Peace of mind goes a long way
Audio editing services
Choices
You have recorded your audio and now you want it to be perfect for release. The issue is time, as well as all the tech involved in the process. You have options, you can find the time to learn the editing programs and deal with the process yourself, or you can just choose to hand it off to a pro. Editing can take many hours, from downloading and working the raw audio to adding your intro, outro, and mid-roll ads, choosing clips for socials, to final rendering. Having a pro do the work for you can be a real-time-saver, and it also helps to have fresh ears when deciding what works and what should be taken out, ensuring the best overall result.
Boat, Sea, Sunrise by quangle
Preparation is key...
In the end, the better the initial audio recording is, the better the final result will be. Working with less-than-great recordings is something I am well acquainted with, but let's be clear, you cannot make gold out of mud. If you have planned your interview or audio recording properly; you are in the correct space for recording, no one is fidgeting or clicking their watch on the table, dogs or sirens are not going off in the background, you are using a decent mic and, you are sitting at the correct distance from that mic, by following these simple steps, the results will be much better.
Lotus, Flower, Lily pad by ha11ok
The process
RX10, Adobe Audition, and Reaper are my preferred editing software. These will allow me to deal with reverb, background sound, voice de-noise, essing sounds, mic plosives etc.
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Removing all breaths and pauses or even all the umms is not natural. Unless you are wanting a book narration edit (or your guest has a serious tic), it is best to keep things as natural as possible.
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Once the sound has been corrected, I will then listen the entire recording to remove unnecessary repetition such as some of the "umms", the lip-smacking, the long pauses, errors, and random sounds that crop up. Once I have gone through the whole piece with a fine toothcomb, I will then listen to it from start to finish once again.
This time, rather than searching for mistakes, I am looking at the overall flow and the conversation as a whole. This is where I would recommend the removal of certain parts if need be, to bring the whole interview or audio together. Oftentimes people repeat things or go off on tangents and this can take away from the main theme and quality!