How to Make a Podcast in Reaper

hi Chris Henry here welcome to audio punch and if you want to get into podcasting you're going to need some sort of software to edit and possibly even record said podcast that's called a da W and while there's a bunch of expensive ones and a couple questionably good free ones the best thing I think you can do is find something that's effective but cheap and that is Reaper today I'm going to show you how to set up Reaper for recording and editing your podcast and then also how to export your podcast from Reaper so that you can put it on the Internet so when you open up Reaper for the first time this is what you get it's a blank session I have mine set to also show this handy little metering channel mixer there and as you add tracks to hold audio it's going to add more channels to this it's an easy way to monitor your levels while you record an edit so the first thing you're going to need to do in order to make a podcast is record some audio and if you don't have an external audio recorder you're gonna need to do it inside your computer now Reaper is cross-platform it works for Mac and Windows and Linux I think they have a stable build for that too so while I'm in Mac OS if you're on Windows you can do all of these same things in Reaper it's just that the menu positions might be a little bit different the first thing you need to do after opening Reaper for the first time is you need to set up your audio input and output now chances are if you don't have any external equipment that you need to plug in and get set up the defaults will probably work but just in case let's go over what the settings are and how to make sure that your audio is going in and out of Reaper properly so on Mac OS you go to the Reaper menu select preferences now on Windows this might be under edit I think is where preferences usually is but find the options you'll get this window up here and then you will select audio and go to device in the menu that pops up chances are if you set this to your default system device that's going to be the easiest way to get started unless you have several different audio inputs and out or you have an external sound card or audio interface that you only want to use with Reaper but not on your computer for some reason then you can tell Reaper to use something different than what your system is set to otherwise leave that at default if for some reason you need to mandate a sample rate this is where you would do that forty-eight thousand Hertz or 48 kilohertz it's the standard for film since I'm making a video that's what I'm gonna leave it set at if you don't know what you need to do leave it where it is and you'll be fine and you can pretty much leave everything else alone unless you're getting into some again advanced equipment routing and stuff like that you don't have to worry about whether this can override other audio device requests or anything like that just leave it blank for now this is basically all you need to do in the future as you get used to Reaper you can come in here and you can make custom keyboard shortcuts I mean Reaper can be skinned differently you can make it look and behave completely differently to suit your workflow as you get used to the software but for now we're just gonna stick with the vanilla settings so now that you've got your audio input and output set up we need to get a track ready to record because you can't have a podcast that's all silence I guess you could but I mean every episode would be the same all the episode 15 who or the silence went like one second longer that was hot anyway back into Reaper go to the track menu then select insert new track or on Matt that's command T windows might just be ctrl T by default but again you can customize that so when you do that this pops up here which is just a blank track now if you have taken my advice and switched over here from audacity this second row here might look a little bit mysterious to you but we'll we'll talk about what that does later so the first thing we need to do after we get this track started is make sure that the audio inputs are set up properly chances are if you don't have a big honkin audio interface like the one I have that I need for work is going to be a really easy process so after the track is inserted the next thing we'll need to do is make sure that the audio input source we want is the one that the track will be listening to when we hit record the way you do that is you come over here to this area where the meter is on the track and you will right-click come down here to input we want to select mono because again your voice is a single channel input source and then now I have 24 different inputs I could select from I happen to know that my microphone is plugged into input 1 so that's the one I'm going to select if you have a 2 channel audio interface like focus right - I - or I think Presonus make some pretty affordable ones there'll be one or two different inputs and you want to select the one that your microphone is plugged into once you've done that we need to arm the track for recording and what that means is you're telling Reaper when I press record I want you to record the input sources for these selected tracks and that's this button right here when you click it it turns red the meter activates and that's showing you that yes indeed my microphone is connected to that track so watch this when I hit the record button down here or on Mac command R hey everybody welcome to movies R Us the movie podcast of the future where we talk about Mission Impossible number 470 to go disgraces Tom Cruise is still alive he must be a robot that's that's the intro to our podcast today and now if I come up here and I hit I hit the spacebar or the play button we're gonna hear that audio playback hey everybody welcome to movies R Us the movie podcast of the future where we talk about Mission Impossible number 472 there it's it's that simple now if you're the only one on your podcast or it's you and a buddy a co-host sitting next to each other recording into the same microphone that's all you need to do just leave that recording until your episode is done and then you can stop and remember to save your session and get into editing it and putting music and stuff in its it's really not all that complicated once you get past the initial setup speaking of getting the podcast edited the first thing that I like to do especially when I'm making a new show is pick out some intro music because you could just record don't do anything and put it out there but there's so many so many podcasts out there that one of the ways you can sort of be heard above the