Going back to our post on the Production process, you will want to get things done as best you can at the source. Don’t adopt the mindset of being able to “fix it in the mix”, the best results always come from doing things the right way from the start. That being said, there is still a lot that can be done during Post-Production to enhance your audio and clean up any problem areas that may have come about during the recording. Here’s a checklist of some things you may want to do.

Remove Background Noise: Street noise, hum from appliances, distracting room tone, etc… There are great plugins such as iZotope’s RX that can do this, or even a simple EQ can help.

De-Verb: This is a trickier one and is probably the best example of “DO THIS RIGHT DURING THE RECORDING PROCESS” but if you have a recording that is still a little “roomy” or “echoey” you can do some post-processing to tighten things up a bit. Plugins such as iZotope’s De-Verb or a Transient Shaping plugin can help.

De-Ess and De-Plosive: Again, if you are recording properly, you should be experiencing a minimal amount of these issues. However, some De-essing can go a long way to reducing harsh sibilance and if that pop-filter didn’t quite do the trick with your plosives, a De-Plosive tool or even some simple EQ to roll off low end frequencies can help.

EQ: How you EQ will vary depending on many factors, and may not be necessary at all if you recorded properly, but some small EQ adjustments can help improve the overall quality of a dialogue track and address any issues that may be present. It’s probably a good idea to roll off low-end using a highpass filter across the board too, as you don’t really need anything under 100hz or so on your dialogue tracks.

Compression: Again, you may not need any, but if you have a very dynamic speaker who varies between being very loud and very quiet throughout the course of the show, it may help to use some compression to level them out through the podcast.