Create a podcast with an iPad and Ferrite

1. Trailer: Hi, I'm Shaun and I'm a professional copywriter and podcast producer. Like you, I'm passionate about learning and being creative. I've been writing professionally for more than 25 years and podcasting since 2009. In that time, I've picked up a lot of tips and tricks, some bad habits that I've had to overcome, and I've become addicted to improving workflows wherever I can. Because I work with a lot of big corporations, you can't get away with making mistakes. At least not too many. So while I've learned how to be creative at a professional level, I've also honed my skills to be quick and efficient, but always making sure standards are high. This means tools I use change all the time depending on how they make me work better, faster, and with more enthusiasm. With this in mind, I'd like to introduce you to my course and using your iPad to create a podcast with editing software called Ferrite. In this course, I'll take you through the steps required to master recording your voice, editing a single track of audio, adding a cool effect, adding chapters, and exporting your show for the whole world to find and enjoy. You will learn how to use Ferrite as well as pick up tips and tricks about editing audio, getting the best out of your voice, mastering the final mix and using some cool effects, to add pizzazz to your podcast. Along the way, I invite you to share your work in progress if you want to. I'm going to help you make an audio recording that includes all of the elements of a well-recorded podcast. Just really short! I want to hear what you create. Making classes is all about me inspiring you to inspire me. I will answer your questions and help with as much feedback as I can to inspire you to make Ferrite on an iPad the best way forward for your podcasting life. So obviously, to get the most out of this course, you'll need an iPad as well as the Pro version of Ferrite. I'll be using version 2.6.9 of Ferrite Pro, and iPadOS 15. However, the first couple of lessons we'll use basic functions only. So if you only have the free version of Ferrite, you can still produce a podcast. Grab your iPad, strap in, and let's get to grips with the speed and convenience of producing podcasts on a mobile device. 2. Course opener: So welcome and thanks for choosing my course. It's the very first time I've been on Skillshare, so thank you so much. I'm delighted to have you here. We're going to learn about editing a podcast using a program called Ferrite. And we're going to use the power of your iPad. In my own creative life, I'm passionate about podcasting and writing. Since about 2009, I've probably produced more than 300 podcasts, mostly for corporate clients. I also produced two shows under my own name. They are Media Will Eat Itself and From the Comms Cupboard. For years, GarageBand was my go-to for editing podcasts. I used to use it on my Mac. I've even used it on my iPad. And why use anything else when it's free and comes with a Mac? But then I discovered Ferrite and I haven't looked back. I began using my iPad about halfway through producing Media Will Eat Itself. I produced all 40 episodes of From the Comms Cupboard using my iPad. I've also used it to create shows for my clients. And I'm going to show you how you can also produce podcasts using your iPad. I invite you to work along with me to produce a short piece of audio. It's optional. You don't have to do it if you don't want to. But it'd be great and I'd like to see what you come up with. I'd like to hear your questions as well, should you have any, about the process of producing this short piece of audio using your own iPad. But first, let's begin with a brief tour around Ferrite. I'm going to show you three different components. I'm going to make myself a coffee. I'm going to find a nice cozy spot in the house. We're going to settle in. And let's get on with this. As you can see, as I'm actually talking, there's a meter. You can record right into Ferrite if you want, but you don't have to. You can use the iPad microphone. You can actually, what I prefer to do is what I'm doing now, which is recording the audio separately and then I sync it through. What you're looking at here is the library. You can see I've got loads of files in here. So these are my archive library. So you can see I've got From the Comms Cupboard episode 40, 39, and I kinda clean things up as I go. So the library's very easy to understand. You can see two tracks are already built. We're just going to use one for this intro to Ferrite. If you wanted to actually paste something in or import something, as you can see it's going to go to my library. And I can put that, let's say the Italian cafe, so there's the Italian cafe, and I can move the audio around. So that's the editing suite. And then the final thing I want to show you just in this opener is the final mix section. So this is where you kind of decide what you wanna do with your final mix, whether you have chapters, whether you want to use leveling. I'll explain all of these things in the course as we go. Effects, automation, etc. And that's where you mix out. So now that you've seen what Ferrite looks like and where to find basic tools, let's move on to the next lesson and record a single track of audio. 