Cleaning up your audio during podcast editing is crucial to ensure a professional and enjoyable listening experience. It helps eliminate distracting background noises, echoes, and other imperfections, allowing your content and message to shine through clearly, ultimately engaging and retaining your audience.

People can record podcasts in suboptimal environments, but that doesn't need to be a showstopper with the iZotope RX audio cleanup plugin. RX cleans up your audio with ease, including:

• Room de-noising, including room tone and reverberation
• Mouth click and plosive removal
• Background noise removal, from sirens to air conditioners and fans

For most common scenarios, RX Standard is the way to go. But if you’re a professional who needs the full power of the world’s most famous audio-restoration software, RX Advanced is a must. RX is truly one of the greats in the podcast software market.

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Getting clean audio in podcasting doesn’t have to be hard, even if your audio sounds terrible. If you’re just beginning your podcasting journey, RX Elements has powerful assistive technology to take care of sonic imperfections, giving you more time to focus on the creative side of things.

RX Elements includes the basic tools all podcasters need to get the most out of their audio, including:

• Background noise and room noise removal
• Room reverb removal
• De-click unwanted mouth clicks and sounds
• Hum removal from electrical interference

Or, use the assistant, let this easy-to-use plugin do the work for you.

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Audio metering is essential during podcast editing. You need to know how loud your podcast is so you can sound professional against the competition. You also should be able to spot-check your frequency balance at any time.

iZotope Insight has the perfect metering solution for podcasting, providing comprehensive and comprehendible tools for levels, loudness, and frequency balance. Insight also provides an Intelligibility meter, which is perfect for podcasting. Used properly, this meter can show you if your mix is louder than common listening environments. People tend to listen to podcasts in transit after all—so why not give yourself a leg up over the competition and make sure your audio is audible in any circumstance?

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Finalizing your podcast for distribution (also known as audio mastering) is an important part of the podcast production process. People think of iZotope Ozone in a musical context, but Ozone is just as useful for podcasting. Features in Ozone that are beneficial for podcasting include:

• Limiting your podcast audio with the Ozone Maximizer
• Mitigate vocal harshness with the Stabilizer and Spectral shaper modules
• Thicken thin-sounding voices with the Exciter module

You can safely rely on Ozone to hit your delivery specifications without incurring any distortion or artifacting.

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Mixing your podcast is crucial to ensure a polished and professional audio quality. It helps balance sound levels, remove background noise, and enhance the overall listening experience, which is essential for retaining and growing your audience.

Neutron is an all purpose channel-strip that is perfect for podcasting. It offers powerful podcasting tools, including:

• An intuitive and industry-standard gate (the Multiband Dialogue Expander preset)
• Multiband processors that are perfect for reigning in dynamics or tamping down annoying resonances
• Inter-plugin communication that allows you to use Neutron as an automatic de-bleeding tool: simply sidechain one person’s vocal to another person’s gate, and goodbye mic bleed

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Paying special attention to spoken words in your podcast mixing is essential because clear and intelligible speech is the primary content of your show. Properly mixed spoken words enhance comprehension and engagement, ensuring your message is effectively delivered to your listeners.

The Nectar vocal mixing plugin has a lot of bells and whistles for music, but its podcast offerings are equally fantastic, including:

• A de-esser that is one of the most natural-sounding in the industry
• An automatic leveling module that is perfect for controlling dynamics without introducing the unwanted artifacts of compression
• A Vocal Assistant that automatically learns your specific vocal audio and applies intelligent processing to be more inline with typical podcasting settings

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Audio interfaces are crucial for podcast recording as they enable high-quality analog-to-digital conversion of audio signals, ensuring your voice and any accompanying sounds are captured with clarity and fidelity. They also provide essential features like preamps and phantom power, optimizing the recording process and elevating the overall audio quality of your podcast.

Native Instruments’ Komplete series of audio interfaces are perfect for podcasting in the home-studio, giving you stellar audio quality at an affordable price. Depending on your needs, you can choose interfaces with one, two, or four microphone inputs to accommodate your host/guest configuration.

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ADPTR Metric AB is a game-changer in the world of audio referencing, providing all sorts of tools for intelligent comparison, including:

• The ability to quickly flip between your mix and a reference mix, be it a rival podcast or your own previous episode
• Comprehensive metering that shows you if things are too squished, too loud, too unbalanced, or too phasey
• Instant loudness matching of your mix and every reference mix at once

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Equalization (EQ) is essential for podcast production as it allows you to adjust the tonal balance of your audio, enhancing clarity and ensuring that voices and other sound elements are well-balanced and pleasant to listen to. Kirchoff-EQ is one of the simplest and fullest-featured of the EQs in the market, and feature the following benefits for podcasting:

• A host of different EQ curves and typologies including the ultra-clean 117-bit processing and comprehensive dynamics options that cover all your bases
• Eke out harshness with infinite specificity as well as de-ess and grab pesky room resonances
• Supply the sweet EQ curves of your favorite hardware equalizers

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Using limiting during the mastering process of your podcast is vital to control peak levels and ensure that your audio maintains a consistent and broadcast-ready loudness, preventing any sudden volume spikes that can be jarring for your listeners.

Featuring true-peak limiting, an easy to use interface, and comprehensive tonal controls, bx_limiter True Peak can definitely come in handy when you’re finalizing your podcast mixes.

• Effortlessly set your loudness target and loudness ceiling
• Easy-to-read built-in metering
• Built-in tone controls allow you to shape the sound to your liking without destroying the balance of your mix

Whether you're a seasoned podcaster or just starting, the bx_limiter True Peak is a fantastic tool for keeping your audio polished and professional.

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Plugin Alliance · Hip Hop - Mix - WET

De-essing is important in podcast mixing to reduce harsh sibilance and excessive "ess" and "shh" sounds, which, when left unaddressed, can be distracting and make the listening experience more comfortable and pleasant for your audience.

The Lindell De-esser is your go-to tool for taming those sharp, hissing esses that can plague vocal tracks. Other de-essers may have a more clinical design to them, but Lindell’s has a sound all its own that one can only describe as musical. It responds to sibilances in a much more analog way than its digital peers, and sometimes that’s exactly what you need for taming the human voice.

Even though it comes from a musical lineage, Lindell's De-esser allows you to precisely target sibilances and reduce them with the clarity befitting modern podcast productions. It’s also dead simple to use, making it the perfect tool for anyone looking to achieve a polished, professional vocal sound.

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Surprised to see this plugin here? Don’t be: Guitar Rig 7 Pro is a sound designer’s dream, and some of the most popular podcasts rely heavily on sound design. From the delays and mangled reverberations of NPR’s RadioLab to the cinematic soundscapes of Wondery’s American Hostage, podcasts are chock full of adventurous sound design—and no plugin delivers adventurous sound design like Guitar Rig 7 Pro.

In fact, American Hostage relied heavily on Guitar Rig to achieve its signature sonic soundscape. Can’t get a better endorsement than that.

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