Two Paths To Podcasting Leaves No Middle Ground

The future comes at every industry hard, including podcasting. Should you learn bleeding-edge skills you hope will emerge in the future or relevant-now skills you hope will stay relevant in the future?

Hello, and welcome to another Podcast Pontifications with me, Evo Terra.

Overall, I'm pretty optimistic about the future. I truly believe that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice. It's a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. I have that same feeling, that same progressive, if you will, or advancing view, even better, of podcasting. Podcasting is getting better. Not just on its own because, but because we're helping, because of our help. We're the ones driving podcasting forward.

But it's not just us. Assisting in that are these continued advancements in technology. Many of those are AI, machine learning neural nets, and some other weird sorts of advanced computing that we barely understand that is emerging out onto the scene. Podcasting benefits from all those advances in digital processing power, from hosting services, to listening apps, to even the software and hardware that you and I use to bring our creations to our listeners' ears. There's no doubt that the process of making a podcast today is easier and the experience better than it ever has been in the past.

Barring any rogue space rocks that have us in their cross hairs, or the omega variant, who knows, wiping us all out completely, we're going to keep riding that train, and the process will get easier and the experience better for us podcasters. But predicting how that ease and betterment will manifest itself is far from an exact science.

For the past few years, I've been making the bold statement that podcasters like you and me, who've been at this for a while, will be the last generation of podcasters to use DAWs - digital audio workstations, like Hindenburg Pro, Reaper, Audition, even Audacity, all of those are at the center of our creation processes today. But the next generation, I think they'll have a completely different approach. I think they'll be using text-based editing tools like Descript, for example, and put that at the center of their creation process.

I still stand by that assertion, but what I'm worried about is the middle ground between the two. And by worried, I mean, I don't think there is one.

But before I explain that, during my Long Winter's Nap of 2021, I decided to take the plunge, if you will, and really go all-in with this new text-based paradigm of editing content for one of my clients, specifically. We already had been using Descript's transcript feature as a part of the editorial process, not just to make the transcript, but actually to remove content from within her longer form interviews. She and I were collaborating on doing this. As we make her episodes, Descript was a part of that.

So it would make sense for me to start there. I would just move all of the engineering work that I would do after the editorial work, all that engineering work I would just do within Descript. My goal was really to retrain myself there, acquire the necessary skills to use that new paradigm, and then shift more production work over to that system. All of it, if it made sense, including this, Podcast Pontifications. Because you know me, I love the future and I've gotta put my money, or I guess my time in this case, where my mouth is.

So during that test, I produced three different episodes of my client's show in that new style, 100% inside of the new tool. And I am very happy to say that the episodes that I produced sounded great. I honestly cannot tell a difference in the sound quality between an episode that I fully produced in my DAW, Hindenburg Pro, or another episode I produced completely in Descript. And that's great!

Also, the experience proved to me what I thought all along, that this really will be the way that the next generation of podcasters make content. But you might remember I said that I stopped after three episodes, or I only produced three episodes, and that's true. I certainly have not switched the production process of Podcast Pontifications. Hindie is still my jam.

Which brings me back to the assertion that there isn't much of a middle ground here. I had thought, naively, that the experience was going to give me two vastly different approaches in my toolkit, which would then allow me to choose which path would be the most optimal for the job at hand. But it didn't work out that way. And I think it didn't work out that way because my brain is really hard-wired to work with waveforms. But that's a recent acquisition, actually. My brain had already made a paradigm shift long ago when I started working with waveforms about seventeen years ago in podcasting.

Prior to that, I was editing audio with nothing more than studio monitors and a razorblade. I didn't even see a waveform. So, I've already changed once. But, arguably, my brain's not nearly as flexible now as it was then thanks to biology, not anything else.

But look, my problem is not everyone's problem. If you're relatively new to podcasting and have a relatively young brain, or you have people on your team who are new and also have relatively young brains, I think the switch away from a DAW to a text-based editor is going to be easier. I'm still betting on the long form, on the long game, whatever I'm trying to say, on tools like Descript.

And no, this is not a sponsored message for Descript. Just giving you my honest opinion of how things have been going.

I still think that approach, text-based, is going to be the dominant way that podcasts are made in the future. How far away that future is is rather questionable. And the good news is that us old dogs, if you will, who have mad DAW skills, we're not going to be displaced by this anytime real soon. Again, the output can, and oftentimes does, sound the same. But as long as we keep making great audio, which makes all of podcasting better, we'll still be fine.

With that, I shall be back on Monday with yet another Podcast Pontifications.

Cheers!

Podcast Pontifications is written and narrated by Evo Terra. He's on a mission to make podcasting better. Links to everything mentioned in today's episode are in the notes section of your podcast listening app. A written-to-be-read article based on today's episode is available at podcastpontifications.com where you'll also find a video version and a corrected transcript, both created by Allie Press. Podcast Pontifications is a production of Simpler Media. Find out more at Simpler.Media.

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