3. Record your voice: OK, welcome to the second lesson of this course on using Ferrite and your iPad to create some audio so that you can go on and perhaps make some podcasts of your own. The first major thing we need to do for this project is record your voice. It doesn't matter what you want to say. Pick any topic, but we want two or three good sentences, so we can have a very, very short clip. I'm going to go through now and show you the different ways that you can get audio into Ferrite. Number one, I can do right here. So I'm recording this on my Zoom. It's a Zoom recorder. I've got it plugged in to a microphone. Let me show you the microphone. Samson microphone. All right. So that's one way of getting the audio in. Take the SD card out of here, then plug it into my iPad, and then I can access the audio straight into Ferrite. So let's go through some other ways of how you can get audio that we're gonna use for your project, so that we can crack on with the next few lessons. OK, so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to record straight into Ferrite using its in-built microphone. We're using the great microphones on the iPad. All right, so all we have to do is click that, and then we're recording. So welcome to our podcast! It's Wednesday, and we're here with some great guests today, so gather yourself, make a coffee, and let's get down to business. And then you're finished. All right, so you can see that a new recording pops up straight away. And you can rename that if you want with the 'i' button. So let's call this 'Skillshare straight into Ferrite'. And you can see that it changes it to a CAF file. That doesn't matter – that's just a file for Ferrite – because we're going to output it into whatever format we want, usually MP3. So another way to actually get your voice into Ferrite using your iPad is to actually record it on your Mac. Maybe that's a good setup for you because you've already got a microphone. Just record it into what we call Voice Memos. I think that's what Apple are calling it: Voice Memos. So let's make a recording. So here we are! Welcome to the podcast. Today, we're gonna talk about electric cars and flying around the world, or something like that. We've got lots of guests for you, so grab a coffee and settle in and enjoy the show. So that's it. Record whatever you want. Press 'Done' at the end of that, it'll create a new recording for you. Now that recording should sync between your phone, your iPad, through iCloud (if you have an iCloud account). But you can also, if you want, just put it into Files, Dropbox, whatever, and then access that through Ferrite. Let me show you how to do that. OK, so I just opened Voice Memos on my iPad and straight away I can see that the new recording has showed up because it's synched through iCloud. So what I can do now is I can actually share that. I can move it to 'Save to Files'. I can move this to 'iCloud Drive', or I can move to 'On my iPad'. If I go to iCloud Drive, I've got a Documents folder in there. Let's save it in there. It's called 'New Recording', but you can call it whatever you like. Now if I go back to Ferrite and then 'Import Audio', from 'Files', I can browse, I can go to Documents and there's the new recording. Instantly it comes in. Press the Edit button, and there's the audio that I recorded on my Mac a few minutes ago all ready for editing. So whichever way you decided to record your voice, so hope it's worked out for you and that you've managed to get the audio file in the place that you want it, which is Ferrite on your iPad. Let's go to the next lesson and let's have a look at the library again, and renaming things ready so that you can edit them later. 4. Library and editing: Hi again. Welcome to the next lesson. So what we're gonna do is we're going to explore what we can do with our little piece of audio that we just created. We're gonna have a little more detailed look at the timeline and the track tools. And we're also going to look at the tools that are available in the library before you get editing. And then we're going to make a simple edit. We're going to delete a portion of the audio just to show you how easy it is to do it inside Ferrite on your iPad. Let's get going. So we're gonna go and look at that ... You can see where it says 'New Recording'. So where it says 'New Recording', that's in your library. That's where our audio file is. So what we can do there is we can just tap on it, and then you can see some details of the new recording by tapping on the 'i' logo. Then you can see some information about that file. You can see that actually, it was recorded in mono. It was created on the sixth of October. It's 1.1 megabytes. There's the duration, and you can see that it's actually used in 0 projects. So we haven't actually used it yet. It's ... we haven't created a project in which to use that. So let's do that now. What we're going to do now is we're going to press the logo on the left: the icon with the square and the pencil. If you click that, you can see that you open into the editing section of Ferrite. You can see the single track of audio right there. Just for a moment, if we go down to the bottom left, you can see a document icon with a little tick on it. That takes you back to the library. I'd like you to go there now just to see what's happened. You can immediately see that New Recording now has PROJECT written underneath it. That means