Audio tips for RPG podcasters

I listen to quite a few RPG-related podcasts and while the audio quality of most have improved immensely over the last couple years, some still have a way to go. Therefore I thought I’d offer some simple advice for podcasters to improve their audio quality of their product. What makes me think I’m qualified to offer advice? In my younger days I played in an amateur band and did a lot of home recording. I still have a room full of recording equipment including a 16-channel mixer, an 8-channel A/D/A converter, and a rack full of audio processing equipment. I also used to be a beta-tester for Cakewalk audio software although I gave up that side “job” back in 2002.

Audio tips:

• Do not pan hosts hard left and hard right (i.e., one speaking in to the left channel, one in the right channel). While doing so might seem like a cool idea for making the two voices easily identifiable and more “natural”, it can cause major problems with anyone listening to your recording on headphones – it’s highly distracting (bordering on annoying to many people), plus means that both headphones have to be on in order to hear everything, something which may not be possible for people listening at work or while doing something. In most cases mono is best.
• Reverb is only good when used in moderation. Hall reverbs are never appropriate. Some of the podcasts out there (The Power Source has been really guilty of this at times), use highly distracting reverb processing that makes them sound like they’re in an echo chamber. Worse yet, if you’re using a cheap reverb plug-in (like most of the free ones), the reverb is very artificial and digital sounding – it sounds too springy and metallic. A little reverb can be nice for adding a bit of “air” to your voice but a little bit goes a long way.
• Compression is your friend – I’m not talking about audio file compression; I mean the compression that is applied to the a signal which helps even out peaks. Adding some compression, especially to vocal tracks, helps avoid painful or distracting “spikes” and helps even out the overall volume. You don’t need a lot.
• Consider running the finished file through a mastering compressor at the end to help even out all the levels across the various segments. Many podcasts are plagued by very low volume on spoken segments, broken up by very loud bumpers and transitions which makes for an annoying at best, and potentially painful (or even damaging) listen at worst as the levels of the recording jump between segments.
• Normalize – you should be normalizing your recording, setting the levels as high as possible. In a nutshell, all you’re really doing is simply adjusting the peak volume of your file to a specific value. Set your normalized levels to somewhere around -0.5 dB. This maximizes the S/N ratio and means that listeners won’t run into problems hearing the podcast if they’re listening in a noisy environment.
• Audio artifacts can annoy, or even injure, listeners – Having a low volume podcast suddenly interrupted by a burst of loud noise or other audio artifact is annoying at best and can cause potential hearing damage if the person has cranked up the volume to make up for your lack of normalization.
• Dead air time is never interesting – editing out dead air is incredibly easy; there’s no reason to leave two minutes of dead air in the middle of a podcast. You can also use careful editing to get rid of pregnant pauses in interviews if you’d like to produce better polished interviews.