EDITING YOUR RECORDING

Now the real work begins and the editing will make the difference between a bad podcast and a good podcast.  With good editing you can take the conversation of a dull slow talking interviewee and turn it into a fresh quick thinking interviewee by cutting out some of the pause time between sentences and words.  If you stutter and say things that sound dumb when recording a podcast, like I do, with editing you can sound brilliant in the finished product.  The task of editing your podcast is not easy and it's time consuming.  A thirty minute podcast can take you two or three hours to edit but the results are worth it.

After you have saved and copied, the raw uncut podcast recording, you can begin the editing process.  This is where you will learn to love the big waveform display of your podcast in WavePad.  I tried several other program but this is the easiest program to use when editing.  Start at the beginning of the podcast and work your way slowly through the podcast the first time.  Then play it back and listen to it and make any corrections you missed the first time through.  After editing it twice your probably tired of listening to the recording and it's time to quit.  Then save the recording with a different name so you still have you copy of the raw uncut podcast in case something bad happens. 

The more your edit podcasts the better you will get.  But here are some tricks I have learned that will help you in the beginning.  When you hear a section that you want to delete, stop the play of the recording and highlight (click the left mouse button and drag the highlighted area) the area you want to delete.  Once the area has been highlighted you can click on the magnifying icon on the bottom main tool bar.  Then play that section again.  When your sure you have the area highlighted that you want to delete just press the delete key.  WavePad will automatically back up a bit and play the section, minus the deleted part, again.  If you made a mistake and deleted the wrong portion then just press the CTRL key and the Z key at the same time.  This will undo your deletion and you can try again. 

Sometime no mater how careful your are you will have a big pop sound in your podcasts.  You can delete the pop or crack by using the same delete technique on this time you will want to zoom in more to locate the pop sound.  It will appear as a tall straight spike in the waveform.  Then carefully highlight it and delete it.  The proper editing of your podcast is hard work but worth the effort.

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