Podcasts-Recording and Producing: Finishing Up and Exporting

In this page we will talk about how to finish your mix and covering a little about mastering. We will learn about how to adjust our levels and bring together our individual tracks. 

Now that we have gone through and adjusted and polished each of our individual tracks we can bring them together to hear how they all sound together. 

The first step is to adjust the levels, so all of the tracks can be heard and there no large differences in the audio. You can do this by using the volume knob on each track.

 For a podcast this should be pretty simple. Look at transitions and just make sure that no one is dramatically louder or softer than anyone else. If you have used your compression correctly, the volume for each individual track should be consistent and won't change that much over the course of the track.  

Once you have a balance between all of the tracks, listen to your mix and adjust individual eq, compression and reverb settings as needed. This changes should be very subtle.

• Listen to make sure there is consistency, one track should not be heavily compressed while another is not.
• The amount and type of reverb on each track should be very similar.
• If you decided one track sounds better with the high end taken off, doing something similar to other tracks. 
• Adjusting the volume of a track to fit in better with mix will effect your compression and eq settings, so make sure they are still appropriate

Now you can use the Pan option. This lets you choose whether the track will play more in the left or right speaker/earbud. This lets you recreate the feeling of being in a room and hearing sound come from different parts of the room. For a podcast, it is a good idea to split up the different quests, some in the left, some in the right, to make it sound to the listener like they are in the middle of the group. You can find the pan option under the Show Track option:

panned left:

panned right:

The final step is to export your podcast. In some software at this point you would need to Master your file which involves a couple of different steps including setting the levels to the standards of the MP3. Luckily, Soundtrap automatically masters the your recordings for you. 

1. File
2. Export
3. Export to MP3

and you should have a finished podcast, ready to go.