it's created a project based on the audio that you've asked it to. But look underneath that: you can still see your original audio file intact. It won't change. Say you messed this up, you've still got the original audio file. You can just start again. All right, let's go back into that project by pressing the icon on the left again with a little pencil. Just for a moment, I know I keep doing this, but let's go back to the library again. Bottom-left, remember, the tick. If you go to the third icon along – the arrow pointing up – usually that's the share icon. You can see you've got some options here. So before you even edit your audio, let's say it's great. Let's say you didn't even need Ferrite in the first place! You've played it, and it sounds pretty good. You don't want to make any edits. You can actually do all of these things already. Save another copy to the Ferrite library, duplicate copy, you can share it out, you can make an archive. Archive's really good. I back up every podcast. Major tip: BACK EVERYTHING UP! Plus, audio files aren't as big as video, so it doesn't really take up too much on your hard drive as well. And then you can convert to mono, share tracks, different chapter information. Now look at these ones here. This is Share to LumaFusion. Because I have LumaFusion, which is a video editing suite on my iPad, I can actually save it straight over and put the audio right into my video editor as well. And can save to Files, pCloud and Dropbox. I can make a PDF. I've never used 'Make a PDF' from an audio file. Does that work? I don't know, maybe I need to give that a try. I'm going to go back into the editing section. So we're back on our timeline now, the timeline being the bit here. So if I move this cursor along, I can move it with my finger. You can also move it with an Apple Pencil if you want to do that, but my big fat fingers will do the job quite nicely, thank you! So you can put the timeline wherever you want it. Here's what else you can do. So you can click the cursor where you want, you can stretch, stretch it with two fingers out, a little bit like when you want to see a photograph. And then you can pinch a little bit shorter to pinch the timeline in. So you can do all of these things to really get some granular control over the audio that you see. Let's see how far I can go into this one. Really far. You can get really quite accurate. Every time I do that, my voice goes higher and I just don't know why! Let's squeeze that back. Go that way. You can go that way. Doing this with your fingers is absolutely fantastic. It's much better than using your mouse. I just want to show you, if you just tap with one finger on your track, all of these things pop up such as cutting, copying, select the whole track, paste, delete, split, import new audio, zoom into the audio, strip silence – which we will come to – and then click that arrow right at the end and you can see something called tighten – which we will get to – and share again. So it's a nice, easy way to share straight from here instead of going back to the library and sharing it. Let's click that arrow again on the left. Let's try something. Let's listen to a little bit of the audio. I'm going to turn the iPad up here, so you'll pick it up on the microphone. Let's see where we are on there. So right down on the bottom-right, you can see the play button: "... today, we're going to talk about electric cars and flying around the world, or something like that." Pause. So it's picked up, it's not too bad. I'd like to tighten some of those sections. I'd like to perhaps cut that bit out where I just said: "or something like that". It doesn't seem to fit with it, does it really? So why don't we do that? All right, so let's move the play head along. I think that's where it is. Let's just play that: "or something like that." That's exactly what I want to take out. I'm going to put it right about there to split, right there and move the play head probably about there. Let's tap it again. Tap again and split. Right. I don't want that piece now. It's in yellow, so I know that's the selected piece of audio. And what I wanna do is I want to get rid of it. So watch what happens. When I press Delete, it asks me whether I want to Ripple Delete. And Ripple Delete means everything's just gonna magnetically shut, and those two pieces on either side of the audio that we've deleted will come together. Let's say yes, I want to Ripple Delete. Boom! Here's a little tip you can do. If you go to where it says the nine seconds at the bottom – it's actually a time code – and just tap it, you can zoom to project length. Let's do that. It shows us the whole project in one go. Let's take the cursor back. Let's play this. "We've got lots of guests for you." Perfect, seamless, you didn't even notice. So that worked really, really well. Very happy with that. Before we go any further and make any ... use any new tools, let's look at the top-left, and on this track. So each track that you make has a spanner. We're going to look at the Spanner for our single track. So tap the spanner. You can see that there are tools specific for this track. For instance, you can mute the track or just have it solo. But this is mainly if you have lots and lots of tracks, which you eventually may do if you begin to use Ferrite more extensively than this beginner course. Then