Welcome to Podcasting Tech, a podcast that equips busy

entrepreneurs engaged in podcasting with proven and cost effective

solutions for achieving a professional sound and appearance.

I'm Matthew Passi, your host and a 15 year veteran in the podcasting

space. We'll help you cut through the noise and offer guidance on software and

hardware that can elevate the quality of your show. Tune in weekly

for insightful interviews with tech creators, behind the scenes studio tours, and

strategies for podcasting success. Head to podcasting tech dot

com to subscribe to this show on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform

and join us on this exciting journey to unlock the full potential of your

podcast. How do you know that when you publish a

podcast episode that you did everything right? You feel like you've done it,

you've checked, you've double checked, and yet sometimes things still slip by.

Well, now there's a new platform out there that can actually do that last check

for you and make sure that your podcast is really ready for prime time

delivery. Today, we are chatting with Damien Moore. He's the founder and

CEO of Audio Audit. It's a platform that makes

sure your podcast is perfect each time you publish, and you can find out more

about it at audioaudit.io, which, of course, we'll have a link to here at the

bottom of the show notes. Damien, thank you so much for joining us today. No

problem at all. Thanks for having me me, Matthew. Oh, it's great to great to

meet you and and chat about this platform. So before we talk specifically about Audio

Audit, what was your journey like into developing

a podcast platform? Were you in the space prior?

Do you have a lot of podcast experience? Are you just a big fan of

podcasts? Yeah. I'm from a sort of software developer

background. I've been a massive fan of podcasting

since probably 2,005. So so

quite early on, I've always been listening to them. I found

the good weather in bed and,

weather out running, that sort of thing.

But I'm used to building software and

tools mainly for other people, doing

contracts and building web applications,

front end, back end sort of thing. The,

I guess, the inflection point for me to start audio audit was

when, my first child was on the way,

and I was, doing a lot of decorating.

Had paint all over my hands, had a load of audio books and

podcasts queued up, and then I was getting quite

annoyed because I was hearing lots of

sort of mistakes sort of creep in. One of my

biggest bugbears is, like, the volume levels. So going from

one show to the next and having to turn the volume up or down.

Like, I've got these earphones in. I don't wanna get paint all over them,

and it can be pretty well, it can

be quite a serious change and quite painful,

actually, listening to those

sudden changes. And in the software industry, we have,

sort of test test driven development and, yeah, automated

test suites, those kinds of things. So if we release new code to

production, wanna make sure it doesn't break other things. So I I

felt there was there should be some combination of these two

worlds to create something

to take a lot of effort away from producers

and make the experience better for listeners.

So you go ahead and you launch audio audit. Tell us how it works

and, you know, what the experience is like for a podcaster

thinking about using it. Yeah. So I'm trying to

help people to improve the quality

of their their podcasts. So

podcasting's great because anyone can get started. It's easier to create a

podcast than it is, like, a YouTube video, and that's great. I think

people should get out there and start putting

content out right away. But when you get to the point where

you wanna focus a bit more on quality, maybe

well, you probably don't have, like, a sound engineering background,

or you don't know if the producer you're hiring

is doing everything that they can.

You can, at that point at that at that point,

upload one of your episodes to audio audit,

and it'll tell you where you probably wanna be

focusing your efforts. So

you there are 2 ways you can use it. Either

you upload an MP 3 file before you publish, and

you can the other way is you can also connect it up to your RSS

feed and have it automatically send you an email every time

you've released a new episode. Oh, so wait.

That that begs a a very interesting question. So if I'm

using a platform that does dynamic ad insertion, let's say,

and I've connected audio audit to the RSS feed, it's gonna

pull the final version with the ads in there,

and that's gonna tell me not just if

my content is okay, but also if my ads to my content. Right? Like, sometimes

a big problem you have in podcasting is the content's okay.

But then the ads are mixed differently. And so you've got either like super

loud ads to quiet content or or the inverse. So, yeah,

exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly

right. And the the platforms will often

boost or lower the volume of the audio as well. They're trying to do

normalization or they're doing some AI magic

editing. Like, it's good to see the before you

publish and after publish, I think, at least a couple of times.

