What does it actually take to get a podcast episode from “recorded” to “listenable”?
Recording is the fun part. You hit the mic, talk rubbish for an hour, argue about minimaps, someone forgets to mute their dog, and everyone logs off feeling good about it. Then comes the bit nobody romanticises: the edit.
Editing isn’t creative. It’s corrective. That’s when you find out who breathes too loud, who talks over everyone, who smacks the table every time they make a point. You hear filler words, repeated thoughts, inside jokes that don’t land, and long silences where someone’s clearly reading a Steam page off-screen.
The first listen feels like a punishment. The second feels like a test. By the third, you’re just numb.
The idea that podcasts don’t need editing is a lie told by people who’ve never listened to themselves speak for 60 straight minutes. There’s always something to cut. An awkward pause. A bad joke. A sentence that wanders off and forgets where it’s going. Someone thinks they’re being clever, but all they’ve made is a mess. It’s all in there, waiting to be cleaned up.
And it’s not quick. For every hour of audio, expect three or four hours of trimming, levelling, syncing, and listening back to make sure it doesn’t sound like a Zoom call from hell. If someone’s internet dropped mid-sentence, you’ll be stitching it back together like a forensic linguist.
I don’t have a production team. I don’t outsource. I do the edit. And every time I finish an episode, it’s because I managed not to lose my mind somewhere around the second audio pass.
The raw recordings are chaos. Not in a fun way. In a ‘who left this long pause in the middle of a joke’ kind of way. In a ‘why are two people talking at once for half the episode’ kind of way. What you hear isn’t what was recorded. What you hear is the salvage job.
There are moments where something’s not funny, too long, or just broken. So you cut. Then you cut again. Then you patch the seams so it doesn’t sound like it’s been hacked to bits. That’s the difference between a podcast and a conversation. One sounds finished.
And it’s not just the big stuff. It’s the clicks. The mouth noises. The odd gaps. The weird static someone’s mic added halfway through. You learn to hate waveforms. You hear a sigh five seconds before it happens.
You reach the point where you can spot an ‘erm’ or an ‘uhm’ just from the waveform.
It’s slow. It’s frustrating. And it’s necessary. Because without the edit, a podcast isn’t worth listening to. Doesn’t matter how good the topic is. Doesn’t matter how funny the jokes are. Bad audio kills a good show. And it doesn’t take much—one person peaking, one track out of sync, one segment that drags.
Editing is what makes it real. It’s where an hour of chaos starts to sound like a show. You don’t get to skip it just because the recording felt good. Good recording is luck. Good editing is earned.
Have you ever tried editing a podcast? If not, would you still want to after this?