noise is to sound like you've put some thought into the episodes you don't have to go crazy you don't have to spend thousands and thousands of dollars well that's fun to do and equipment but having some additional stuff in there to show that like I've considered you listener is gonna go a long way to giving a good first impression in those first few seconds of your show so one way you can do that is by having some intro music that doesn't go too long and frankly can start right with your introduction to the episode like we have right here so the way you're gonna import music is really simple in Mac OS we'll go to the finder in Windows it's the Explorer just go to wherever you have your music stored now make sure that you are legally allowed to put this music on the internet that means either that you have paid somebody for the rights to use the music or it's music you yourself have created you can't use some other bands music or someone's recording of Bach or something without permission you can get in trouble so if you don't have your own personally created music which many people don't one thing you can do is find royalty-free music now that doesn't always mean that the music itself is free to get but it does mean that you don't have to pay every single time someone listens to it there's a couple of different places that you can go one of which is free it's freesound.org they have three different licenses available but they're all free licenses there are different versions of Creative Commons so all you have to do is give different levels of attribution depending on what the owner of the music or the sound effect would like you to do so freesound.org links in the description whole bunch of free sound effects and music that you can just use as long as you get credit another one the one that I use for my podcasts and my personal stuff you have to pay yearly to use it but then everything you download from it is licensed to you without any additional fees and that is audio blocks comm and I've also gotten some stuff from premium beat but that one's really expensive it's really good but it's it's way more expensive than audio blacks it's like 50 bucks minimum per download but the quality is way up there anyway we're gonna select our music I have pre selected something which we're gonna preview real quick on Mac OS that's as simple as selecting the file and hitting spacebar on Windows I don't think there's a live preview function but that's the hill you have to climb [Music] doesn't really sound like a future movie podcast nope not that one no that one's sad let's do that one so now that I've picked my music to bring it into Reaper it's very simple you just click and drag and you can see what's about to happen probably you drop it Reaper automatically adds the right kind of track and puts the music on it and now if we hit play you'll hear both of these things playing at the same time hey everybody welcome to movies are right a little bit of a problem though that music really loud compared to the voice now there's a way you can sort of automatically have the music turned down when the voice comes in and that's called ducking it's a little complex for this intro video but reaper has a really easy way you can just draw your volume automation and that's what that's called is you're gonna give reaper instructions to hey at this time turn it down this much really easy so the first thing I'm gonna do I'm gonna come in here hover over until I get this tool this is an edit tool and if you click and drag it pulls the region in and then I'm gonna move this back closer towards the beginning I don't want any dead air at the beginning that's a common and easy editing mistake to make is too much time before you get to the content so we've got that going and now I can see right about here is when I start talking so that's what I'm gonna want the music to turn down so you come here you hold a shift and then wherever you click it's going to make a dot that dot is an edit point and then here I'm gonna do the same thing another dot now when I drag this one down watch what happens the shape of this line changes and actually the display of the waveform changes that's one of the cool things that Reaper does is everything that shows up in this waveform by default is what the waveform will look like after all of the automation and effects that you put on it have been applied you can switch that but I kind of like it so we're gonna leave it and now if we go back and listen to the beginning hey everybody welcome to movies R Us you can hear that's a lot easier to listen to now it's still a little out I might turn it down even more and listen again hey everybody welcome to movies R Us the movie podcast of the future yeah that's not bad right so we can let that music run through our entire introduction and now we can scroll over and I'm not gonna have music playing the whole time I just want the music there for the intro so the next thing I want to do first of all is come up here I'm going to put the cursor this is called the playhead the line that starts up here and goes all the way down to the bottom that's basically showing you that at this point in time you're going to be at this point in the audio waveform while you're editing and I'm gonna cut this right here you can right click and scroll down to split items at cursor or you can just hit s and it's going to make a cut and now I can select and delete everything after that cut because I don't need it one last thing is if we just let the audio drop out that's not gonna sound polished that's not gonna sound clean right still alive you must be a robot that's abrupt we don't want that so there are two ways you can fade audio out the first is just continue on with the automation you know hold shift to create an edit point and then shift to create a second one so it's basically where do you want the volume automation to start doing something and where do you want it to stop doing something and then I can just drag this all the way down to the bottom until you can see they're in that little tooltip it says negative INF negative infinity decibels and now we've got to fade it live you must be a robot so now you can see it fade it out pretty nicely another way to do a fade out is we're gonna delete these points by holding option or alt make those go away is you can hover over the edge at the top edge until you see this tool appear and then if you click and drag it's going to automatically create a fade out with no automation now if I did automation as well it would do that to these things step so that gives you a lot of different choices while you're editing in