Mix stereo down to mono if it’s not a mono recording
Loudness Normalization to -16LUFS
Find 10s of silence to grab noise profile and do noise reduction
Noise Reduction (dB): 14
Sensitivity: 7.00
Frequency Smoothing (bands): 4
(Check) Reduce
Clip Fix
Threshold of Clipping (%): 95.0
Reduce amplitude to allow for restored peaks (dB): -5.00
Export back to FLAC, 16-bit, level 5
Create new Ardour project
Import all audio files into Ardour, sample rate 44.1kHz
Align by matching clap markers
Apply Compression to each voice audio track (not music) with custom Podcast preset:
Attack: 10.0ms
Release: 100.0ms
Knee: 2.0dB
Ratio: 6.0
Threshold: -20.0dB
Makeup: 3.0dB
Cut out non-talky bits from each track
Edit the episode content (draw the rest of the owl), adjust individual portion audio levels as needed to prevent ear death of listeners
Adjust EQ of voices as needed, focus on dipping super low (<70Hz) and super high (>9kHz) frequencies and slightly boost the mid ranges depending on the speaker
Line up beginning and end music with appropriate fade, slide in ending easter egg if exists
Export audio:
OGG: Lossy Compression->Ogg Vorbis->Session rate, Normalize loudness to -16.0 LUFS limit to -1.0 dBTP, trim silence at start and end.
MP3: Lossy Compression->MP3->Session rate, Normalize loudness to -16.0 LUFS limit to -1.0 dBTP, trim silence at start and end.
Listen to final output and tweak as needed before publishing