{"id":12603,"date":"2021-10-28T03:16:26","date_gmt":"2021-10-28T03:16:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/audioordeal.co.uk\/?p=12603"},"modified":"2021-10-28T03:16:31","modified_gmt":"2021-10-28T03:16:31","slug":"how-to-speed-up-podcast-editing-in-reaper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/audioordeal.co.uk\/how-to-speed-up-podcast-editing-in-reaper\/","title":{"rendered":"How to speed up podcast editing in Reaper"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Coloured waveforms using spectral peaks<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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With spectral peaks, the waveform is coloured based on the frequency content<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Spectral peaks are a way to add colour to your waveforms \u2013 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<\/em> area of the audio is likely to be a hissing sound, perhaps an “sss” or “sh”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em><\/strong> action. To edit the colours and view, you can select the action View: Show peaks display settings<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Setting the spectral peaks up in Reaper allows for coloured waveforms to help edit audio<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Split and ripple delete \u2013 Rapid actions to help you<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you are unfamiliar with Reaper’s Custom Actions, I highly recommend you read this more in-depth guide.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Custom: Ripple Delete<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n