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Sept. 24, 2024
Ensuring Podcast Perfection: How Audio Audit Can Transform Your Show
Imagine a world where every episode you release is flawless, where volume levels are consistent, silence is clipped, and every last nuance is polished to perfection. Sound too good to be true? Well, our guest this week makes that dream a reality.
This week, we chatted with Damian Moore, the brilliant mind behind Audio Audit, a popular innovative platform that ensures your podcast sounds are impeccable each time you hit publish. Join Mathew Passy as he dives into a challenge many podcasters know all too well: the relentless pursuit of quality and consistency.
With his extensive background in software development and a passion for high-quality audio, Damian has developed a tool that can significantly improve your podcast's production process. If you’re growing your podcast this year, this is an episode you don't want to miss!
In this episode, we are chatting with Damian about his journey into podcasting technology, the features and benefits of Audio Audit, and why it’s essential for podcasters aiming for professional quality.
Audio quality is a key determinant of podcast success, and this episode offers invaluable insights into achieving impeccable sound.
IN THIS EPISODE, WE COVER:
- The story behind Audio Audit: How Damian's frustration with inconsistent audio quality while prepping for his first child’s arrival sparked the creation of Audio Audit.
- Dynamic ad insertion and quality control: Discover how Audio Audit ensures your ads match the content volume and quality.
- Features that set Audio Audit apart: Automated email reports, volume loudness checks, and the detection of profanities and restarted sentences.
- The importance of metadata and encoding: How Audio Audit simplifies these technical aspects to ensure your files are professionally polished.
- Damian’s content creation journey: Insights into Damian's own foray into content creation and how it influences Audio Audit's development.
Links and resources mentioned in this episode:
- Audio Audit platform
- Follow Damian on social media: Audio Audit
- Audio Audit
- Youtube
- Audio Audit
- Amazing hardware suggestion: Rode NT1-A Microphone
- Expert software recommendation: Audacity
- Check out Damian's favorite podcast, The Clean Energy Show
- Podcasting Tech website for more insights:
- https://podcastingtech.com
- Missed our last episode? Catch Improving Podcast Discoverability with Dynamic Ads—perfect for boosting your audience!
**As an Amazon Associate, we may earn commissions from qualifying purchases of podcasting gear from Amazon.com. We also participate in affiliate programs with many of the software services mentioned on our website. If you purchase something through the links we provide, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. The team at Podcasting Tech only recommends products and services that we would use ourselves and that we believe will provide value to our viewers and readers.**
For additional resources and insights visit podcastingtech.com or follow us on social media:
- Instagram: @mathewpassy
- LinkedIn - /mathewpassy
- Threads: @mathewpassy
- Twitter/X: @mathewpassy
- Facebook - /podcastingtech, /mathewpassy
PODCASTING TECH IS POWERED BY:
- Captivate - Easy, professional podcast hosting to create, grow and make money from your podcasts
- Podpage - Build a beautiful podcast website in 5 minutes
- Riverside.fm - Record Podcasts And Videos From Anywhere
- Castmagic - 10x Audio Content With AI
- Podgagement - Engage your audience and grow your podcast!
EQUIPMENT IN USE:
- Rodecaster Pro 1st Gen (No longer available). Consider the Rodecaster Duo or Rodecaster Pro II
- EV RE20 with 309a Shockmount
- Rode PSA1+
- iPhone continuity camera but previously the Logitech Brio 4k
- DCMEKA In-Ear Monitors
- BusyBox Smart Sign
Transcript
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Welcome to Podcasting Tech, a podcast that equips busy
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entrepreneurs engaged in podcasting with proven and cost effective
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solutions for achieving a professional sound and appearance.
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I'm Matthew Passi, your host and a 15 year veteran in the podcasting
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space. We'll help you cut through the noise and offer guidance on software and
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hardware that can elevate the quality of your show. Tune in weekly
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for insightful interviews with tech creators, behind the scenes studio tours, and
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strategies for podcasting success. Head to podcasting tech dot
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com to subscribe to this show on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform
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and join us on this exciting journey to unlock the full potential of your
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podcast. How do you know that when you publish a
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podcast episode that you did everything right? You feel like you've done it,
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you've checked, you've double checked, and yet sometimes things still slip by.
