Work Text:
Okay, you’ve recorded your first podfic, posted it, and are feeling pretty proud of yourself.
Maybe you followed this guide and bless it, honestly, for being clear and concise and easy to follow. Or maybe you followed one of the other guides! There are a bunch! Some of them are linked in resources, because they expand certain parts of the process that were daunting before but maybe you’re ready for now!
But that was hard work, and also you want your podfic to be better. Or at least, you want your next one to be better.
A few things I’m not going to talk about:
- You can (and probably want to) upgrade some equipment, have a non-laptop or phone microphone, figure out how to modify your environment with sound dampening clothes, blankets, foam, whatnot. And while I will take this moment to mention that making sure your podcave is large enough that you don’t overheat is an excellent idea, this is highly location and budget specific and other places on the internet cover it way better than I could.
- Also, all I’m going to say re: making cover art is that a) I’m a big fan, and b) I’m a big fan of Photopea as graphics software. General graphics editing and photo sourcing advice is plentiful and again, software and patience specific, and other places on the internet cover it way better than I could.
- Also also, if you had to figure out the absolute basics of it to make your first podfic post (like hosting, editing software, etc), I’m not going to talk about that. I linked a great resource just a bit further up, but also there are probably a dozen beginners guides that cover that and this is a guide for a different audience.
1. Get to know some audio terms
There are so many terms, and it can be very hard to know what to play with things in audio if you don’t know what the basics are. Here are a couple of resources I found helpful, targeted at podcasters but close enough:
- https://blog.podcast.co/create/podcast-glossary-terms-phrases-explained
- https://riverside.fm/blog/podcast-glossary
2. Learn Punch & Roll and/or Visual Editing
Okay, look, the first time you spend god only knows how long listening to the same fic, you will want to make it easier. And while it’s nice to find the parts you did well, once you start listening to the same piece multiple times and you can’t remember whether you fixed that bit, you start going insane. … only me? Okay, but this tip still applies to people with more straight forward editing processes.
Punch and roll… I admire those who do it, I am not one of them. You can find instructions on how to do that here.
Visual editing I DO like. Here’s a great tutorial on the process.
I got a dog training clicker to mark my spots. You can clap or snap, but I can’t snap consistently, and felt self-conscious clapping even though I live alone. It was 7 bucks. It’s purple.
I generally seem to forget to click once or twice per hour? So still listen through after editing to find those. But you can listen to the shorter version after the visual edits rather than the whole thing and save yourself some time there.
3. Develop a pre-recording process.
This can be as big or as little as you like. I try to hydrate a few hours before (with varying degrees of success), and then after the podcave is set up, do a bit of a warmup. I do a few stretches, and say a couple of tongue twisters to get my enunciation going. “The teeth, the tongue, the tip of the lips” a few times over, or something along those lines. If that causes a few too many tongue twists, more hydration is good! Also brushing teeth and having a mug of warm water with some lemon (and honey?) set up for while recording. Or just a glass of water.
Also, remember to check your mic is correctly hooked up, on the right settings, and the right one is recording.
4. Make a backup copy of your raw file before you start editing.
Self explanatory, but I did not a few times, and regretted it. Use WAV or other lossless format for this.
5. Make friends with labels!
Oh my god, the moment I discovered this, it was like finding a light from above. See above for my woes in listening to the same part many, many times.
Sync-lock your Label track to your Audio, so that when you cut out some audio, all the labels later in the recording (and everything else above the label track) move along with it.
Excellent for things like:
- Marking where you need to put in sound effects
- Marking sections that you want to rerecord
- Marking music cues
- Leaving yourself a reference to how far you got in editing
If you want more information, here's an additional resource.
6. Press Z before you copy/cut/paste/apply filter/whatever
Z is the audacity keyboard shortcut for “Zero Crossing”. Technically this means that it’ll move the selection to the next place the waveform goes to zero and match beginning and end. This means that your cuts and edits and whatnot will be smoother because that’s the magic point that the bit before and the bit after will be the same and going in the same direction.
7. Build yourself some presets and macros
Obviously and importantly, play around with things and see what works and sounds good to you! Listen to what other podficcers have done and see if you like it or not and figure out what you want to try, then do it!
Once you’ve got something you like, save it to reuse! For something that’s just one step, you can maybe get away with just doing a user preset depending on your workflow. If it’s multiple steps, you want a macro - instructions here and here
Effects Macros, Presets, and other options
- Non-human voices (dragon? alien?)
