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Recording and Processing Spoken Word
hat happens if you listen to 60 seconds of your favourite radio station / audiobook and then 60 seconds of a random non-professional podcast? The former will be pleasant to listen to, with good intelligibility — it’s easy to understand everything the speakers say. The latter, however, are often somewhat unpleasant to listen to and have poor intelligibility.
It’s tempting to look at video of our favourite podcasts or radio stations and assume we need to spend £400 on a Shure SM7B — but then we need a microphone arm and a surprisingly powerful audio interface. In fact, the limiter works so well on spoken word that it underlies my suggestion from earlier in this post for those in a hurry to use ffmpeg-normalize and not worry about explicit compression. Manual compression does lead to a better mix, but the difference often isn’t as stark as you might expect: indeed, if all you take away from this post is “use ffmpeg-normalize ” then I have not wasted my time entirely!
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