you have things like Duck, Duck King, Duck Off. We'll get to those things! Effects, automation. Then you can actually delete that track if you want to do that, and then you can rearrange tracks as well. So they're the track tools. If you go to the speaker button, you can do that and see the x means you're turning off that track. If you tap again, you star it, which means you're only going to hear that track, and then tap it again to go back to its default state. You also have the volume, and underneath that one is the pan. So that's going from left to right. If you want to have this track of audio just play through someone's left ear, then obviously you put it all the way over to the left, to the right for the right ear. So that's panning. So that was fun. We've used our iPads to actually get the audio in, and we've made a few edits. The next stage, we're going to be looking at some more advanced edits. If you need to take a break before the next lesson, rest assured that Ferrite automatically saves your file, so you can go away, have your dinner, you can come back the next day and it'll be saved automatically. So let's move on to the next lesson. 5. Audio overview and basic edits: In this lesson, we are going to look at recording some new audio so that I can show you how to manage splitting audio. The importance of having an overview of your track so that you see everything all in one go. And then we'll have a look at scrubbing through the audio, splitting the audio, crossfades and cropping. So let's get started on this lesson. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna re-record my bit. You don't have to re-record your dialogue, but I'm going to re-record this because I want to put some mistakes in it so that we can have something to edit, and I'll be able to show you how it works better. So I'm going to re-record. I've actually prepared myself a little script. So I'm going to read from this and I'm going to record it. Tap this. All right. Let's do this. I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you're looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you return my pyjamas today, that'll be the end of it. I won't look for you. I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will tickle you to death. OK, a bit of fun. So I've put that in. You can see it's called 'New recording'. Let's do that and we'll call it ... oh I don't know. 'Neeson'. Done. And there's my new track. So I'm going to press the edit button now and it's created that new set for me. So the first thing that you should do when you're looking at your audio file is look at the entirety of it. See what you're dealing with before you start editing. Have a look at the peaks and the low points. You can immediately see a peak right there. And you may want to go there and find out what it is. Let's do that now. It's a cough. I did that on purpose because I wanted to show you that while I was saying this, it was quite uniform. The volume was quite uniform, right throughout this audio waveform, but the cough is a little bit louder. So it's a good idea actually. A good tip is to, before you start editing your piece, have a look at the audio file in its entirety. It's good practice, and you can see what you're dealing with before you get going. One other thing that you should do before you actually begin editing is play the track from beginning to end. Really get to know what it sounds like, so that when you actually come to edit, you know what you need to do. You can immediately hear whether it's distorted because it's too loud, or whether it's too quiet. If it's too quiet, record it again, and just turn up the microphone, turn up the gain on the microphone. Because if you turn something up that was recorded too quiet, you may introduce other sounds such as hissing in the background or the ambient environment. Good tip: Don't ever record audio in a restaurant unless you really mean to! So let's take a look at this. I don't really use the forward and rewind buttons. I use my finger or an Apple Pencil for moving the play head where I want. But I do like the jumping buttons though, which take you to the start or end points of clips. But I won't be able to show you that until we make a clip. So let's for instance look at this cough. So I'm going to tap on that. I'm going to split that. Going to move it to the other side of the cough. Let's introduce another point and we're going to split that. So you can see we've got these splits. So now if you go down to the bottom-right, and you can see the forward arrows and the backward arrows. If you actually do that, can you see it took me to the beginning of the clip. The forward arrow took me to the beginning of the next edit point where I've split it. Another jump to the edit point there. And then I can go to the end. So 1234 ... 