- Change Speed & Reverb combinations! I have 3 different ones for different sized dragons - reducing the speed makes it sound bigger and lower, and making the reverb room size bigger conveys it coming from something larger.
- One dragon voice for a smaller dragon includes bumping the treble and reducing the bass somewhat and Reverb.
- Reverse a section, add reverb, then reverse it back for an otherworldly voice
- General rule of thumb -> smaller things are higher pitched; larger things are lower pitched.
- People talking through helmets/megaphones/speaking trumpets/etc
- Equalization and/or reverb will probably achieve an appropriate effect!
- Removing the lower frequencies will make it sound tinnier.
- Distortion is also an option, but remember to make sure it’s still clear what the words are to the listener.
- Flashbacks
- A really little echo can convey this nicely! Mine is at 0.05, which I think technically makes it reverb? Regardless, it works, I like it. It’s not too obvious but also distinctly different from the regular narration. Also it’s fewer settings than reverb.
- Literally copying exactly the phrase you’re calling back to (if it’s that kind of flashback) with a bit of an echo reflects the callback extra strongly.
- Telepathy/inner dialogue
- Change pitch? Reverb?
- If one fic has both, probably do them differently to make them more distinct.
- Narration (character reading a story)
- Maybe some little sound effects of pages turning when they start reading the story?
- Pacing your reading slower is a good way to convey short bits, no effects required
- Change the tempo to a little slower (not speed, as that will change the pitch as well)
- Phone calls/voicemail
- Equalization has pre-set options for this, and for old-school radio as well. Take a look and play around.
- Distortion has a walkie-talkie preset, but make sure it doesn’t overwhelm the words.
- Text messaging
- You might want a beep notification sound effect and then read out the message
- Computerised or phone effects could work if you don’t have those elsewhere in your fic.
- Footnotes
- A ‘ding’ before and/or after each can indicate jumping back and forth
- Get a second person (or do some distinguishing sound effect) to make it clear you’re hopping in and out of the main narrative
- Computerised
- Echo of 0.009 can do this, though it works best if you do a sort of flat tone when recording
- Differentiating voices
- If you can do it just by acting, that’ll work better probably.
- If you can’t, try Change Pitch! But only a little bit, like, maybe a semi-tone. Unfortunately, sometimes you just have to compensate for being a soprano on a deeper male voice. Or vice versa, I suppose.
Editing macros
Play around a bit with editing, but once you have your process, you probably want to make some macros to repeat. Your recipe is going to be unique to your voice, your recording studio, your microphone, your recording software, and your personal preference.
Here are some common ingredients:
- High pass filter
- Low pass filter
- Compressor (resource)
- Normalise
- Limiter
- Loudness Normalise
- Noise Gate (resource)
- Noise Reduction
- Equalization (resource )
- De-clicker (download here)
- De-esser (download here)
Note: I have changed pretty much all of this probably half a dozen times in the process of writing this.
I have a start editing one:
.5) run noise reduction! But that’s manual.
1) EQ Filter for Audacity preset LF Rolloff for Speech (essentially a high pass filter to clear out distracting and muddying background noise that you probably can’t hear)
After first pass (the visual clicks are out, but before special effects):
1) De-Clicker
2) Low pass filter 12000 & 6dB (I’m a soprano, if you have a lower voice, lower the first number) (softens ‘S’es; I don’t know why, but the de-esser linked above does NOTHING for my recordings)
And I have an end editing one:
1) Compressor to even out volume
2) Normalise to peaks of -3dB to get the volume right (or maybe vice versa on which part does what work here)
… then I run an ACX check, just so something else can answer questions like “is it too quiet? Is it too loud?”, because I am the human embodiment of the shrug emoji about it. Also, if you’re just trying out a whole bunch of settings, it’s a nice way to know what aspects you need to work on, and what isn’t broken.
8. Learn some keyboard shortcuts
Take a look at what the keyboard shortcuts are for your DAW of choice and learn what they are and how to use them to navigate and edit and such. It’ll save time and sanity. Some of my Audacity faves are Z, C, Cmd+K, Cmd+B, Space, Opt+Left/Right, plus obviously the usual C&P friends.
Also, now that you have some macros of your own, you can assign them their own keyboard shortcuts! This is under Preferences > Keyboard. Highly recommend for anything you do more than once in a project.
9. Metadata
There are as many ways to do metadata as there are people doing podfic. Or maybe more? I don’t even necessarily do the metadata the same every time, because how I want series and chaptered things and individual fics is different.
