Podcast vocals without overediting

The time sink nobody talks about

Podcast edits aren't hard. They're just long. You're fixing room tone here, taming fan noise there, trimming tiny sections for every guest. Death by a thousand clicks.

We tried isolating vocals on a remote call and—honestly—we were kind of shocked. The dialogue just sat there, clean. Suddenly we were polishing instead of performing surgery.

The workflow now

Isolate vocals, blend a touch of the original back for room feel. Keeps the voices present without losing that sense of real space.

If host and guest levels are uneven? Normalize the isolated track before blending. Smoother than reaching for a compressor right away.

Where the time went

Across twelve episodes: fewer cuts, less time hunting for noise. The biggest wins were on longer interviews, where a five-second fix used to balloon into twenty minutes of babysitting.