Our final tip is to spread the stereo image of your music tracks. When you are listening to something in stereo, you have what is called the Stereo Image. You can think of it visually as the track you are listening to being a stage. Things that are panned in the center of the stereo image, sound like they are located right in the middle of the stage. Then you can start panning things left or right and placing them further out to the sides of your stage.

If your podcast will be in stereo, you need to consider the stereo image. Voice and Dialogue should be dead center so that they are nice and upfront. An exception would be narrative or story podcasts, where you might pan voices for dramatic effect or to tie in with what is happening in the story. But for most Solocast, Conversational, or Interview format podcasts, you will want your voices dead center. With SFX and Music you can then be creative in how you place them in the Stereo Image.

A good way to separate the music and dialogue and help them to not conflict with each other, is to spread the stereo image of the music, while leaving the voice in the center. This creates some more separation between these two elements and helps the music fill more of the outside space, while the voice still takes center stage. You can do this with stereo imaging plugins that help increase the spread or width of a track. There are a bunch out there, but a great free one is iZotope's recently released free Ozone Imager plugin - which you can check out here

So if you plan on adding music to your show and having it live alongside other audio elements such as voice and sound effects, play around with some of these tips to increase the overall audio quality and professionalism of your podcast.

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