This is The Ember Studios Podcast #2 with Mike Brown and we go over the specific baseline gear you need to start editing your podcast.

Find more at - www.emberstudioscreative.com/podcast

Contact me at michael@emberstudioscreative.com

 

A.I. Generated Transcription:

This is Ember Studios, podcast number two. The gear, you need to edit your show.

What's going on everybody. I hope you're having a great day. I am fired up right now to work on this show and I hope you are fired up to work on. So today, we're just going to talk a little bit about the gear. You need to edit your show. So we're not going to really be talking about microphones and stuff like that.

Cause that's not really editing, right? That's that's tracking, that's recording and really you could be editing somebody else's show you don't need a microphone to edit somebody else's show. So we're just of going to break down the gear. You need to edit. A podcast, hardware, software, everything. This episode's probably going to be kind of on the shorter side, because you really don't need as much as you might think for real.

Like I could get you editing a show for less than $150. I think probably it's really not expensive to break into it. Well, of course that's not including, you know, the computer and stuff, but we're going to go over the computer. So let's just break into it to do podcast, audio editing. Your computer really does not need to be anything special.

For example, I'm looking at the minimum system requirements for studio one, which I use, and they're pretty low, I guess we could say. So the latest version of the operating system, windows 10 is a given right now. I mean, Windows 10 has been out for, I don't know how many years, but it's nice and stable.

Whereas noting that it needs to be 64 bit for studio one, it's not really a good reason as far as I know, to be running a 32 bit operating system right now, unless your computer is literally ancient. So probably. The processor and Intel core I three or an AMD, a 10 processor or better. If your computer has a processor, it's less than like 10 years old, it's probably as good as, or better than the recommended processors here.

Minimum four gigabytes of Ram. Again, this is absolute bare minimum. Four gigabytes of Ram I think is the lowest. Amount you can get right now. I don't think they make Ram sticks with less than two gigabytes of Ram. And so, you know, dual channel memory, it turns out to be four gigs. It says recommended eight gigs or more, again, this is absolute minimum.

Most computers you buy right now, we're going to have eight gigs of Ram. Maybe a laptop might have four gigs. Eight gigs of Ram is so inexpensive right now at the end of this, I'll put together like a bare bones windows system and tell you guys what the price is. I guarantee you it's less than you think for an audio editing PC.

Then it goes on to say, you need an internet connection, which I think is a little obvious just for installation and activation. Even if you just kind of. Install, everything, activate everything and then move it. You're good to go. Minimum monitor resolution 1366 by 7 68. That's the lowest resolution monitor.

I think you'll find anywhere right now. So basically these programs are being. With specs that any functional computer right now is going to meet these specifications. You know, if you've got an ancient computer that's running on like windows XP, maybe it's not going to work. Probably still has four gigs of Ram, but it might not be a 64 bit operating system.

You know, these specs are very minimal and they're really functional at that level. This isn't like video editing where you need so much Ram or gaming where you need like a high graphics card. It's just, you just need a bare bones. No again, that's for editing and some light mixing. If you're thinking you want to rig, that's going to scale with you and you're going to do music and maybe you're going to have like 13 instances of Melodyne on a track or something like that.

Some more intensive stuff is going to require some higher power components, but you're, I mean, a minimal system is just fine for voiceover editing. If you're just editing your podcast. So that's step one. That's just a machine. To do what you want now, what do you want? You're going to do audio editing and to do that, you're going to need to hear what you are doing.

And so there's pretty much two ways that you can hear. You can either use speakers or headphones. If you're on a laptop, I'm not going to lie. Your built-in laptop. Speakers are going to be okay. They are going to get the simple job done. If you're not looking to go all out or any. You'll be fine. If you're on a desktop, it's a little different, you're going to have to purchase some speakers.

If you want to just use some, you know, again, $10 Amazon speakers. When you're mixing a podcast, unlike with music, you do mix with your eyes. I rely on meters more than I rely on my ears because there's all sorts of different stuff with the different frequencies affect things differently. And just because one person sounds louder to me doesn't mean.

Digitally, they are louder. And so when things get shipped out to the platforms, they do stuff to them and they're not doing stuff to them based on their ears. They're doing stuff to them based on the digital sequence that's sent to them. And so I need to consider that when I'm mixing, I tell people I can mix their show without listening to it as because I've done a billion of them, but you don't need high quality speakers to mix the show.

So you. Really need high quality speakers in order to edit it. However, I will suggest using headphones more than the speakers. I like to have everything right there at my ear, so I can hear every little mouth noise, every little click, every slide, breath, everything. I want to be able to hear it right in my ears so that I know exactly what I'm doing.

You know, if I make a little cut and I don't hear that the person is in the middle of a breath, then when I put compression on everything, it's going to just cut right in, in the middle of that breath that I didn't hear before, because the volume was a lot lower. And so that's why sometimes you'll hear like a, like, that kind of sound because somebody cut in the middle of a breath, didn't do a fade, didn't do anything.

And just kind of, kind of threw it out there. So that's why I like headphones again. They do not have to be. You've got a pair of apple ear buds. Those are fine. You don't need crazy fancy headphones for spoken word or anything. You just need to be able to hear everything. And work on it. It's not much. And there's two more pieces of hardware.

Now we have an audio interface now for this kind of thing. If you're straight up just editing and you're not going to mix it, maybe you'll send it out to get mixed, or maybe you're not worried about the mixing. In my opinion, you should be worried about the maximum, but, uh, if you're not, you don't really need to get an audio interface because your CPU's onboard sound processing is going to be okay.

You're going to be. 40 to 48 K. You're going to be able to listen back and edit it 48. K. If you're going to do some stuff that needs some DSP, which is digital signal processing, then you're going to need to get a little bit of a higher power sound card. So again, this is something to think of. Upfront. I mean, I guess not because you could always upgrade later.

So if you think eventually you're going to be mixing, or if you plan on mixing the whole time, you're going to need an audio interface. And again, this doesn't have to be fancy. It doesn't have to have a billion inputs or anything. I bought one with a ton of inputs because I thought, oh, what if I ended up tracking drums?

This was five years ago. I haven't tracked a single thing that requires more than two. Not once. So I, you know, my main recommendation right now because the PreSonus audio box USB, there's a whole bunch of different ones, but the audio box USB 96 records in up to 96. K we'll get into that another time. I think that's a little much, but yeah, it was a hundred dollars.

So now you've got a computer. You've got an interface. You already had the headphones. Now you need a keyboard and a mouse. Okay. If you're on a laptop, you already have the keyboard. I will say, do not use a track pad. Do not use a track pad. You will be miserable. If you're trying to edit audio with a track pad, there's so much clicking and dragging and you have to be so precise sometimes that.

The trackpad is going to be too much. Even if you have to buy a $7 mouse on Amazon, which I did, the $7 mouse on Amazon was better for editing than the most expensive track that I could have ever purchased. It's just better to have a mouse. When we get a little bit more advanced, it's sometimes better to even have a gaming mouse.

Cause they have all those extra buttons. You can map them out to your macros. And this is all down the line. Once you really have a feel for what you're doing. So that's it for the hardware. That's, that's what you need. You need a computer, you need some way to hear the sound, whether it's headphones or speakers, you need an interface.

If you end up mixing and you're going to be sucking up some resources and you need a mouse. Well, I guess you need a screen too, but I kind of include that in the. So that's it. Now you have that stuff. You have the hardware, you have the physical things that you need in order to edit your show. What, now you sit down, you've installed windows for the first time.

Let's just say you bought this computer just for editing. You