How to speed up podcast editing in Reaper
4 min readOne of the best all-round DAWs in the industry is Reaper, my go-to software for editing podcasts and spoken-word audio. While I rely on Ableton as my music production DAW, Reaper offers significant advantages when it comes to podcast audio. This guide will show you some of the best features and tricks to use in Reaper for editing podcasts, lectures, and any other recordings of people speaking.
The first thing you will want to do is install the SWS extensions. These are community-based add-ons to Reaper which extend the functionality significantly. They can be downloaded from the official SWS Extensions site.
Coloured waveforms using spectral peaks
Spectral peaks are a way to add colour to your waveforms – something which is more than an aesthetic choice. By colour-coding your frequencies, you can edit much better. This does come with a bit of a learning curve, but the different colours represent different sounds that are made with the mouth. For example, a high-frequency blue area of the audio is likely to be a hissing sound, perhaps an “sss” or “sh”.
You can also identify problem pops and bumps by looking for low-frequency (red) spikes in the audio which may indicate the microphone has been bumped.
These colour-coded waveforms make editing and finding problems a lot easier. To get the feature, you can open up the actions menu and toggle the Peaks: Toggle spectral peaks action. To edit the colours and view, you can select the action View: Show peaks display settings.
Split and ripple delete – Rapid actions to help you
When editing a podcast, you are likely to need to split and chop audio rapidly. There will be plenty of unwanted pauses, coughs, and other irrelevant content that can be chopped down to reduce the playtime and tidy the audio up.
While this can be done manually with the mouse and keyboard shortcuts, you can further refine the workflow to massively increase the speed of editing, thus, saving time.
The two custom actions I want to show you are refined ripple delete actions. Ripple deleting is a useful editing technique where you split the audio around an unwanted part, then delete it, shifting everything after it back to close the gap.
In the instance of a cough, you would make a cut before and after the cough, delete it, then the audio that follows it would snap backwards and connect as if the cough was never there.
The first custom action requires you to split the audio manually (I use keyboard shortcut S to split at the cursor). IT is a custom action with two actions chained together:
Custom: Ripple Delete
- Script: X-Raym_Delete selected items and ripple edit adjacent items.lua
- Item Navigation: Move cursor left to edge of item.
This simple custom item will delete the unwanted audio, snap the next bit of audio back to join the gap, then move the cursor to the edit point.
The second edit is even more streamlined. It allows you to skip the audio splitting by dragging the mouse and making a selection over the audio you want rid of, then following the same action. It has these component actions:
Custom: Ripple Delete at time selection
- Item: Split items at selection
- Custom: Ripple delete [where this action is the one outlined above]
- Time Selection: Remove time selection and loop points
This example is a good one to demonstrate Reaper’s ability to add custom actions within other custom actions as part of a larger chain. You could add additional actions within it depending on where you want the cursor to go too, as outlined below.
Auto-remove silence
Another really useful custom action is to automatically remove silence. This is a great one if you have long pauses that you need rid of. The way it works is it tells Reaper to select any parts quieter than a defined threshold and delete them. This can be tweaked to allow brief pauses – something natural in conversation – and only remove silences longer than a defined time.
Custom: Remove silence and snap together
- Item: Auto Trim/Split items (remove silence)
- Script: mpl_Snap selected items to each other.lua
When you run this action, it will bring up a menu that allows you to define the volume, below which is silence. It will also ask you what length of silence to ignore. I tend to set it to ignore silences shorter than 5000ms (5 seconds).
Save chain FX
When you have finished editing and mixing an episode, it is very likely that the next episode will have the same presenter using the same microphone. There is no point going to all the trouble to set up you mixing FX and sound adjustments from scratch each time, so you can save your FX chains for later use.
Once you have made an FX chain you like, you can save it via File > Save FX Chain. By bringing up the FX menu and selecting File > Add FX Chain, you can bring up previous FX chains that you have saved.
