can drag your Zoom file directly into Descript as well. So you can get straightaway set up with that one and start playing with it. So have a bit of fun with that if you like the idea of that. I will then see you in the next video. We can have this chat about music.
Resources
Learning Action
If you’d like to try text-based audio editing, download Descript and practice editing on the audio file from your Zoom interview in the Remote Interviews lesson.
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