1234. You can see I keep doing that. And it takes you to the very point in the clip where you want the play head to go. Let's tap on that cough, and as I showed you in the previous section, let's actually take that out. That's ripple delete it, and it brings those two points together. Let's play that now. That'll be the end of it. I will not look for you. The cough has gone. I'm going to zoom in a little bit to that clip now and show you an overlapping technique. So remember pinch out, zoom in to where the edit point was. There's still a little bit of dead space there, so let's get rid of that. If you actually pick up by tapping and holding that piece, you can see that when you drag it to the left, it's automatically created a crossfade for you on this edit. So you can overlap two pieces and it creates a crossfade. We've got a slightly tighter edit for that now. Let's play it from here ... today ... That'll be the end of it. I will not look for you. Nice and smooth edit. No clicks or anything like that because it's automatically created that crossfade for you. If you want to undo that, remember you can go down to the bottom-left and undo. So let's undo, and it takes you right back to where you were. You can also redo, and it creates a crossfade for you again. Nice and handy to know these little shortcuts. I'm going to undo that section again now just to show you that you can actually grab the end and drag it to where you want. So when you select a piece of audio, can you see that it creates that sort of semicircular bit? And what you can do is you can tap on that and drag it across. And you can do the same on the other side, tap that, drag it across. And then you can pick up and place that right next to it and create an even tighter edit. Let's play that ... will be the end of it. I will not look for you. Nice and fast! Probably not what Liam Neeson would do, or if you were a trained actor, but for the tightness of the audio ... say it's a podcast and you didn't want too much breathing space in between your words, that's a great, fast way of editing and pulling pieces together and taking out – successfully taking out a cough. That was quite a quick-fire lesson on getting to grips with the audio. Let's take it a little bit further with some advanced editing just on a single track. And we're going to look at taking silence out, little pauses, little gaps, and then we're going to tighten them. 6. Strip silence and tighten: Hi again. In this very short lesson, we are going to look at the Strip Silence tool. Then what happens after you strip the silence is you tighten all the little pieces of audio together again. And finally, we're going to do a very fast edit to buy back valuable seconds in our audio file. Let's get cracking. OK, I want you to see the silence. We're going to use Strip Silence. So to do that, I'm going to do loads of undos because I want a track without any cuts on it, so let's quick-fire that ... ... loads of undos. So that I have perfect audio. And there it is again. Let's go back to that trick I showed you in a previous lesson, zoom to project length, here's the whole thing. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to strip the silence. I'm going to tap on the audio, tap again to bring up the menu, and Strip Silence. Now you can see that it's finding the pauses; it's finding the silent gaps in our audio and showing you with the serrated lines. So now what I can do ... if you go down to the bottom bit, where it says Strip Silence – Threshold, Fade Edges, and the Minimum Silence – that's where we can change those things. So right now if you just click on it, you can see it's set at 3% -15 decibels. So what that means is ... I want you to watch the timeline as I move that to say 15%. So you're you're asking it to see what the minimum and maximum is that you say is a silent piece of audio. Fade Edges is basically so they can have that softening ... a little bit like the feather tool if you use Adobe Photoshop, to soften the edges of your audio. And then the Minimum Silence is set at 345 milliseconds here. Change that as well. And you can see that also adjusts the amount that it changes. What I'm going to say now is Done. Here's what happens when you say Done: it takes out all those silent bits for you. So what do you do next? Here's what we do next. We tap again on the audio to bring up the menu. Then we say Tighten, and that's this one here. And that brings the pieces together. Again, you've got the amount that you can tighten. So let's put your finger on that, and right now it's 80%. And I can adjust that by going to 100% if I want, or make the gaps even larger by going the other way. I'm going to say 100% for this and see what it sounds like. Again, you can adjust the Minimum Silence if you want. It does a similar kind of thing. Anyway, let's ignore that for now. Let's go back. Let's say Done. Press Done, and let's listen to a section here. So let's zoom in on this section. ... look for you. I will not pursue you. Erm. But if you don't, I will look for you. So you can see that it's actually brought all the audio together. It sounds very fast now, great for a podcast, not necessarily for a scene from a certain film. All right, so I'm gonna jump to the project length again from the timer menu, and then look at the whole thing. I'm just going to play it through. I will find ... Let's go right to the beginning, so keep my finger down. I hold it down on that left arrow there and it goes right to the beginning of the project. All right, let's do this. I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. Right. So don't need that front bit, so let's tap on there. Hang on. Let's see what that is. Let's do this. Yeah. I'm going to delete that. I can ripple delete the whole project. Let's see what this bit is. I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you're looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you return my pyjamas today, that'll be the end of it. Cough. Let's take that cough out again like we did earlier. Let's do that pretty quick. So tap on that. Oh, sorry, wrong one. Let's tap on that and split. Let's bring that here. Tap on it again and split. Now I'm going to go back to the cough. I'm going to tap again, ripple delete. Bring that play head back ... the end of it. I'm will not look for you. I will not pursue you. Erm. There's an "erm" I put in. Let's do the same. I'm going to slightly change that. I'm going to drag that over to here. Now, I'm going to drag this bit to snap. I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you. I will find you, and I will tickle you to death. There we go. All of those edits nice and quickly got a nice piece of audio. And I've actually taken it down by about 10 seconds. I've removed 10 seconds of audio that I didn't need. In the next lesson, we're going to have a look at effects and warming up your voice to make you sound like a radio host. 7. Use effects: So we're on to lesson 6 already. And in this lesson we're going to look at warming up your voice with effects. We're not going to dig too deep into the effects palette because there's so much that you can do, but you need to understand audio a lot more than this basic course is going to give you. So let's get to it. OK, looking at some of the effects now, I'm really not going to dig into the weeds of these because effects, you kind of need to know a lot more about how audio works in order to know what kind of effect you're applying to the audio. So let's just stay simple with this. And the common things that you wanna do with podcast audio is perhaps make a little bit warmer, perhaps make a little bit louder or quieter. So let's look at those two things. I'm going to go to zoom to project length. That doesn't really matter because what we're gonna do is go to the top-left again and our spanner. Or I guess Americans will call it a wrench. And we're going to look at effects. So tap on Effects. And the first one we're going to look at is the Warm Amplifier. So let's click on Warm Amplifier and you can see it says Warm Amplifier. We can tap on that. And a setting comes down at the bottom and you can see it says Strength. So what a Warm Amplifier does is make you sound a little bit like a radio host. Be forewarned: too much of this (as I've done in the past) can make you sound a little bit too heavy; a little bit too much bass. But let's see what it does to this audio. If you're looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people ... So you can see what it was doing there as I was turning it up and down, the stronger it was, the more bass was introduced. And then if we just keep it at normal, then it's just the audio track with a lot more tonal variety. Perhaps we want to find a little balance between the two. If you press Done, that applies it to the audio. I just warmed it up a touch. So that was tackling basic effects, warming up your voice. Now let's move on to the next lesson. 8. Add chapters: Well, I hope you're enjoying the course so far. I can't wait to see what you've come up with. Should be a nice short clip. In this lesson, we're going to look at chapters. If your audio is sort of like a podcast length, maybe 20 to 30 minutes, it's good idea to break things up. So in this lesson, I'm going to show you how to add chapters. It's also a nice mark of quality if you can do that because it means you've taken the time to look at the story, look at the narrative of the audio and help your listeners find what they want to find within that show. Even though we're only dealing with a very short audio clip, let's find out how to add chapters, let's find out how to edit them, and how to splice one in. Okay, so looking at the chapters now. So in order to add chapters, if you can see, we can see the whole section here. Now these are our split points. So let's use this one. You can see these are all our split points. They're not necessarily chapter points. If you want to find chapter points, the best thing to do is, again, listen to your whole audio. You may be working with a 30-minute podcast, so have a really good listen through it and then find those bits that would make sense in terms of the story, the narrative, interesting things that your guest has said, for instance. Here, we're just working with a very quick, rough and ready clip for me to show you how to do some basic things in Ferrite. But if I wanted to, I could say, well, let's see ... Let's play this bit ... skills I have acquired over a very long career. So this is my skills chapter. I'm just gonna say, let's have a chapter point there. So if you can see down at the bottom, you have the 123 with a little 't' on it. So I'm going to click that and say "Insert Chapter" point. So right here I'm going to call it skills. You've got room here to make a sentence if you want. So there's skills. That's my first chapter. Let's move this on a point. Let's have another chapter ... what's this bit here? That'll be the end of it. I will not look for you. I will not look for you. So let's put a chapter point in here. So let's go here. I will not – Oops! – look for you. So you can see we've already got one chapter, two chapters. That's just arbitrarily put ... Whoops! My finger's going nuts. Move the point