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 part nobody romanticises: the edit.
Editing isn’t creative. It’s corrective. It’s where you find out who breathes too loud, who talks over everyone, who hits the table when they’re making a point. You discover gaps, filler words, repeated points, inside jokes that don’t land, and long silences where someone’s clearly reading a Steam page off-screen.
The first time you listen back to a raw episode, it feels like a punishment. The second time, it 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 that needs cutting. An awkward pause. A bad joke. A sentence that wandered off and forgot where it was going. Someone thought they were making a clever point, but all they made was a mess. It’s all in there, waiting to be cleaned up.
And let’s be clear – it’s not fast. For every one hour of audio, you’re spending three or four hours trimming, levelling, syncing, and listening back again to make sure it doesn’t sound like a Zoom meeting from hell. If someone’s internet dropped out mid-sentence? You’ll be stitching that back together like a forensic linguist.
We don’t have a production team. We don’t outsource. I do the editing. And every time I finish an episode, it’s because I chose not to lose my mind somewhere around the second audio-quality 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 there two people talking at the same time for half the episode” kind of way. What you hear is not what we recorded. What you hear is the salvage job.
There are moments in the edit where you realise something isn’t funny, something’s too long, something’s just not going to work. So you cut. And cut. And cut. And when you’re done cutting, you have to patch the seams so it doesn’t sound like you hacked it to bits. That’s the difference between a podcast and a conversation. One sounds finished.
And it’s not even just the big fixes. It’s the tiny stuff. The clicks. The mouth noises. The odd gaps. The weird static someone’s mic added halfway through the show. You learn to hate waveforms. You learn to hear a sigh from five seconds out.
You rich the point when you can spot an “ERM” or an “UHM” just from the waveform itself.
It’s slow, frustrating, and necessary. Because without the edit, a podcast isn’t worth listening to. No matter how strong the topic is. No 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 the part that makes it feel real. It’s where a throwaway hour of chat becomes something that sounds like a show. You don’t get to skip it just because you had a good time recording. Good recording is luck. Good editing is the part you earn.
Have you ever tried editing a podcast? If not, would you still want to after this?
