Speaker testing your podcast means listening to your show the way your audience does, on many different devices.Your audience listens to your show in their car, on their mp3 player, on their computer and on many other devices and in countless environments.
To hear your podcast the way your listeners do, put your podcast on these devices and listen in these spots to get a better idea of what your podcast audio sounds like to everyone else. It might sound great through your finely tuned headphones in the edit but does that translate to these devices and places?
- MP3 player with the cheap earbuds it comes with.
- In the car. Try rolling down a window while you’re at.
- On a smartphone – with and without headphones.
- Computer speakers (desktop and laptop).
- On a TV – Find someone with an Apple TV.
- Stitcher Radio – They recompress your already compressed file.
- Anywhere else you can think of (place your ideas in the comments below).
So you’ve taken your podcast out of the place you normally listen but what are you listening for?
Here are a few things to pay attention to while listening to your show on different devices and in a variety of environments.
- Does your audio (voice) stand out from the background noise (other cars, people at the gym, etc).
- Can your voice be heard and understood above bed music (intros, outros, and sound FX)?
- Is your audio peaking?
- Are your levels too low? Do you need to crank the volume level higher than you normally would for music or other podcasts?
- Do you have even levels with co-hosts and/or interviewees/guests?
- Did you use too much noise removal or compression?
- To increase my knowledge and experience with audio production.
- Live broadcasts – allows me a little more control over the audio I send to a live stream.
- More control over my audio in situations where I’m appearing on someone else’s podcast and have no control over the final audio mastering.
- Use of an expander in real-time as well as to turn off the audio received from Skype when the Skype caller is not speaking.
- Limiter – extra protection against peaked audio.
- Can increase the quality of your audio.
- The ability to place a real-time gate function on Skype calls.
- The extra DB boost provided via gain or output knobs can supplement cheaper pre-amps on your mixer.
- Limiter capability.
- Difficult to learn and use. There’s a steep learning curve with gear like this and it’s easy to mess up your audio.
- Requires insert channels on your mixer. A lot of cheaper, widely used podcasting mixers don’t have these.
- Baked in audio effects. Can’t be undone.
- Levelator
- ATR2100 microphone
- KRK Rokit6 studio monitors
- DIY Desktop Rack Mount
- MDX4600 compressor
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Need helping starting your first podcast? Contact me to work one on one setting up your show today.
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