This is a “limiter”, which is essentially a compressor with an infinity-to-one ratio, meaning no matter how loud the input signal is, our limiter will bring the volume down to our threshold. We’ve set our threshold to -3 dB as that is the common peak limit on audiobooks, in case anyone here is reading this guide to produce those, but you can have it set all the way up to -0.1 dB if you’d like. Personally, I find the audio is a little smoother when you bring down transients a bit more, but as long as we’re not going over 0 dB, we’re in good shape.

Lastly on the Master track, we’re going to put on the EBUR128 Loudness Measurement effect. This won’t actually impact the sound of our audio at all, instead its purpose is to give us real time feedback on the loudness of our podcast. It does this by giving us a LUFS (Loudness Units relative to Full Scale). When you start to play your audio, you’ll see the sliders start to move around. While the documentation around LUFS is very dense and complex, for our purposes we just want to make sure that the first number (IL LUFS, or ‘integrated lufs’) is consistently at or around -16. We’ll briefly go over what each number means below, but it is by no means the final word on the topic of loudness:

Channel Config: LUFS is measured differently depending on how many channels are being considered, we’ll leave this on 2.0 Stereo.

IL LUFS is the integrated loudness of all of the audio that the meter has heard so far (up to an hour for this plugin). If you make any changes to your audio, it is good idea to hit the “RESET” button in the bottom right hand corner to clear the integrated loudness memory and have it start listening to the new adjustments fresh. As we have it in “Stereo” configuration, we’ll want the LUFS number to be at or around -16. Pop this effect out by double clicking on it in the FX menu when you render and you’ll see a much sped up version of the LUFS calculation and you can make sure there aren’t any troublesome spots in your audio.

ML LUFS is the Momentary Loudness of your audio, and you’ll see it jump around a lot more than the IL LUFS meter, because it is calculating the loudness of just the last 400 ms of audio. The ML MAX LUFS shows the highest level the ML LUFS meter recorded.

SL LUFS is the Short Term Loudness of your audio. As with the ML LUFS, you’ll see this jump around more than the IL LUFS, as it is calculating the loudness of just the last 3 seconds of audio. The SL Max LUFS shows the highest level the SL LUFS meter recorded.

TP dB is the “True Peak” of the audio. Without getting too in the weeds about what a “true peak” is, remember that the sampling rate we set is how many times per second we record the amplitude of a signal (typically 44100 or 48000), but sometimes the “true peak” of a signal may not be properly reported because it falls between two sample points, (we record sample 120 and 121, but the true peak of the audio happened at 120.5, for example). These true peaks can cause clipping if we’ve set our limiter to -0.1 or 0 dB, but because we’ve set it to -3 dB, we shouldn’t have an issue with true peaks distorting.

LRA LU is the loudness range of the audio. Essentially, it shows the difference between the average highs and lows of the signal. Think of this as your “consistency” rating. For example, a podcast could technically have an IL LUFS rating of -16 by having one person talk at 0 LUFS and another talk at -32 LUFS for equal amounts of time. While you’d technically be hitting the recommended LUFS rating, listeners would be constantly turning the volume up and down because the difference between the volume of your two speakers would be 32 loudness units! One speaker would be whisper quiet and the other would be blowing out ear drums.

The LRA LU is useful to check to make sure everyone in your show has a consistent loudness. Try to aim for an LRA LU of around 3-6. Anything below that can start to sound too compressed, and anything above that is going to be difficult for listeners who have a lot of background noise (think commuters) to hear.

Now that we have our tracks set up, effects in place and we’re getting a great sound, let’s save this parent track as a template. Right click anywhere on the parent track in the track panel, and click on Save tracks as track template. Name it how you want, and now anytime you need to start a new podcast

Finally, making sure there are only audio clips you need in every episode in our project (intro/outro music, recurring sponsor ads etc.) go to File > Project templates > Save project as template, name it, and you’re done! We now have a template customized to our podcast that we can call up instantly, record into and edit on with only minor adjustments to the FX chains that we’ve already put into place. It might seem like a lot to do all up front, and we haven’t even gotten into the actual editing of the podcast, but having a solid foundation that we can get going in 3 clicks (File > Project templates > [Name of Your Template]) saves so much of the time that goes into editing that we could be using to make really great show notes or coming up with shareable content for social media.

You might be wondering why we have so much preamble in a podcast editing guide. I’ve found the wall most podcasters hit after a few months has very little to do with actually recording the podcast itself, and everything to do with the amount of work in post needed to get each episode out. It might seem like overkill right now to set up so many FX chains and templates, but when you’ve left the editing of an episode to 10pm the night before it has to go up, I think you’ll be happy you made so many shortcuts today.