 How can I clean up the audio on my podcast episodes for free? I want to optimise the sound of my podcast audio, you know, remove some annoying background noises and make my podcast episodes sound a bit more, you know, podcast-y. Hello, I'm Neil Mossy and we're going to do that right now for free online. I'm a development producer by the way. I help high achieving creators and performers just like you to get ideas out of your head into the world on YouTube videos and podcasts and ebooks. But today it's the podcast we're going to concentrate on because we're going to clean one up right now for free online with this amazing website called Orphonic.com. I use this service so much. I use it for all of my Great British YouTube podcasts. Once I've edited an audio episode, all I do is upload it to Orphonic and it automatically cleans it up and gives it a boost, a bit of a nice, you know, podcast oomph. Unbelievably, they provide two hours of free post-production processing every month. So let's work through an actual example, one of my podcasts right now and I'm going to take you through it from the beginning. So this is the website, Orphonic.com. All you need to do is sign up to put in the username, an email address and make up a password, hit Submit. Then we need to verify our email address and my Orphonic account is activated. So now we'll log in for real this time. This is what the dashboard looks like. It might look a bit intimidating at first. It was intimidating for me. That's why I wanted, whoa, which is kind of why I wanted to make this walkthrough because it's actually really easy. On the left-hand side, you can see how much time you have left. You're allocated two hours every month. When you upload, say, a 10 minute piece of audio, that will deduct 10 minutes from that two hours and it's reset back to the two hours every month. All we need to do is to hit this big red button here, New Production, and you have lots of options. So I'm going to walk you through how I upload my audio file to be cleaned up. So the first thing we need to do is to choose a file to upload to Orphonic. All you need to do is hit Choose File, then select your file and hit Open, and that will choose the audio file that you want to clean up. This file happens to be an M4A file. It works with MP3 files, WAVs. It even, I believe, works with putting videos up. So you can put in an MP4 video or a .mov and I think it cleans that up and just takes the audio off for you. I only work with audio files, even though they're audio files from the video file, just because it's a lot easier and quicker to upload. I could, if I wanted, add an automatic intro and outro, and I could add basic metadata and extended metadata and chapter marks. But I'm not going to do that for now. I just want to choose the output file and we have a wide variety of file types that it can output to. I'm going to choose MP3. The other thing that I like to do is to make my podcast mono. So I click the mono button over here and you have so many options, but I just need this last section here. There's a leveler. It kind of boosts all the parts that are quiet and keeps things at a podcast-y level. That's me doing a podcast-y level and you can select that here in the loudness target. You can choose different targets, but I go for the podcast one. It's the kind of loudness that you want for a podcast. There is a very technical explanation for this. All I know is that if I select podcasts, it makes the audio sound a bit podcast-y. The other crucial box to tick is right here, noise and hum reduction. Sometimes I turn it on and sometimes I turn it off. I'm going to be cleaning up some audio. Let's go for a medium strength clean up of 12 decibels. That has worked well for me. If it creates its own distortion, it's really easy to come back to this page and to reduce it a little. And when I hit start production, it asks, do you want to start the production? Because this is going to be taken off our two hours of free credits. So I'll confirm that with start production and now it uploads the file to Orphonic. I'm going to put my headphones on now so we can hear the difference between the original file and the file after it's been cleaned up by Orphonic. It keeps you informed at every step of the way, so it's processing the audio now. It doesn't take that long, only a couple of minutes, a few minutes, depending on how long your podcast audio is. And here we are with the cleaned up file. That only took about 15 seconds. The section of the audio that I want you to hear, you can choose between the outputs, which is the Orphonic cleaned up version. So if I hit play here. When I first started it for the first few years, you know, there's different ways to meet money on tech talk, and I think some people are a little bit dubious. So that's the output and you can click on input down here and hear what it sounded like originally. When I first started it for the first few years, you know, there's different ways to meet money on tech talk, and I think some people are a little bit dubious. Now it might be difficult to appreciate the difference if you're listening to this on a laptop speaker. I don't know what kind of compression YouTube is adding to this as well. So you'll have to take my word for it that the results are usually really, really great for my audio files. I'm going to show you now how you can adjust what you want to do before you download it. If you're happy with what Orphonic has done with your audio file, all you need to do is click the download button here. But if you want to tweak with it and you can tweak as many times as you like without it affecting your two hours allowance, all you need to do is to click at the bottom, edit this production, and you can change any of the settings that you set in the first place. You can change anything you want. What I'm going to do for a demonstration, I'm not sure this is going to work, but I'm going to change the noise and hum reduction to high, because sometimes that distorts. So let's see how different that sounds. So I've selected a slightly different output and I'll hit start production. And that starts the audio processing again for the same file, so you don't have to upload it again, but with that slightly different setting. It's so quick. So let's listen to this section again. This is with the slightly heavier noise reduction. Back then it was really bad because it was cheaper for guests and some creators in America got done really well on gifting. I can definitely hear a difference there, just even on my laptop speaker. It sounds a lot deader. Maybe slightly unnatural for me. For safety, I'm going to download that. So I'll hit download, and I'm going to make a note for myself that the noise reduction is at 24 dB. And it downloads as easily as that. Now I want to go back to the previous one and download that version. And I'll probably use that version. So I'll go back, change the noise reduction to medium, start production and let allphonic.com do its thing. If you're watching this from Allphonic, if you've worked for Allphonic, I cannot express to you how happy I am with your service. It is such a good website. It's cleaned up so many little bits of audio. And I really appreciate that I could just buy some credits when I need to. There we go. So let's hear this one again. It was cheaper for guests and some creators in America got done really well on gifting. But now TikTok are putting measures to keep it safe so kids can't send gifts on the app. They'll have to be eating their over. I'm going to download that one and I'll call that noise reduction 12 dB. Save. So now I have two completely different processed versions and I can just listen to them at my heart's contents and choose the right one. That's how easy it is to use allphonic.com. Is this helping? If you have reached this point in the video, please hit a thumbs up. If you have any better places, please leave a comment down below. I'd love to know how you get to clean up the audio on your podcast episodes or make them sound a bit more podcasty. And I'm going to make lots more of these. So please hit the subscribe button if this is the kind of stuff that you're into. Here's a video right here about how I use Zoom to make video podcasts. And here is what YouTube thinks you should be watching next.