As a podcaster you do want to make sure your audio is clean of noises and sounds the very best it can. Good news is – Adobe Audition comes packed with world class editing and noise removal features. I’ll show you how to use these to edit and improve your podcast.
Using a Noise Gate
Noise gates are perfect if you or your guest happen to take plenty of breaths. These breaths may be eliminated by using a noise gate.
Make sure you select Window > Effects Rack and then click the white triangle arrow on effect 1 then Amplitude and Compression > Dynamics Processing…
Noise Gate @ 20dB is the preset you’ll want to start with and then slowly tweak the preset in the visual editor to get the desired noise gate that will cut any audio below a certain amplitude from your recording. You can playback the audio while you’re editing which makes it easy to set a noise gate in Audition.
Removing Background Noise
Have you got a noisy fan or some hiss in your recording that you want to remove. This is easy with Adobe Audition. When you’re playing back your audio find and highlight a section that contains only the noise you want to remove with no speech.
It is important you select only the noise and no speech otherwise you’ll end up severely reducing your audio quality.
Now right click and select Capture Noise Print from the menu that appears. Then you want to head to Edit > Noise Reduction / Restoration > Noise Reduction (process)…
This effect will dramatically reduce and even remove any background noise from your recording. You can tweak settings to your desire or just apply it out of the box. It does a great job!
Adding and Removing Silences
Sometimes there are plenty of awkward silences in a podcast recording. Audition has a feature that automatically scans all of your audio and then removes silences to make your recording flow and sound more natural.
Head to Window > Diagnostics then select Delete Silence from the options in the new window. Under presets click Trim Long Silent Pauses, go to settings, select all of your waveform and then click Find Levels then click Shortening Silence from the dropdown menu and type a time. I find 150 ms (milliseconds) is enough to delete long pauses but still leave a natural gap between spoken words.
Now to run click Scan then Delete All.
You can, alternatively, insert a silence in your audio by clicking Edit > Insert > Silence… then type the duration of the silence you wish to insert.
Learn More Adobe Audition
I hope you’ve enjoyed learning the basics of podcast editing to help you edit and improve your podcast. If you’d like to learn more check out my YouTube channel containing hundreds of free Adobe Audition video tutorials at https://www.youtube.com/musicradiocreative
Written by: Mike Russell
Creative Director, Voice Artist, and Audio Producer at Music Radio Creative.