the future but for now that's what we want to do and then the second thing is this is kind of abrupt the curve of that it's it's gonna fade out a little bit but it looks a little abrupt right so if I click and drag even further I can start this fade out sooner and you can see it's gonna go gradually gradually and it's sort of fading out more and more and more until you get towards the end so that's the second way you can do a fade out in the movie podcast of the future where we talk about Mission Impossible number 470 to get miss gracious Tom Cruise is still alive he must be a robot yeah that's not bad I would probably make that a little bit smoother in a future edit I like I like the music to just sort of gradually melt away but that's a matter of taste so that's it we've added a track we've recorded a track and we've done a little bit of light editing one more thing just on the note of editing sometimes you're going to want to cut something out of your podcast you know maybe you made a mistake or you just decided that this section isn't isn't entertaining and we don't need it the way you can do that is you can hang on let's say the movie podcast of the future where we talk about Mission Impossible number 470 to business gracious Tom Cruise is still alive let's say I don't like from about this point to here right I can right click and go down to split items at time selection or I can hit shift s now that's selected and I can just delete it and then select this and drag it back now check this out it's gonna remove the selection so we can see if we let this play through there's gonna be a little blip a good practice when you're bringing audio together like this is to use a tiny little crossfade Reaper will do that automatically if you have this option selected Auto crossfade if I overlap these check that out it's two opposing fades so the first clip is fading out while the second clip is fading in and you can use that to smooth out the sound of like a breath between words or the space of air in a cut that you've made it's pretty cool now there are ways that you can set up what's called ripple editing if you want to look it up on your own so that the editing can go even faster but for now that's a basic cut okay so that's all well and good if you are only recording one microphone or one source but let's say you want to up your game a little bit you want the audio to sound a little bit cleaner one of the ways you can do that is by putting a separate microphone in front of each performer so you're gonna need some piece of hardware that will let you get both of those microphones into your computer and that's again where you know I no barrier makes one I can't remember the the model number Presonus makes a couple of different two channel audio interfaces Focusrite was the first one that i got it's the scarlett 2i2 all of them do basically the same thing at varying levels of like audio quality which is it plugs into your computer via USB and will have you know anywhere from 1 to 32 channels that you can plug a microphone into depending on how much money you spend so you can get one that has two or four channels and you can plug one two three four microphones in your computer at once and then record them all on separate tracks which is where the second boost in quality comes from is then in the Edit you can edit each person's microphone separately so if Steve coughs while I'm saying something I can cut his cough out and you'll be able to hear me much clearer without having to cut out that entire section so the way you set that up in Reaper is you just make another track which we remember is command T and you would set this track by right-clicking on the meter input you'll set it to the other input on your interface that you've plugged a microphone into now I don't have a microphone plugged into input two right now I have a bass guitar which I won't subject you to but you can still see if I set that to record and then armed that track to now both of these tracks are armed if I go back to the beginning I'm gonna mute the music so it doesn't get through into the microphone if I hit record again you can see now it's recording on both of those tracks if we had a second microphone plugged in this bottom track would be displaying other information as well so that's how you can record on multiple tracks and multitrack editing can make a huge difference to the end product it takes a little more work to do a little more work to learn how to do it quickly because you're managing more audio tracks but it's really in my opinion it's real worth the time you spend learning because the results are so much better so we'll unmute this we'll get rid of this track you can just select it and hit delete and let's say that we're done we have completed our podcast that in this case is about nine seconds long and we need to get that information out of Reaper into an mp3 so that we can upload it to you know Lipson or pod bean or wherever we're hosting our podcast right and so to do that we're going to need to do what Reaper calls render in other software it might be called bounce or mix down which are older industry terms when they did it with like tape and machines and they both have different meanings that are sort of irrelevant to us right now and in fact Reaper also has a bounce option but its output isn't probably what you're gonna want so for our purposes we're going to select render so to do that the first thing I like to do is select the entire length of our episode plus a second at the end just to be safe so click drag and then you'll go to file and select render now there's a lot of information here thankfully we don't need to use most of it you're going to want the source to be your master mix the bounds to be your time selection then you'll come up here to browse for directory and this is where you're going to tell Reaper where to put your file when it's done I'm just going to bounce this to the desktop don't do that have some sort of file structure in place so that you'll be able to easily find this later when you need to but for purposes of illustration the desktop it is for now it's not II do as I say not as I do I'm going to name the file something memorable so this was movies from the future so we'll say mff and then I like to put the date starting with the year 2018 10:17 is when I was recording this and then another underscore or a space or something in the title of the episode Tom Prue's is a robot probably once we've done that after we get this bounced and the files on the disk once we get a whole bunch of those together it's going to list them in order you could also replace the date with