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How to remove ums and ahs from a podcast

Everyone says um. The trouble is finding every one of them in an hour of audio, cutting it cleanly and not making the conversation sound chopped up. Here's how to get it done without scrubbing through a waveform.

Why it takes so long by hand

Cutting filler words the old way means listening to the whole episode, spotting each um, zooming in, trimming it and checking it doesn't clip the next word. A one hour conversation can have hundreds of them, plus the false starts, the repeated words and the long pauses while someone thinks.

That's hours of work before you've even started on the parts of the edit that actually need a human.

How Edit The Pod does it

Upload your episode and Edit The Pod transcribes it, finds the filler words, false starts, repeats and long gaps, and cuts them for you. It reads the conversation as a whole, so it knows the difference between an um that's just noise and a pause that's doing a job.

By the time you open the episode the cuts are already made. On a one hour video episode that's usually somewhere between 300 and 1,200 of them.

Step by step

  1. Open the Podloader and drop your recording into Podcast audio / video. Audio or video both work: MP3, WAV, M4A, MP4 and MOV all go straight in.
  2. Click Upload and process. Once the upload's finished you can close the page. You'll get an email when the episode's ready.
  3. Open the episode. Every automatic cut shows up as crossed out words in the transcript, so you can see exactly what came out.
  4. Read through. If a cut went too far, select the words and choose Restore skipped text, or right-click the crossed out words.
  5. Spot one it missed? Select the words and choose Skip. The audio (and the video) goes with them.
  6. Click Export when you're happy.

Good to know

  • Nothing's thrown away. A crossed out word can always come back.
  • You can drag the edge of any cut in the timeline to tighten or loosen it, and each cut has a small fade handle.
  • Choose Yes on Learn from this episode when you export and the auto edit leans further towards the way you like to cut next time.
  • It's about 90% of the work done for you. You still get the final say on every cut.

Upload an episode and see the edit already done when you open it. Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial. Start your free trial. Or try the demo first, no signup needed. Everything in Learn.