Podcasting

By Abigail Ali

Podcasts have become a popular listening form of media in the past few years, and one thing my sister and I often talk about is being able to hear the quality difference between a podcast’s first episode compared to its latest. As podcasters become more serious, learn more about microphones, editing software, etc., the quality of their recordings greatly improves.

One podcast I have noticed this the most with happens to be a very popular true crime podcast called “My Favorite Murder.” Here is the first episode of the podcast from 2016.

The general quality of the recording isn’t awful, but it isn’t the cleanest audio, and the biggest issue I noticed in the podcast’s older recordings is the two microphone levels were often completely different or one person wouldn’t be speaking directly into the mic so one host is incredibly loud and you can barely hear the other one.

Here is their most recent episode. The audio for this episode is noticeably more crisp, the levels of the audio are even for both mics and generally sound really good and allow listeners to have a good amount of control over volume. Overall, the production quality has improved a lot.

I find this interesting, because it isn’t unlike how we have been improving our sounds as students in our audio class. The more we practice, learn about editing and equipment, the better our recordings get over time. It also reminds beginner audio engineers like us that everybody starts at the beginning, and we can improve our audio producing skills.