In this brief tutorial I'm going to show you how to create your own podcast by using a multitrack session template, which is going to allow you to easily record your own voice, add music and export to one of the popular podcast formats all directly from within Adobe Audition CC.

So the first thing we're going to do to get started is create the new multitrack session. So let's go up to the File menu and choose File, New, Multitrack Session... When I do this the first thing I'm going to do is give it a name, I'll call this Jasons Podcast. Choose the Folder Location, and then we're actually going to choose the template called Podcast. It'll automatically select the chosen Sample Rate and Bit Depth for you.

Click OK on this and this brings you directly into the multitrack view. And what you'll notice on the four tracks displayed here is that it's already even labeled all the individual tracks, Host, Interview, Sound FX and Music Bed. So now we basically got the setup for a very common podcast workflow.

Now at this point before we begin recording, we need to actually set our input devices, make sure that we're using the correct device to record our voice. So you can access these settings by going up to the Adobe Audition CC menu under Preferences, Audio Hardware... In Windows you'll find this under the Edit menu.

Now for this particular recording I'm using my Focusrite Thunderbolt device. You can see that I've got a couple of different options in here. Now if you don't have an external recording device you can of course use your built-in microphone or a plugged in device or an USB device. Basically just choose whatever you most commonly use on your machine to do your recording here - for both the Input and the Output. It will automatically choose based on those settings what it's using for its Master Clock, and you're basically ready to go at this point. So let's go ahead and click OK here.

And we're going to navigate to this little field here: Inputs/Outputs at the very top left of the track headers, because we want to make sure that we're going into the correct input. So this little arrow that you see here represents the input selection. So let's go over here, click on this, and because I'm recording into a mono single channel microphone signal I'm going to choose Mono, and this happens to be on my device input number 6. I'll choose this. Let's go ahead and grab this little portion bar So I can expand the track a bit. Because now I want to be able to monitor and actually see my recording level. You can do that by from with inside the track headers first choosing R to enable the track for recording, and if you actually want to live monitor what it is that you're recording, you can click OK. So now that we have the recording button enabled basically now we are ready to go.

So let's go down to our recording controls over at the bottom here. I'm simply going to click Record, and I'll give myself a little intro for this podcast. "Hi this is Jason Levine, and welcome to my how to create a podcast series in Adobe Audition CC 2017." Alright and it's as simple as that! We just made a recording.

Now let's take this out of record mode and I briefly want to bounce over to the fx tab here. Because you may have noticed that there were already effects applied to each of these tracks. And in this case we actually have the Speech Volume Leveler applied.

If we want to see what sort of settings are being used here we can double click on this and this will reveal the actual Target Volume Level, how much Leveling it's actually doing, and the Target Dynamic Range. And again these are the defaults already built into the Preset. So let's go ahead and click this.

Wind back and let's take a quick listen. "Hi this is Jason Levine, and welcome to my how to create a podcast series in Adobe Audition CC 2017. " Ok, very cool.

So at this point now we actually want to add our music. Well, I happen to have a Music Bed that I've already loaded up. So I'm going to take this file from the files panel, drag it into the Music Bed track and now play them together. Now you'll notice that there's a Hard Limiter applied to that Music Bed. And again, we can expand this just to see a little bit more of what's happening there.

If I double-click on the Hard Limiter, this is showing me that this is allowing this music to peak it -0.1 dB. Now it's not giving it any input boost, but the key here and the thing that I want you to understand is that this music might be a little loud. So we may need to make some volume adjustments before we actually export this for our podcast.

So let's first just play it back as it is and take a listen and hear what it sounds like, and then if necessary, we can simply attenuate or drop the volume by adjusting the volume right here on the track. Let's take a quick listen and I'll actually make the adjustment if need be as it's playing back. Here we go. "Hi this is Jason Levine, and welcome to my how to create a podcast series in Adobe Audition CC 2017. " Okay. Sounds pretty good actually.

And you see I just dropped that around 6.9 dB. Now this is a very simple implementation. And if we had another additional speaker or someone else that we were interviewing we would go back to our Inputs/Outputs, we would set the appropriate input of wherever their microphone is located and we could begin recording them as well.

You can naturally record multiple tracks simultaneously from multiple inputs simultaneously. And your Sound FX here this is where you'd start to add the kinds of sound effects and sound design that you typically hear in well produced podcasts.

Now one other thing that I want to point out that can really help you when you're trying to really make this sound professional is something known as topping and tailing or more importantly fading in and fading out wherever there's silence. So at the top of the clip that you see inside of the track here you'll see that we have these little icons. These are actually fade handles. And if I grab this with my mouse, you'll see that you have the ability non-destructively to create a fade right on this clip. So it's going to fade in right before I start talking and then it'll fade to silence right after I stopped talking. And this just kind of keeps things a little bit cleaner and a little bit nicer.

