Multitrack session for an episode of The Teacher Leader Podcast, with separate tracks for each host, the guest, music, and a mid-roll ad.

The Teacher Leader Podcast is a discussion show for educators, hosted by three retired teachers and featuring a working teacher as a guest in each episode. It’s the flagship project of The Teacher Leader Press, and my job is to take what four people said in a real conversation and turn it into something people will actually listen to all the way through.

The hosts record on Zoom and send me the audio files. A recorded conversation can be messy. Someone’s microphone picks up room tone, everyone says “um,” and now and then two or more people speak at once. The hosts and their guest do not notice any of it while they are talking. But a listener has only the audio. Nothing else is competing for their attention, so every flaw is easier to hear.

I run the audio through Adobe Podcast first to reduce echo and background noise. Then I edit in Adobe Audition: cutting filler words and verbal stumbles, and adjusting levels where voices overlap so nobody gets buried. I add effects to give the voices more body, and check that levels sit between -12 and -6 dB: loud enough to hear on earbuds or in a car, with enough headroom that a laugh or a raised voice does not clip.

After the edit, I transcribe the episode in Descript and work from the transcript to draft an episode summary and a set of title options for the hosts to choose from. Once an episode is approved, I publish it to Podbean, which creates the show’s RSS feed. When I set up the show in Podbean, I submitted that feed to major podcast directories like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Now every new episode I post updates automatically across all the connected apps. I also set up podcast.theteacherleader.org as the show’s own address, so it lives under The Teacher Leader Press’s own domain rather than a Podbean URL.