there, and let's just add another chapter, just for the hell of it. Near the end. Insert. So for reviewing purposes, let's have a look at what we've done with our three chapters here. So if we go down to the bottom again and you can see 1, 2, 3. Click on that. And you can see, you can have a look now at the chapters that you've created. Number one: skills. Number two: I will not look for you. Number 3: Near the end. And you can see that it says at 12 seconds, at 18 seconds, at 21 seconds. "Lock to Timeline" means it will lock to the timeline! Literally, those points will stay exactly where they are. If you "Link to Audio", then if you were to move the audio any point, the chapter moves with the audio. So it's a nice little hint to remember there. If you press the 'i' next to skills, for instance, you can see some more information. This is where you can actually say "Include in Table of Contents" – that's on by default. Leave it on. And then you can see you have a section for putting in some artwork. So you can actually have a nice little image for each chapter of your podcast or your audio, or whatever you're trying to create. Just as a final thing to remember about chapters, you can actually add one from this MP3 Chapters section yourself. If you go to the top-right corner, you can see there's a plus button. Tap the Plus button, and you can see it's created a new chapter for us at the point where the play head is right now. Let me undo that. Undo. Let's move the play head, for instance to there, which is in between 1 and 2, and I'll show you what happens. Bring up the MP3 Chapters section again from the bottom, add a plus. It's actually created a new second chapter and it's pushed number 2 to number 3, and number 3, which is now number 4. It's a great way of automatically adjusting the chapters for you, the order of the chapters. And then you can do the same again. So you can go to the 'i' and you can rename that if you want: Arbitrary Chapter. And there we are, Arbitrary Chapter at 15 seconds. This is great for if you have a podcast, like I said, with lots of interesting points that your audience can then go to from within their podcast player. So we're nearing the end of the course now, I hope you've had fun so far. In the next lesson, we're going to start looking at wrapping things up and heading towards the final mix. 9. Mix, archive and share: So, we're on Lesson 8 already, and in this lesson we're going to look at final mixing. If you have the pro version of Ferrite and you've been working along with me, we're going to have a look at post-production, which means looking at auto levelling and how our audio sounds at the end of the project. We're also going to look at the Project Info and the settings, as well as archiving. And then we're going to save the final piece of audio to a hard drive. OK, let's take a look at the Final Mix section. So if you go to Final Mix just below the single track, click on that. You can adjust Effects, Automation, you can look at Ducking settings, you can Rearrange your tracks. If you're working on the pro version of Ferrite, as I am, you can also see Auto-Levelling. The Final Mix section is where all of your tracks come together. It doesn't really apply for your single track of audio in this very basic course, but you may find post-production quite handy. Let's take a look at that right now. In Auto-levelling, it's basically analysing your whole track of audio. Or if you have multiple tracks, it will analyse all of it. It will look at the loud bits and make them a little bit quieter. It will look at the quieter bits and make them a little bit louder. How much it does each of those things depends on the setting that you apply. And as you can see here, you can set it to Regular or quite Strong. Basically, you're asking Ferrite to apply a degree of strength to your Auto-Levelling. I always keep it Off because I prefer to do my post-production levelling in a separate area – separate software. But if you're keeping things simple and just starting your podcast journey, this is a perfect way of finding that balance between the loud bits and the quiet bits, and making sure your audio output is nice and smooth. Let's come out of there now. Go down to the bottom-left: on the tick. Takes you right back to the Library. And this is where you can see information such as ... here's your file. Let's press on the 'i' and then you can see the Project Info. So here you can see when it was created, 18th of October. Today's the 10th of November. You can see how long it's taken me to put these videos together! You can see the length of my audio 24.9 seconds, and the audio used. If I click on the arrow, it says I used the "Neeson" audio clip. If we go back, you can actually change the title if you want to. I often call it "master" – "Neeson Master" now, so I know that's the master file. And then, in Export Format you can see it says Mono 96 kbps CBR MP3. It's all jargon. Basically, that's my setting for speech-only podcast audio. A stereo track can take up more space, whereas mono brings everything together. It doesn't really matter if it's not stereo, unless you want to keep that very, very high quality. If you click on that, that's where you can change it. So you can see you have all of these different formats such as Lossy, Lossy MP3, Lossless, and Uncompressed Wave file. I use the MP3. If you click on that, you have even more options. Mono, stereo. And do you know what, you don't need to know all of these things for a very basic understanding of audio. Dig deeper into that when you're a little bit further down the road. For now, understand this: That 128 on this scale is about CD quality (if you can remember compact discs). 