Podcasting Hacks

Chapter 8. Basic Editing

Hacks 50–60

I don’t know that I’m doing it so much as a

protest against radio as I am to develop the

radio show I always wanted to hear.

—Brian Ibbot

Broadly speaking, audio production software falls into one of four categories: recording, editing, mixing, and plug-ins. Recording tools sample audio from one or more inputs and store it to disk. Editing programs allow you to rearrange or delete sections of previously recorded audio. Mixing tools take sounds collected from various sources and mix them together into a final produced piece. And plug-ins [Hack #51] are used throughout the process to add or remove distortion, noise, and echo, and to create sonic effects.

If all you plan to do is record a mono track of speech, make some small edits, and then encode it to MP3, all you need is one program, Audacity [Hack #50] . For more complex audio work, professionals use a combination of multiple programs, each of which specializes in one of these tasks.

In addition to these basic tools, other types of specialized applications can be useful to podcasters. Small audio routing applications, such as Sound-flower, can make it easy to reroute audio within your system from applications that might not have elaborate sound input and output options.

Cart applications [Hack #54] and [Hack #55] can be a handy way to organize the samples and sounds that you will use throughout your show. These applications preload the sounds for easy access and then present a grid of buttons; ...