Introduction to Podcast Editing with REAPER

hello this is Tim white and I'm gonna be a quick tutorial on how to use Reaper for podcast editing Reaper is a digital audio workstation that is a piece of software that's meant for audio production it is more than just an audio editor like audacity it is actually meant to be a full multitrack recording and production suite however like most DAWs it is aimed out-of-the-box at music production and not necessarily narration production which is what a podcast is but with a few tweaks it's easy to get Reaper working for podcast so the first thing we're gonna do we've got a brand new project here we're gonna go ahead and go to view time unit for ruler and change that to minutes and seconds that way our ruler across here is more applicable to what we do with podcasts the second thing I'm going to do is go to options snap grid settings and change this to 1/32 of a beat and that's tightened up our grid nicely the next thing we need to do is get some audio to work with so I'm going to go up to insert media file and I'm gonna grab this recording this recording is a raw recording that I originally recorded in audacity I'm gonna go ahead and zoom in on this now I zoom in by using the scroll wheel on the mouse I'm rolling the scroll bar up right now and you can see that this is about the 40-minute mark at the end of my show if I want to zoom out so I can see the entire audio file this thumb at the bottom of the screen also is a zoom control I can just double click on it and now I've zoomed out and I'm seeing all the way from 0 to 37 minutes or so where the end of my show is if I want to see where that is exactly I can click here and you can see 40-32 now I'm looking at the entirety of my audio file and I want to get started editing it you can see this is a stereo file there are two tracks recording in many cases if you recorded this in audacity you might actually have two different microphones recording to different people so go ahead and right-click on this thing and you can see that there is item properties I have properties as an important menu to know and get to love it lets you do all kinds of fun things here's our item properties window and what we're going to do first is take a look at this channel mode in this case though we're gonna do mono left and that's gonna give us just the left channel of audio so now I've got just a left channel now I'm gonna right-click on this track and I'm gonna do duplicate selected tracks now I've got this twice I'm gonna select just this lower track right click item properties and now I'm gonna do mono right and now I have just the right track here and the interesting thing is I'm still only using one copy of this file on disc it didn't make two copies of it on disc Reaper uses what's called non-destructive editing which means it will never edit this actual original file that I have here instead it's going to save in the Reaper project file the series of cut points and changes that I make to that audio so that I can always go back to the original state of things and never have a chance of losing my original audio so now I have two tracks I'm gonna go ahead and double click here I'll name these great way here one great thing about Reaper is that you can do groups of tracks so I'm gonna go ahead and insert a new track I want to call this narration I'll drag this to the top and now I can turn this into a folder and now these two are grouped under here click on this control over on the left here and it will let me tighten that up this is great if you've got a group of items that go together for example if you have an outro that has music under it and you've built all that ahead of time you just want to have it sitting in your project and collapse all the other tracks that belong to it if you have sound effects or something like that to go under your track you can group those all up together or of course if you've got seven or eight different contributors to a podcast you can group them into local people versus remote people on skype or however you'd like to do it so I've got my audio I'm set to goes to start editing so the first thing I want to do is go ahead and click in the beginning here I'm going to zoom in using that scroll wheel this is to me the single biggest selling point of Reaper is I can zoom in but wherever the cursor point is simply by running the scroll wheel up and down and I do that all the time while editing I might look for a particular spot that looks like it's got a silence in it click on it zoom in do an edit and then zoom back out so speaking of doing an edit let's say we want to clip this section out I click on the piece of audio I want to edit right click and I drag over what I want to do and then I hit control delete now what control delete does is actually removes the piece of audio that I have here and you can see it removed it only from the piece of audio that I had selected that's exactly how all gasp Lee works if you're used to that that's what you expect but we can do better so I'm gonna go ahead and undo that and I'm going to turn on what's called ripple editing ripple editing lets you apply the results of an edit to the entire rest of your project so I'm going to turn on ripple editing twice and with all of these dots selected now any change I make will infect the entire project not just a single track so now when I hit control delete look at that it actually deletes the chunk of time that I had selected and it automatically pulls the rest of the project to take up the gap and it cut that same piece of audio out from the second track as well in fact if I had 30 tracks it would have cut them out of all the track in this case that's exactly what I wanted these two pieces of audio go together if I'm going to cut big chunk of time out of one I want to cut it out of all of them not necessarily always what you want to do but you have other options for example if I had switch this to single track let's say I only wanted to cut this out of here I could select that control delete now that track only has been affected so now I've got a nice edit there but this edit is more than the edits in audacity if i zoom in quite a bit here you can see this blue curve this represents the volume of the track Reaper has automatically faded out the audio here and faded in the audio on this matching track this creates a seamless populist transition so even if the audio was very loud here and very quiet here that quick fade up and down will remove any sort of pop or click that you would hear from that edit being in place and Reaper did that automatically I didn't have to ask it to do that when I cut that time out it automatically did that for me another great thing you can do with these transition effects which is what this fade in fade out is you can actually crossfade as well so I can take this and I can drag it over the previous clip and now I'm actually cross fading between the clips which means both clips are playing simultaneously from here to here but during that time this one's getting quieter and this one's getting louder obviously this is a technique that DJ's use all the time for music but it's also incredibly useful for audio production if you have a word that's coming to an end in another word you want to have start right after it it's often easier to crossfade those two together and just drag it left and right until you get that perfect gap between words that you're looking for this is to do super tight editing when you're cutting up words very tightly it can also be useful when you're cutting a piece of music down if you have a piece of music that you're using for your intro for example and you'd like it to be much quieter and you'd like it to be much shorter you can often do these sorts of cuts and then cross fades inside the audio to get smooth transitions between the clipped out chunks of audio that you've done this is again one of the killer features of Reaper for podcast editing and is incredibly useful here's another way it works I'm gonna drag this to the end I've got this little piece of audio here that's coming and maybe I don't want to tighten this up I don't want to cut that off but I want to make that word much quieter so it sounds like I'm coming to the end of a sentence I can actually drag this fade out like so and extend the time over which is that fades out I can of course shorten it up as well or get rid of it all together another great feature I can grab this and I can actually shorten this clip however much I want and if I mess up and shorten it too much I just pulled back to the right again and that was still there because it has not really been deleted again non-destructive editing is a great thing so with ripple editing on I can pull this together and even just dragging this top one is dragging all the pieces together again a great time-saver if you have multiple tracks some of my productions get up into the 15 or 20 tracks range and being able to drag them around all together for example if I need to insert a promo here I can just pull this all the way to the right plenty of time for the promo and then tuck it up to fit 2 promo back in you

Channel: Tim White

Views: 9,469

Keywords: reaper, podcasting, podcast, DAW

Id: Y7efHSsAz0c

Length: 8min 46sec (526 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 28 2009