96 is pretty good. Then you have constant bit rate and variable bit rate. Just keep it at CBR. Then you can choose whether to do Mono or Stereo. And I choose Mono. So that's my output. I can head back. I can add my name if I want to. I can copyright – put some copyright info in there. I can put a genre in there. Each time you're filling in this metadata, it's going to carry over so that when you upload it to the likes of Apple or Spotify, it will have that genre in there. Just going to put "podcast" in there. You can set a link to your website if you want to. You can put tags in there. This is ... what shall I call this? Film. It didn't add it because ... there we go ... film. I didn't press Enter. And then you can put some notes in there: Show Notes or Lyrics, pretty handy. And then you can add some artwork as well. And that's where you can put the artwork for your, for your podcast, right in that space and it will carry over to the metadata. OK, what I want to show you now on the Project Info is the top-left. So you can see it's the spanner (the wrench). Click on that. You see we have some more options. We can make an archive file. I do this every time. Every show that I make is archived, every episode is archived. Now what that does, it takes everything that you've worked on: the project file, all of the individual pieces of audio that you've used to put the whole thing together, music, sound effects, whatever, and creates a file. An archive file. And all of those things will be in there. I recommend you use that if you want to keep a backup for all of your shows. There you go: I've made an archive and it's actually put it here for me, "Neeson – Edit (Archive)." And all I have to do is then share that wherever I want. So let's go back to our project settings for the original "Neeson". Back to the spanner. You can see that I can also make a template. A template is quite handy if you want to reuse the format, the infrastructure for your podcast, and you want to use it again and again without necessarily having to recreate everything that you've put into that podcast, such as your theme music, sound effects, or idents and things like that. When you're ready to share, here are your options. So let's press Done on that. Happy with that. Going to now press the square with the arrow. You can see these are my sharing options now. So I can AirDrop this wherever I want. I can message it to someone, email it, put it in Craft, which is something I use. You can see all of these things on the Apple share sheet. But you can also copy the file, save it to the Ferrite Library, which basically puts the audio you've made – your edited audio – and puts it right back in the Library so you can use it elsewhere. You can duplicate it, which I prefer doing rather than making a template. Here, you can also Make Archive, Share Archive, Make Template, Convert to Mono. You can do so many things. But what I like to do in this instance, is I like to Save to Files. You can also save it to Dropbox or wherever you like to save your files. Let's click on Save to Files. Did you see it said "Preparing Audio" very, very quick because I think it said this was 20-something seconds of audio. It's sometimes a little bit slower depending on how long your podcast is. Let's choose Documents folder, "Neeson – Edit", and Save. Let's go over to the Files folder, and there we have "Neeson – Edit". You can see it's only 300 kilobytes because it is so small. Let's have a listen. I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you're looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do ... And there we are. There's our upload for the world on Spotify or Apple. Wherever you want to put your file. I invite you to share it with me in the Skillshare project setting, so that I can have a listen and offer feedback if I need to. 10. Conclusion: So in this basic course, we've produced a short audio file. We've done a lot together. We've actually used the recording function. We've done the import tools, the Ferrite library, the timeline. We've made edits. We did crossfades, ripple deletes, we stripped silence. We tightened audio clips. We added warming effects to our voice. What else did we do? We added chapters. And finally we shared to an external hard drive. We've covered a lot together. Sharing your audio with me was entirely optional. But if you have something to share, then great. If you have questions as well, I'll try to answer them quickly and clearly because I want you to become a podcast pro. Perhaps you're already a professional podcast producer looking to take your game mobile. And which case, I hope I've inspired you to pick up your iPad and give it a whirl. So thank you for watching my first Skillshare video. There's so much I want to share with you guys out there. I've been a professional podcaster and copywriter for many years. I want you to know what I know so you can take your game to the next level. After all, it's why I'm a Skillshare student too! See you again very soon.