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Well, now there's a new platform out there that can actually do that last check
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for you and make sure that your podcast is really ready for prime time
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delivery. Today, we are chatting with Damien Moore. He's the founder and
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CEO of Audio Audit. It's a platform that makes
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sure your podcast is perfect each time you publish, and you can find out more
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about it at audioaudit.io, which, of course, we'll have a link to here at the
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bottom of the show notes. Damien, thank you so much for joining us today. No
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problem at all. Thanks for having me me, Matthew. Oh, it's great to great to
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meet you and and chat about this platform. So before we talk specifically about Audio
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Audit, what was your journey like into developing
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a podcast platform? Were you in the space prior?
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Do you have a lot of podcast experience? Are you just a big fan of
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podcasts? Yeah. I'm from a sort of software developer
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background. I've been a massive fan of podcasting
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since probably 2,005. So so
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quite early on, I've always been listening to them. I found
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the good weather in bed and,
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weather out running, that sort of thing.
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But I'm used to building software and
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tools mainly for other people, doing
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contracts and building web applications,
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front end, back end sort of thing. The,
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I guess, the inflection point for me to start audio audit was
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when, my first child was on the way,
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and I was, doing a lot of decorating.
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Had paint all over my hands, had a load of audio books and
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podcasts queued up, and then I was getting quite
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annoyed because I was hearing lots of
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sort of mistakes sort of creep in. One of my
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biggest bugbears is, like, the volume levels. So going from
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one show to the next and having to turn the volume up or down.
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Like, I've got these earphones in. I don't wanna get paint all over them,
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and it can be pretty well, it can
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be quite a serious change and quite painful,
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actually, listening to those
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sudden changes. And in the software industry, we have,
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sort of test test driven development and, yeah, automated
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test suites, those kinds of things. So if we release new code to
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production, wanna make sure it doesn't break other things. So I I
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felt there was there should be some combination of these two
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worlds to create something
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to take a lot of effort away from producers
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and make the experience better for listeners.
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So you go ahead and you launch audio audit. Tell us how it works
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and, you know, what the experience is like for a podcaster
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thinking about using it. Yeah. So I'm trying to
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help people to improve the quality
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of their their podcasts. So
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podcasting's great because anyone can get started. It's easier to create a
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podcast than it is, like, a YouTube video, and that's great. I think
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people should get out there and start putting
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content out right away. But when you get to the point where
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you wanna focus a bit more on quality, maybe
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well, you probably don't have, like, a sound engineering background,
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or you don't know if the producer you're hiring
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is doing everything that they can.
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You can, at that point at that at that point,
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upload one of your episodes to audio audit,
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and it'll tell you where you probably wanna be
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focusing your efforts. So
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you there are 2 ways you can use it. Either
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you upload an MP 3 file before you publish, and
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you can the other way is you can also connect it up to your RSS
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feed and have it automatically send you an email every time
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you've released a new episode. Oh, so wait.
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That that begs a a very interesting question. So if I'm
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using a platform that does dynamic ad insertion, let's say,
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and I've connected audio audit to the RSS feed, it's gonna
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pull the final version with the ads in there,
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and that's gonna tell me not just if
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my content is okay, but also if my ads to my content. Right? Like, sometimes
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a big problem you have in podcasting is the content's okay.
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But then the ads are mixed differently. And so you've got either like super
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loud ads to quiet content or or the inverse. So, yeah,
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exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly
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right. And the the platforms will often
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boost or lower the volume of the audio as well. They're trying to do
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normalization or they're doing some AI magic
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editing. Like, it's good to see the before you
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publish and after publish, I think, at least a couple of times.
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I expect people to use it quite a lot heavily
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at the start. And then once they've refined their workflow, sort
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of built some templating around what they're doing,
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then the sort of email
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automatic reports will probably be enough, and then
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you sort of just keep an eye on those and see if they suddenly dip.
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And if you start to have, issues that you weren't thinking of. So a few
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things that audio audit can look for in your show is volume loudness, like you
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were just talking about. Right? You don't want things being too dynamic, you know, too
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many peaks and valleys where somebody turns up the volume because you're too
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quiet and then you start screaming in their ear and it hurts. It'll clip out
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silence at the beginning and the end, which, you know, sometimes as
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somebody who used to work in radio, if I hear 2 seconds of
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silence, you know, my panic brain goes off thinking that we're off the air or
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something like that. So, I'm sure not everyone has that experience with podcasts,
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but I sometimes do interestingly enough, the next to
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restarted sentences and profanities and swearing.