I expect people to use it quite a lot heavily

at the start. And then once they've refined their workflow, sort

of built some templating around what they're doing,

then the sort of email

automatic reports will probably be enough, and then

you sort of just keep an eye on those and see if they suddenly dip.

And if you start to have, issues that you weren't thinking of. So a few

things that audio audit can look for in your show is volume loudness, like you

were just talking about. Right? You don't want things being too dynamic, you know, too

many peaks and valleys where somebody turns up the volume because you're too

quiet and then you start screaming in their ear and it hurts. It'll clip out

silence at the beginning and the end, which, you know, sometimes as

somebody who used to work in radio, if I hear 2 seconds of

silence, you know, my panic brain goes off thinking that we're off the air or

something like that. So, I'm sure not everyone has that experience with podcasts,

but I sometimes do interestingly enough, the next to

restarted sentences and profanities and swearing.

How do you program the software to

kinda listen for those and to identify

that? Yeah. Yeah. So this was a problem. I know it's

a lot in audiobooks actually that they're obviously so long, and

they they just fluff a chapter name or they

rerecord it, but the editor forgets to cut the original one

out. What what we're doing basically

is, using transcription

models. So AI comes in and converts everything to

text. Then we have, in the

case of swear words, we've got a list of, swear words

from, yeah, US and UK. So

I've built those up, and it's it's quite simple

searching for the text. But then the nice thing

is it can it gives you a waveform waveform of

your show at the top, and then you've got orange

marks, like, exactly where those, swear

words are. The restarted

love the way you visualize this on your platform. We'll

we'll definitely make sure you go to a link and just check out the homepage

because there is a nice little display of what it's gonna look like. And it

will totally make sense to people as they see it, you know, where the

issues are and how they're labeled. It's it's very well thought

out and very considerate to make it easy for, somebody

using it to be able to use it. Oh, thanks for that. Yeah. And then

restarted sentences is similar. It it

uses the same transcription underneath and then does some sort of

fuzzy matching for restarted sentences. So if it

if it notices there's, like, a sentence and there's 60%

of the words are the same from one sentence to the next, it sort of

highlights those. Like, it might

pull up well, you might

get some false positives, like if someone says,

yeah, when they're interviewing someone and the other person replies with a yeah, that sort

of is not clever enough to detect that those are 2 different

people, but it's very quick to just click on

click on each of those and just double check.

I try and raise raise everything

in in a way that makes it easy just to

to check. Like, I I on the side of caution.

That's fair. And then the other piece that it does is it will handle encoding

and compression. So if you are not skilled in that

or, you know, you don't even know what those words are, this is very helpful

to make your audio sound as rich and as clean as possible and

then adding the metadata to the file. In these

days, is that still helpful to have that information directly in the

MP 3? Yeah. And I'll tell you why. It's

it's if someone shares your show directly, and a lot

of players allow this, you can send the file

to a computer to listen to or someone else

having the the artist name, the the

podcast name, and, you know, the cover artwork

is is always great to just keep that attached.

And more and more search engines are gonna become aware

of audio files. Transcription is

very easy to do now, so I think that's gonna be another

way of sort of indexing that data and

making sure that people know that's your content.

Are you a content creator yourself? Do you make music, video, audio,

anything like that, or are you just a very passionate listener

who wants his experience improved?

My mom was a music teacher. She's retired now, so I kind of guess I've

got that ear for quality, and I've always been playing around

with mixers and making music, that sort of

thing. I'm just starting to get

into content creation myself. So I've I've got

one YouTube video. I've started getting onto

podcasts. Yeah. Got like a a

bit of a playlist curated for my YouTube

channel, which I'm gradually working my way through.

That raises another good question. So it's called audio audit. Does it work on

video as well? Can you upload a video and and

get a similar review?

Not right now. I I think it'd be really good to do that.

Obviously, there's the technical challenges of dealing with video,

just that they require so much space and

processing time. But, yeah, it's definitely something I'd

like to do. It's also a matter of the different

platforms or or where your content is being,

published to. So YouTube will have their loudness standards.

