Podcasting Q&A

When should you upgrade your audio editing software?

January 23, 2024 Buzzsprout
Podcasting Q&A
When should you upgrade your audio editing software?
Show Notes Transcript

Today on 5 Minute Mondays, we’ll explain when it’s finally time to splurge on some pro audio editing software.

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today on five minute Monday's I'll explain when it's finally time to splurge on some pro audio editing software. Welcome the five minute Mondays. We're bring the best tips and strategies for building your podcast in five minutes or less. So if you're new here, consider subscribing now when you're first getting started with your podcast. Free software like audacity and garage band are great places to start. They will give you the ability to record your audio edited in different tracks. Apply some really basic settings and profiles and and things like that. But you might be asking yourself, When is it time to buy a pro level Daw or digital audio workstation? When is it time to take my editing game to the next level and before I give you my answer, I want to tell you a story, uh, from myself of when I switched from editing movies in my movie, which is the free software that you get on Apple devices like a Mac book to adobes Premiere Pro. So when I was first getting started, I didn't have a lot of extra cash laying around, so I was like, Well, if I want to start learning how to make movies just for fun, just to try it out. Let me go ahead and use my movie, and I learned a lot of the basics. There. I learned how to cut different scenes. I learned how to transition. I learned howto add music beds. I learned how to add graphics and things on top of the the video and picture in picture and those kind of things. And so when I was first getting started, it was helpful to not have a 1,000,000 options of things I could do is very simple software that allowed me to make basic videos, and I use that for over a year. And then I reached the point where it started holding me back like I wanted to layer two things on top of a video and it would only let you do one. Or I wanted to add sound effects in addition to music. But there's only one track for that music, and so I was gonna have to create those custom tracks in garage men and then bring it into my movie as an exported wave file. And so I started hitting all these roadblocks where creatively I movie could not do the things that I needed it to do. And that's when I decided to switch to Adobe Premiere Pro, which is a software that movie editors use for like blockbuster cinemas. So it's definitely like a super upgrade, and there was certainly a learning curve. But I was able to take all the skills I learned in my movie and apply them to Premiere Pro, and within a couple months I became pretty pretty decent. I using Premiere Pro to edit videos. And so I say that to say, When should you switch to another audio editing software? It's when your current software doesn't allow you to do what you wanted to dio when it starts holding you back creatively when you want to experiment with something in your episodes, and your software isn't capable of doing that. So, for example, when you wanna dial in your compression settings just right, you're not looking for a dial that you just turn up and down. But you have a specific value in minds that, you know, is exactly the perfect impression for you and for your recording space when you want to meticulously shaped your fades in your cross fades, so you know exactly how you want the music to fade out. You want to vocals to fade in, and it's not a straight line when you want to really take it to the next level or when you want to create custom presets and voice per files. So ah, lot of software is you can say voice profiles that will adjust the EQ U of your voice to make it consistent. So if you're recording, you have a cold you apply. The voice profile on it makes it sound like you're perfectly healthy. You're not coughing up a lung, so those are all things that advanced audio editing software will allow you to do that. The basic ones, like Garage Band will not. And so when you find yourself in that place where you're wanting to push into those things, then that is when you should switch. If you are looking to upgrade their three programs, that I recommend that I only hear great things about the 1st 1 is Hindenburg Journalist Pro, which is an audio editing software specifically tailored for podcasters. If you're a bus route user, you can go into the resource is section in your dashboard. There's actually a discount code, so you can do that if you want to try out Hindenburg Journalist Pro. The other two are Adobe Audition, which is great. If you already used the Adobe Suite, you'll be very familiar with the layout and then Logic Pro X, which is like garage band on steroids. But I've been podcasting for years, and I'm still using garage band. So I feel like you have to upgrade to one of these pro audio editing suites to feel like a real podcaster, because you can make incredible podcast episodes simply using the free tools that are already available to you. Well, that's it for today. Hit the subscribe button if you're watching this on YouTube, or subscribe to the five minute Monday's podcast in your favorite app to squeeze even more podcast related content into your life. And if there's something you want me to talk about on a future episode, you click the link and showed us to submit your question. Thanks for listening and is always keep podcasting