How To Edit Multiple Podcast Tracks Simultaneously

So the podcasting purists, or the audio production experts, amongst you will probably already know this stuff.

I’ve definitely not reinvented the audio production wheel here.

For the experienced podcast editors, I’m not going to show you something that you don’t already know, but for those who may be starting out — or for those who are maybe haven’t got such a deep level of experience in terms of audio and podcast production — I want to share something that will be useful for you.

This might sound a bit grandiose, but at the moment I’m the ‘Exec Producer’ on an upcoming podcast series — which is very exciting as this new show is in-depth conversations between some of the leading people in the Health Tech Innovation and medical space — and to record the content we have decided to use Zencastr, so that we can capture a high quality audio feed from both the host and our illustrious guests.

Just in case you’ve never used Zencastr, it is a great platform where you actually get a recording from each individual person involved in the podcast. So you can create what they call an ‘episode’ and send out the link for each of your participant to use.

You then get a separate audio file of everyone at the end of the recording session.

Now, you can obviously record multiple tracks on other platforms like Zoom, but Zencastr records in much higher quality… you can actually record in the highest resolution WAV format but, given the fact that you can only upload podcasts in mp3 format, I would not worry about using WAV as I suspect you might have bandwidth issues once you get over a certain length of recording.

So you’ve recorded great content and you’ve got separate recordings of each participant, now what…

You can utilise all of those individual files to edit in the recording.

Why is this important? Well, lets say your guest is talking and there is background noise in your hosts recording, you can simply silence your hosts recording, so only the guest is audible at that point.

Here’s an example of how to do those edits in Audacity — and, by the way, I always encourage my clients - who are just starting out in audio - to utilise Audacity because it is so simple to use (you can pick up the basics in about 30 minutes) and it is also open source, so it’s free… which negates the excuse of budgets stopping people getting started with their podcast!

Usually you would edit a section of audio one file (or channel) at a time but, when you have two files that you want to run in synchronisation with each other, you need to edit simultaneously. This is easily done by clicking Command + Shift + K.

This shortcut enables you to, as Audacity themselves word it, “extend the current selection up and/or down into all tracks in the project.”

So, highlight a section, click Command + Shift + K and any action you take within that highlighted section will happen to all files.

So if you delete the audio, you delete it from all files, if you amplify you amplify all files… you get the idea.

I realise that editing multiple channels simultaneously might not be that easy to understand via the written format, so check out the video below where I’ll walk you through the process quickly and easily.