On doing cheap audio for your newsletter:

I thought it might be useful to others to share my process for recording audio for my newsletters.

Since the start of the year I’ve aimed to include voiceover audio with my main newsletters. I wasn’t sure it would be possible given the timeframes, but so far so good.

It should be noted that I’m not an audio engineer and I’m not aiming for BBC Radio-quality results. I want it to be decent quality, but it’s very much a home-made endeavour. That’s also what makes it logistically possible.

So, the tech and process:

1. A laptop. I use a tiny Microsoft Surface thing, but any modern laptop will do. Even something a bit old should be fine, TBH. The reason a laptop is useful is that you can go to any room in your house to find a quiet spot, and laptops don’t tend to have intrusive fan noise like a desktop machine.

2. I use a Sennheiser Profile mic. It was about £110, which isn’t nothing but also isn’t a mjillion quid like some microphones. After doing some research, this seemed to be the sweet spot for affordable-while-still-sounding-great. It’s a USB-C mic, which connects to my laptop easily, you don’t need drivers or any faffing about. It’s directional, so it reduces unwanted noise from elsewhere in the room. It is resistant to audio pops, so I hardly have to do any clean-up.

3. Find a quiet room. Pay particular attention to background noise that your brain filters out - fridges, heating, electrical hums, background traffic etc. Try to find a space that has natural padding, like soft furnishings or books. This will absorb sound in a nice way and prevent reverb and an echoey sound. At the same time, don’t stress too much: birds tweeting outside or the occasional car isn’t a big deal on a lo-fi homemade thing, as long as the voice quality remains really good.

4. I record and edit in Audacity. This is free, open source audio software. It’s a bit clunky but gets the job done. Again: it is free.

5. I always record some ‘silence’ at the start before I talk. This makes it easy to apply noise removal and get rid of unwanted BG ambience.

6. While recording, if I make a mistake I simply stop, leave a 5 second gap, then repeat and carry on. The gap then makes it really easy to spot the mistake in the waveform while editing, so I can tidy it up.

7. I do very basic clean-up: a noise removal to get rid of any mic noise or background fuzz; a normalise tp bring up the volume; a limiter to reduce the dynamic range (louder bits get quieter, quieter bits get louder), then another normalise.

8. I then export the audio out and upload it straight to Substack.

Crucially, for a ~1,200 word article, which works out to about 10 minutes of audio, I can do the entire recording, editing and uploading in under 30 minutes.

Anyway: you don’t have to do audio, obviously. But it does potentially help to make your work available to new audiences, or at more times (e.g. people can suddenly listen while commuting/cooking/cleaning/etc). It’s good for accessibility. The Substack app has a dedicated ‘media’ tab, too, so it’s an extra layer of visibility.

Point is, you can do perfectly good enough audio very cheaply, and without it consuming your entire day’s productivity.

Hope that’s helpful!