Now, because this music goes a little bit longer, maybe we want to adjust the duration and let it kind of fade out a bit more gradually. So I'm simply going to grab the rightmost edge here and drag it to around, let's say around 12 seconds or maybe a little bit shorter here because ultimately I want this music to fade out. So once again, I can grab this handle here and you can see, you can go for something very linear to something a bit more sinusoidal very, very quickly, something like this fade out the music.

Let's go ahead and wind this back and hit play again. "Hi this is Jason Levine, and welcome to my how to create a podcast series in Adobe Audition CC 2017. " Alright. Very simple. Very, very easy.

So at this point now, I will go ahead and save this. I'll save the changes that I just made by going up to File, Save. And now we have the ability to export this.

So the first thing that you'll do before you create the file that you're going to sort of upload for your podcast, we first need to combine all of these tracks and that process is known as performing a mixdown. So from the File menu, we'll go to File, Export, Multitrack Mixdown, Entire Session... Once again it'll ask us for a name. We can place this on the desktop, and we can choose the format that we want to export into.

Now if you're happy with your mix and you're ready to make this podcast ready, we have multiple formats that you can export into. The most common would be MP3 Audio (*.mp3) . And you'll see if you go to the bottom of the list here we can choose *.mp3. And if we go into our Format Settings, here's where you can vary whether you're using Constant bit rate or Variable bit rate and all of the available bit rates to you.

Now for most podcasts typically you'll want this in something like 256 Kbps. I often see a lot of people exporting them at 160 Kbps. Keep in mind that if you're exporting in stereo 160 Kbps *.mp3 technically means 80 Kbps per channel. So if you go much below that you're going to start to hear some of those phazy and unpleasant artifacts that you can encounter with lower bitrate *.mp3. So find out what your provider requires and then you can choose the bitrate accordingly.

Additionally, if you want to go into one of the more standard m4a file formats you'll find those here under the Apple Audio Toolbox. And what you're actually going to look for - let's go into our Format Settings here under Change, for File Type we're simply going to choose Apple MPEG-4 Audio or AudioBooks. Either one of those will work.

Under Format you'll see that we have the ability to choose AAC or even MPEG-4 HE AAC. In this case we can just leave it at the default. And then you have the option to choose Constant Bitrate, Long-Term Average Bitrate, Variable or Variable Bitrate (Constrained). Again, you can find out the attributes that your provider requires on their sites. And then choose the appropriate bit rate for Export.

Now one thing that I would recommend as a power user is not to export directly into a compressed file format. I'd like to keep a backup of a master uncompressed wav-file. And that is in fact the default file format that this will create. So let's go back to Wave PCM. Choose this - again we'll place it on the desktop we'll leave it at 44.100 Hz Stereo, 32-bit for now. Go ahead and click OK on this. It performs a very quick mixdown. And now you'll see that mixdown over here in the Files panel.

So this is just a good way to kind of verify that you have a master uncompressed file. And this is something that you can archive and you know that this is of the highest quality.

And let's just play this back real quickly. "Hi this is Jason Levine, and welcome to my How to create a podcast series in Adobe Audition CC 2017."

Now one last thing you'll want to do before you export your final file is add some metadata. And if you don't already have the metadata panel exposed you can find it under the Window menu, Metadata. Now I happen to have mine docked off on the left side here.

Let's go back over to my Metadata panel and here's where you can simply add those ID3v2 tags that you're familiar with whenever you've created previous *.mp3's. Title, Artist, Album, Comments, Genre. All of that information will populate this file. So when you export as *.mp3 or *.m4a all that rich metadata lives with the file as well.

So now if we like this, and this is exactly what we want to deliver this is finished, we can go up to File, Export, File... And now we'll choose *.mp3 or if we wanted to go to that *.m4a file format. Let's choose over here. We'll go into format settings and let's choose Apple MPEG-4 Audio, AAC, let's maybe up the bitrate to 160.00 Kbps. Click OK there. You'll see now you're creating an *.m4a file. Click OK on this. It exports the *.m4a, and you're done.

So very quickly we were able to create a multitrack session using the podcast template, record our voices and select our input devices, add a music bed, add non-destructive fades, export the mixdown bringing the master wave file into the waveform view, and then from there exporting to the chosen or appropriate file format whether it's *.mp3, *.m4a or any of the other supported inside of Adobe Audition CC to create an awesome sounding podcast recording.