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How do you program the software to
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kinda listen for those and to identify
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that? Yeah. Yeah. So this was a problem. I know it's
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a lot in audiobooks actually that they're obviously so long, and
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they they just fluff a chapter name or they
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rerecord it, but the editor forgets to cut the original one
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out. What what we're doing basically
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is, using transcription
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models. So AI comes in and converts everything to
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text. Then we have, in the
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case of swear words, we've got a list of, swear words
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from, yeah, US and UK. So
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I've built those up, and it's it's quite simple
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searching for the text. But then the nice thing
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is it can it gives you a waveform waveform of
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your show at the top, and then you've got orange
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marks, like, exactly where those, swear
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words are. The restarted
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love the way you visualize this on your platform. We'll
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we'll definitely make sure you go to a link and just check out the homepage
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because there is a nice little display of what it's gonna look like. And it
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will totally make sense to people as they see it, you know, where the
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issues are and how they're labeled. It's it's very well thought
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out and very considerate to make it easy for, somebody
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using it to be able to use it. Oh, thanks for that. Yeah. And then
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restarted sentences is similar. It it
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uses the same transcription underneath and then does some sort of
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fuzzy matching for restarted sentences. So if it
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if it notices there's, like, a sentence and there's 60%
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of the words are the same from one sentence to the next, it sort of
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highlights those. Like, it might
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pull up well, you might
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get some false positives, like if someone says,
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yeah, when they're interviewing someone and the other person replies with a yeah, that sort
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of is not clever enough to detect that those are 2 different
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people, but it's very quick to just click on
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click on each of those and just double check.
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I try and raise raise everything
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in in a way that makes it easy just to
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to check. Like, I I on the side of caution.
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That's fair. And then the other piece that it does is it will handle encoding
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and compression. So if you are not skilled in that
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or, you know, you don't even know what those words are, this is very helpful
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to make your audio sound as rich and as clean as possible and
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then adding the metadata to the file. In these
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days, is that still helpful to have that information directly in the
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MP 3? Yeah. And I'll tell you why. It's
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it's if someone shares your show directly, and a lot
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of players allow this, you can send the file
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to a computer to listen to or someone else
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having the the artist name, the the
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podcast name, and, you know, the cover artwork
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is is always great to just keep that attached.
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And more and more search engines are gonna become aware
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of audio files. Transcription is
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very easy to do now, so I think that's gonna be another
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way of sort of indexing that data and
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making sure that people know that's your content.
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Are you a content creator yourself? Do you make music, video, audio,
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anything like that, or are you just a very passionate listener
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who wants his experience improved?
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My mom was a music teacher. She's retired now, so I kind of guess I've
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got that ear for quality, and I've always been playing around
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with mixers and making music, that sort of
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thing. I'm just starting to get
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into content creation myself. So I've I've got
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one YouTube video. I've started getting onto
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podcasts. Yeah. Got like a a
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bit of a playlist curated for my YouTube
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channel, which I'm gradually working my way through.
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That raises another good question. So it's called audio audit. Does it work on
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video as well? Can you upload a video and and
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get a similar review?
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Not right now. I I think it'd be really good to do that.
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Obviously, there's the technical challenges of dealing with video,
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just that they require so much space and
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processing time. But, yeah, it's definitely something I'd
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like to do. It's also a matter of the different
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platforms or or where your content is being,
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published to. So YouTube will have their loudness standards.
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If it's going to, like, broadcast TV, that's gonna be a different loudness
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standards. So there's kind of gotta be different,
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standards that I bake in and allow people to sort of define their standards
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within the system before I get to that point. Gotcha.
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Well, I think what we'll do is we'll, we'll do a a episode of
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podcasting tech. We'll run it through audio audit. We'll do a nice little screen record
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of that so people can kinda see what it looks like, how
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we're doing with our audio. I'm I'm afraid to find out how
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we're doing with our audio. But, no, this is a a very
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cool platform. So, again, it's audio audit dot I o. There will
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be a link here at the bottom for folks who want to,
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check that out and, you know, have somebody
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listen and check out their audio for them,
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especially if they're not sure about somebody else who's working on it or if they
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themselves are not, you know, proficient audio engineer.
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Damien, before we let you go, a couple of questions we'd like to ask everybody
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about the space. And since you're more of a listener than
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a content creator, I'll be curious to hear some of your answers.