episode episode number or season number episode number the trick is to keep it consistent so that later once you have a whole bunch of episodes you can go find them again if you need to the sample rate even though I recorded at 48,000 Hertz or 48 K which stands for kilohertz but because this is a podcast and not audio for film I'm going to bounce this at 44100 Hertz commonly called 40 for one all that means is it's it's the number of individual pieces of information per second that comprised the waveform we'll get into all that later I promised in another video but for now 40 for one for podcast audio is a safe standard channels here's an interesting thing if you're hard up for space there are two ways to save space when you're bouncing a podcast down one is to set your mp3 bitrate to lower than default 128 kilobytes per second down here we could move that down to 96 that's gonna make a pretty small file but a lot of these podcast hosting and distribution platforms they charge you based on how much data you upload every month and if you're just starting out you probably don't want to be spending 20 or 30 dollars a month just for data so the way you can combat that is by making sure your sound files are as small as they can be without sounding bet the second way to literally cut the file size in half is to select channels and select mono because if it's in stereo it's basically two audio files one plays out of the left speaker one plays out of the right speaker if you select mono it's going to output only one channel one audio file so the file size there will be much smaller and if most of your content is just talking with some background music and maybe sound effects you can get away with mono I wouldn't use it if you are critiquing music or something where you want to preserve the full sound of the songs that you're playing or something but other than that you can get away with mono so we're going to do that and the next thing is the speed here full speed offline is is what you want there are other options here that will subtly change the output quality but it'll also take more and more time to complete the bounce and since we're already compressing the it out of this for it to be an mp3 on a podcast feed that people are gonna be listening to in their cars or on their laptops or in their headphones we don't really need to worry about that level of audio quality too much so 44.1 or 44100 mono and full speed off line we can really ignore the rest of this the next thing output format select mp3 and select really anywhere between 96 and 192 kilobytes per second it's gonna be fine I have a bit of a sensitive ear to this sort of thing so I like to go a little higher when I can so I'm going to leave this at 128 which is the default everything else here you can ignore for now there are entire forums at Reaper fm full of people who could help you or who have probably already helped others go through this this render menu in depth so if you're really itching to learn how to dig into all of that you can find it elsewhere it is not relevant to what we're doing today so once you've made all those selections you've saved this in a place where you will easily be able to find it later and keep it organized the last thing you do is hit render and it's already complete if this were an hour episode that might have taken anywhere from five to 20 minutes depending on how many processing effects that you had on it we didn't do that this time because we're just covering the basics right we're just getting you started and you don't have to have an audio engineering degree in order to make a podcast so now that's done will it close and you can see since I saved this on the desktop like a bad boy there's the file and we can listen to that file right now hey everybody welcome to movies R Us the movie podcast of the future where we talk about Mission Impossible number 472 and must be a robot right it's got our edit in there it's got our music in there if there was a full episode after that you could upload it to your podcast delivery platform and and hit send and your your episode would be out there for your audience to find so that's Reaper barely barely scratching the surface of the sort of things you can do to get your podcast up to a standard level for listening have your voice boosted and dynamic range so you sound a little more present and full maybe denoise a little bit so that the background hiss from your refrigerator isn't showing up in your mic these are all sorts of things that you can do to polish the recorded audio that you have and if you click the link down in the description and go to the audio pungent website you will find a forum you can pop in your email address and I will send you links to download templates for Reaper and GarageBand and probably I'll do logic and pro tools and however many I can find and download and and get started that will have using only the built-in effects sort of a preset polish for your show and and you can just load your audio up into that or record it right in that and your quality will get boosted and and eventually will continue to go over how to do that sort of thing yourself but for now if you want to get a head start on mixing and processing after you've recorded just go to the website fill in your email address and down low those templates and you can just open them and record in them and you'll be a few steps ahead without having to actually learn how to do it yourself so hopefully that'll save you some time and that's all I got for you that's how to get started recording your podcast using Reaper which in my opinion is one of the best choices you can make if you don't have a lot of money and don't have access to GarageBand on Mac OS it's free for 60 days and then I think it only costs like 50 or 60 dollars after that point and it's got a lot under the hood you can basically use this forever so that's one of the reasons I like it and I'll probably do most of our videos here in Reaper just because it's so accessible so hopefully this will get you started you can start thinking of ideas to record for your podcast and start getting them out there I'm really looking forward to hearing what you guys do with this information and I will see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Audio Punch

Views: 3,834

Keywords: Podcast, Recording, Podcast Editing, How to Podcast, Professional Podcasting, Audio Drama Editing, Audio Drama, Reaper, Audacity, Pro Tools, How to make a Podcast, Professional, How to edit in reaper, Make a podcast in reaper

Id: RxUhYxKtE7g

Length: 30min 34sec (1834 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 25 2019