But here are the ACTUAL rules:
1. Think about how you want the thing to show up in your music library and make it easy to find.
2. Provide all the info anyone might want somewhere.
I tend to listen to things by album, so that’s what I prioritise. Someone who wants to know the original author fastest is going to put that as the artist, but don’t undervalue your work as podifccer - any cover of a song ever is going to have the singer as the artist and the composer as whoever wrote the song, that’s a pretty natural fit. People will change it if they don’t like it, but if the information they’re going to want is easily available, they’ll be fine to do that.
Audacity will prompt you with metadata options while exporting. How I like to do it:
- Your pseudonym as the artist
- The author in the composer field
- The year the podfic was made.
- Genre as "podfic"
- A link to the fic in the "comments" section
If it’s a single chapter fic, I make both the album title and the track title the title of the fic.
If it’s a multichapter fic, I make the album title the title of the fic, and each mp3 has the name of the fic and the chapter number, and the track number as chapter number.
If it’s a fic in a series, I make the album title the title of the series, and then include the track number as the chapter in the entirety of the series. Does this make sense? Kinda. If you know a better way to keep all the fics in a series bundled together but also easy to find fic by fic, let me know.
Now, as a chronic maker of covers, I want to add the cover to the files. Audacity WILL NOT do this. You’re going to need some help. Rumour has it that archive.org can help with this, but it’s temperamental at best, so do it yourself.
Open the mp3 (& wav) files in your tag modification program of choice. MusicBrainz Picard has been suggested for Mac (and is what I use). mp3tag has been recommended for Windows (but I cannot vouch for it). Half the music playing programs out there offer the ability to add cover art as well (I’ve done it on Pulsar Music on my phone, for instance).
For Picard, drag and drop your image file into the cover image of the file. And then save the file. Yes, it was that simple; yes, you do need a separate program for it; yes, I am still irritated about this.
(note: do not hold me to having done this in the past, once I have uploaded a file, I do not wish to go and change the metadata)
10. Streamline your posting & track your podficing
It’ll take you, like, three minutes to realise that there are a lot of things to copy and paste to set up a podfic post. Like, even if you just paste the link in the body (which as a listener, kind of makes me sad, I’m a big fan of streaming, but you do you), there’s still a whole bunch of ways to make that easier.
- You legitimately need(1) this browser add-on. It’s dead easy to install, available for your browser, don’t even need tampermonkey or anything. Copy the link for the work you’re reading from, paste it in there, select a length tag, click OK, and voila, all those buttons in the Works page are done for you. You can customise it a bit to your preferences too, if you like, and even add a format to pre-load into the body text, ready for copying and pasting your links into.
- Mistbornhero’s spectacular HTML generating spreadsheet. You can find the link and instructions here
- I have since modified mine extensively to remove things I don’t care about, and only have one fandoms list so I don’t have to argue with groups.
- REMEMBER: Keep the Alphabetical Fandoms list sorted alphabetically, or some of the formulas on the Summary tab give the wrong results.
- I’ve also modified the generated HTML to meet my own modified versions of posting templates neatly made so that single chapter and multichapter links look good and similar.
- You don’t have to make any modifications to Azdaema’s workskin HTML.
- You probably don’t want to use eosrose’s workskin HTML (in the chaptered page) unless you’re comfortable playing with workskins to make it look nice and be multiple site skin compatible and mobile friendly and all that jazz.
(1) Okay, you don’t literally need it, you can do it by hand, but trust me, you don’t want to when this is an option.
+1) make new friends and ask smart or dumb questions in the podfic Discord server.
Find us here!
Poke around at the resources in there - pinned posts are great, plus many questions have been asked before so you can look those up if you like.
And we’re always open to having the same conversation multiple times, because different people show up and some people have learned new things since the last time the conversation was had, and there’s a lot of things about podfic so people forget things they sorta knew at some other previous points. And even if you don’t find an answer you like, you might find a new feature or three to solve different problems!
Resources:
There are so many great resources, but here are a few (not mentioned above) I personally found insightful at one or more points that may or may not be reflected in the above non-explicitly, and/or have a lot of resource links that might help you further!
- https://sites.google.com/view/podfic/home
- https://the-dragongirl.tumblr.com/post/137390369796/how-to-podfic-a-highly-biased-and-incomplete (especially editing processes)
- https://archiveofourown.org/works/14223324 (especially chapters 8 on performance, 12 on music, 20 on workskins)
- https://archiveofourown.org/works/32123785 (especially relevant to different voices and text things you might want to convey)
- https://archiveofourown.org/works/39117108 (especially editing and MB4 generation)
- https://archiveofourown.org/works/14591670 (many, many resources)