If it's going to, like, broadcast TV, that's gonna be a different loudness

standards. So there's kind of gotta be different,

standards that I bake in and allow people to sort of define their standards

within the system before I get to that point. Gotcha.

Well, I think what we'll do is we'll, we'll do a a episode of

podcasting tech. We'll run it through audio audit. We'll do a nice little screen record

of that so people can kinda see what it looks like, how

we're doing with our audio. I'm I'm afraid to find out how

we're doing with our audio. But, no, this is a a very

cool platform. So, again, it's audio audit dot I o. There will

be a link here at the bottom for folks who want to,

check that out and, you know, have somebody

listen and check out their audio for them,

especially if they're not sure about somebody else who's working on it or if they

themselves are not, you know, proficient audio engineer.

Damien, before we let you go, a couple of questions we'd like to ask everybody

about the space. And since you're more of a listener than

a content creator, I'll be curious to hear some of your answers.

The first one is, is there a place where you'd like to see improvement

in the podcasting space overall other than,

obviously, everybody's audio quality, which, they'll come to you for now?

I think always there's a bit of

a disconnect, isn't there, between different

players. So it's like, I would often

like to sort of leave lies nice,

reviews or friendly feedback for my shows that I

listen to, but as sort of nothing built into the player that I

use, sort of like I would have to go to maybe Spotify

or Apple. Like, nothing.

That's that's a bit of a disconnect. And then a lot of the

time is sort of discovering podcasts.

I think that whole area is quite quite ripe to

be improved upon.

Any any thoughts on solving that problem yourself or one thing

at a time? Yeah. One thing at a time.

Fair enough. Is there any tech that is

on your wish list, especially as you are starting

your content creation journey? Is there something that you know you wanna buy

or even something that isn't out there that you wanna see

created and available for content creators?

In terms of hardware, I think

it's kind of

all very usable.

Like, I'm I've got quite a a technical background, but the

things that really get me down are the

time for editing. And I've played around with,

software tools that allow you to

sort of reorganize your the audio in your

podcast as if it's a text document and that sort of thing, but

then I've not found the quality to

be as great. And I'm trying to also

repurpose that content to make use of the video. And I

found finding a bit of it's a bit

tricky to go between video and audio back

again and trying to keep the audio quality high,

but I'm not able to do that within the video tools.

So, yeah, I think there needs to be some

joining up in in that space, or maybe I just haven't found the right

tools yet. It's interesting you say that. That's

a that's a area that we're doing some research and development into,

and I will take your notes into mind as we are, plotting out,

our little plan there. And lastly, because you already mentioned that you have a whole

bunch on your playlist, is there a podcast or 2 that

you absolutely cannot miss? Right? As soon as that

new episode hits your feed, you're like, oh, stop what I'm listening to. I'm going

over to this show. I

think for me, it's gonna be a show called the

clean energy show, the clean energy show. It's by a couple

of guys in Canada, and

I'm someone who's very involved in sort of the environmental movement. But what

they do is always bring the

positive news stories about that and

practical things that you can do and sort of debunking a lot of myths.

They always have new things that I've not heard of.

And, yeah, I think it's been really encouraging for me.

Oh, nice. Yeah. I think we could all use a bit of,

optimistic, you know, potentially

positive news in our lives. So Yeah. Sounds like a good one to check out.

Well, we've been chatting with Damien Moore. He's the founder and CEO of

Audio Audit. You can check it out again at audioaudit.io.

And if you wanna see more of the stuff that Damian's up to, we'll have

links to, all the social media handles that we have. So, Damian, thank

you so much for taking some time today to tell us about Audio Audit. No

problem. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for joining us

today on Podcasting Tech. There are links to all the hardware

and software that help power our guest content and podcasting

tech available in the show notes and on our website at podcastingtech.com.

You can also subscribe to the show on your favorite platform, connect with us on

social media, and even leave a rating and review while you're there. Thanks, and

we'll see you next time on Podcasting Tech.