Audio Editing 101

If you use Pro Tools, Audacity or Sound Forge, editing audio is an important process to improve the perceived value of your audio production. Making audio products for sale and pod casts increase the perceived value of your business especially when the audio quality and production value are world class.

Here are a few editing tips for a professional audio production.
1. What ever program you are using, find the undo button. Don’t you wish life had an undo button? Windows has control Z that works with many audio editing software programs.
2. Shorten breaths and pauses. Many times when you are creating an audio recording, you pause to collect your thoughts. Tighten those pauses and remove breaths to increase the production value of your audio production.
3. If you stumble, fumble or flub, develop consonant editing skills. This is where you find a hard consonant pronunciation and edit from one point in the recording to another. Keep one hard sound and remove the other. Experiment until you get good at it. Remember the undo button.
4. Remove superfluous information. People do not want to listen to long recordings but rather get your information in short bite sized segments. If you have a long message, consider editing it down to shorter segments and post them over a period of time. If producing an audio CD, use chapter marks to index your content and make the CD user friendly.
5. Edit with headphones. Headphones help block out distracting sounds and improve critical listening when editing for more precise edits.
6. Don’t be a perfectionist. There is a difference between being a professional and perfectionist. Ask yourself if you doubt the quality of an edit; do I understand what is being said?
7. Don’t try to edit quickly. In our You Tube video:




You may feel the edits are done quickly. That's because of 26 years experience editing professional products. Take your time at first and you will learn to be quicker over time. Quick editing is not necessarily good editing.

All good audio editors have one thing in common, experience. Don’t expect to be an expert after a few editing sessions. Keep on editing and over time, you will learn the tricks of the trade and edit quicker and more efficiently.