Welcome to Pocket-Sized Podcasting, brought to you by Alitu: The Podcast Maker. And on this episode, we’re talking about noise reduction and cleanup. Some types of background noise can be cleaned up in the post-production phase. The constant hiss of a fan, or the low static hum of a microphone, for example. Audio software has the ability to recognise this and strip it out, whilst leaving the vocals intact. Of course, it’s easy to go overboard with this and ruin the vocals themselves. Working with noise reduction is a bit like walking a tightrope. Or, using magic in a high fantasy novel. We can teach you how to do it, free with Audacity, at http://thepodcasthost.com/audacitynoise On, if you’re using Alitu, it’s all done for you automatically, so you don’t need to know a single thing about it. One final note on background noise - the environmental stuff like phones ringing and dogs barking aren’t going to be removed by standard noise reduction processes. So always make sure you’re recording the best possible source material. Noise reduction can help good audio to sound great, but it can never make terrible audio sound good. For a deeper dive on this topic, head on over to http://thepodcasthost.com/noise