How aggressive should you set the processing for podcasting? Our audio engineer Mike Erickson says just enough to raise the audio above any ambient noise for listeners who don't have noise cancelling headphones, but not so much that you remove all trace of quality for those who are downloading low bitrate podcasts.
It’s not as difficult as you might think to strike that balance. Because a podcast is not in real time, you have the luxury of being able to process it in a very sophisticated and virtually undetectable way.
Because most podcasts are predominantly voice and most listeners will be listening in on ear buds, you’ll need a noise gate to keep the noise floor from rising during pauses in vocal content. A good audio processor will suppress unwanted noises like the air conditioner rumble that happened to kick in the moment you pushed the ‘record’ button. In some cases, you might want to fatten the sound with just a trace of AGC or compression or limiting. For example, our Aura8-IP processing BLADE (which has eight modes, one of which you can use for podcasting) lets you selectively add AGC, compression or limiting by bypassing the other sections, rather than require all three functions to operate interdependently, which gives you the right amount and type of processing needed.
Mike’s final advice for anyone concerned out the quality of podcasts: If possible, offer AACplus as well as MP3. Most phones and media players support AACplus and the quality is much better.