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The first one is, is there a place where you'd like to see improvement
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in the podcasting space overall other than,
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obviously, everybody's audio quality, which, they'll come to you for now?
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I think always there's a bit of
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a disconnect, isn't there, between different
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players. So it's like, I would often
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like to sort of leave lies nice,
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reviews or friendly feedback for my shows that I
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listen to, but as sort of nothing built into the player that I
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use, sort of like I would have to go to maybe Spotify
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or Apple. Like, nothing.
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That's that's a bit of a disconnect. And then a lot of the
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time is sort of discovering podcasts.
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I think that whole area is quite quite ripe to
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be improved upon.
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Any any thoughts on solving that problem yourself or one thing
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at a time? Yeah. One thing at a time.
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Fair enough. Is there any tech that is
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on your wish list, especially as you are starting
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your content creation journey? Is there something that you know you wanna buy
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or even something that isn't out there that you wanna see
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created and available for content creators?
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In terms of hardware, I think
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it's kind of
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all very usable.
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Like, I'm I've got quite a a technical background, but the
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things that really get me down are the
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time for editing. And I've played around with,
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software tools that allow you to
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sort of reorganize your the audio in your
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podcast as if it's a text document and that sort of thing, but
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then I've not found the quality to
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be as great. And I'm trying to also
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repurpose that content to make use of the video. And I
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found finding a bit of it's a bit
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tricky to go between video and audio back
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again and trying to keep the audio quality high,
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but I'm not able to do that within the video tools.
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So, yeah, I think there needs to be some
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joining up in in that space, or maybe I just haven't found the right
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tools yet. It's interesting you say that. That's
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a that's a area that we're doing some research and development into,
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and I will take your notes into mind as we are, plotting out,
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our little plan there. And lastly, because you already mentioned that you have a whole
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bunch on your playlist, is there a podcast or 2 that
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you absolutely cannot miss? Right? As soon as that
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new episode hits your feed, you're like, oh, stop what I'm listening to. I'm going
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over to this show. I
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think for me, it's gonna be a show called the
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clean energy show, the clean energy show. It's by a couple
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of guys in Canada, and
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I'm someone who's very involved in sort of the environmental movement. But what
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they do is always bring the
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positive news stories about that and
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practical things that you can do and sort of debunking a lot of myths.
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They always have new things that I've not heard of.
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And, yeah, I think it's been really encouraging for me.
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Oh, nice. Yeah. I think we could all use a bit of,
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optimistic, you know, potentially
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positive news in our lives. So Yeah. Sounds like a good one to check out.
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Well, we've been chatting with Damien Moore. He's the founder and CEO of
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Audio Audit. You can check it out again at audioaudit.io.
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And if you wanna see more of the stuff that Damian's up to, we'll have
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links to, all the social media handles that we have. So, Damian, thank
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you so much for taking some time today to tell us about Audio Audit. No
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problem. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for joining us
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today on Podcasting Tech. There are links to all the hardware
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and software that help power our guest content and podcasting
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tech available in the show notes and on our website at podcastingtech.com.
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You can also subscribe to the show on your favorite platform, connect with us on
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social media, and even leave a rating and review while you're there. Thanks, and
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we'll see you next time on Podcasting Tech.
Damian Moore
Founder & CEO
Damian Moore is the innovative founder and CEO of Audio Audit, a groundbreaking platform that ensures the highest quality for every podcast episode before it hits the airwaves. With a solid background as a software developer and a fervent passion for podcasts since the early 2000s, Damian has seamlessly merged his technical prowess with his love for audio content to create a tool that addresses one of the most common frustrations among podcast listeners: inconsistent audio quality.
The inspiration for Audio Audit struck Damian during a pivotal moment in his life. As he prepared for the arrival of his first child, often with paint-covered hands, he grew increasingly frustrated by the jarring volume changes between podcast episodes and the creeping in of audio mistakes. Leveraging his expertise in automated testing from the software industry, Damian envisioned a solution that could preemptively detect and correct these issues, thus enhancing the listening experience. He currently resides in the UK and continues to champion for improvements in the broader podcasting industry, while slowly dipping his toes into content creation himself. His visionary approach not only promises to enhance the technical aspects of podcasting but also aims to improve the overall accessibility and enjoyment of audio content for listeners worldwide.