Podcast and Spoken-Word Audio

How to record a podcast in REAPER, start to finish

By StudioRescue Editorial

Published August 11, 2026 · Updated September 11, 2026

If you already have REAPER and a microphone, you have everything you need to make a finished podcast. The part that trips people up is not any single button, it is not knowing the order of operations, so the session turns into a mess of half-edited clips with no clear path to a published file. This walkthrough gives you that order: what to do first, what to leave until last, and where each step can go deeper if you need it.

Treat it as a map rather than a script. Solo shows, co-hosted shows in one room, and remote interviews all follow the same six stages. The details of the recording stage change with your setup, and there are dedicated guides linked below for each, but the overall flow does not change.

Before you start: what you actually need

Keep the gear list short. You need REAPER, a microphone your computer can see, and headphones so you are not recording your own speakers back into the mic. A USB microphone works for a solo show. For two or more people in the same room you will want an audio interface with enough inputs, because a computer talks to one audio device at a time and two separate USB mics usually will not run together.

The single biggest quality decision happens before any plugin: record in a quiet, soft room, close to the mic, at a sensible level. Nothing in post fixes a bad room as well as not capturing it in the first place.

Step 1: Set up the session

Step 2: Record the episode

Press the transport Record button, or Ctrl+R, and start talking. Watch the meters so you can see everyone is coming through and no one is clipping. A few habits make the rest of the process far easier:

• Record a few seconds of silence at the top, before anyone speaks. That clean room tone is what a noise reducer needs later.
• Leave a clear marker for mistakes. A clap or a short pause before a retake gives you an obvious spot to find and cut.
• Save early and save often with Ctrl+S. REAPER also keeps automatic backups, but a manual save before you stop recording is cheap insurance.

If you are recording a remote guest, the cleanest results come from each person recording their own microphone locally and sending you the file afterward, rather than capturing the compressed call audio. When you can only work from the call recording, plan to repair it later.

Step 3: Edit with ripple editing

Editing a podcast is mostly subtraction: cut the false starts, the long pauses, the tangents, and the dead air. The tool that keeps this sane across multiple tracks is ripple editing.

With Ripple editing all tracks turned on, when you delete a section on one track, everything to the right on every track slides left to close the gap, so your host and guest stay in sync. Without it, cutting one track pushes it out of alignment with the others. Split a clip with S, select the part you do not want, delete it, and the timeline tightens up automatically.

Do not over-edit. Removing every breath and gap makes speech sound unnatural and robotic. Cut the mistakes and the genuinely dead stretches, and leave the normal rhythm of conversation alone. A deeper walkthrough of fast multitrack editing is linked in the sources below.

Step 4: Clean up the sound

Now, and only now, reach for plugins. Work in a sensible order on each voice track:

• High-pass the rumble. A gentle high-pass around 80 to 100 Hz with ReaEQ removes low-end that carries no useful speech.
• Reduce steady background noise. Use that room-tone clip you recorded to build a profile with ReaFIR in Subtract mode, then subtract it. Go light, since heavy reduction adds a watery artifact.
• Even out the level. A light touch of ReaComp, aiming for a few dB of gain reduction on the loudest phrases, keeps a voice from jumping between too quiet and too loud.

Step 5: Add music, if you want it

Intro and outro music is optional, and a clean spoken episode needs none. If you do add it, drop the music on its own track, and where it plays under talking, lower the music so the voice stays clearly on top. Bringing the music down under speech and back up in the gaps is called ducking, and even doing it by hand with a couple of volume points sounds fine. Use music you have the rights to use. For both stock methods laid out step by step, hand-drawn volume automation and hands-off ReaComp sidechain ducking, work through how to add intro music and duck it under your voice in REAPER.

Step 6: Level the episode and export

The last step is to get the whole episode to a consistent loudness and render a file. Most podcast platforms expect an integrated loudness of about -16 LUFS with true peaks staying under -1 dBTP, measured the way the ITU-R BS.1770 standard describes. That target keeps your show at a comfortable, even volume next to everyone else's.

1. Measure first. REAPER can show integrated LUFS and true peak, so check where the mix currently sits before changing anything.
2. Adjust to the target. Move the master level so the integrated reading lands near -16 LUFS, and make sure true peak stays under -1 dBTP.
3. Render. Open File → Render, choose MP3 (a common podcast format), and export. REAPER can also apply loudness normalization on render if you prefer to set the target there.

What this workflow will not do

Knowing the limits up front saves a lot of wasted time in post.

• It will not rescue a bad recording room. Echo and hollow, boxy sound get baked into the take, and plugins only reduce them so far. A soft, quiet space beats any repair.
• It will not undo internet call compression. Audio captured from a video call is already degraded, which is why local recording per person is worth the effort.
• It will not make a thin USB-mic voice sound like a studio. Cleanup and leveling help, but the microphone and the room set the ceiling.
• It is not an automatic filler-word or silence remover on its own. REAPER can be scripted for that, but the basic workflow above is manual editing. For the fastest stock approach, see how to edit out filler words and breaths in REAPER.

If something is not working

A quick order to check when a step goes wrong:

1. No sound coming in? Confirm the track input is set to the right mono channel, the track is record-armed, and input monitoring is on.
2. Recording only plays in one ear, or came out in mono? One voice landed on a single channel, usually because a mono mic was captured on a stereo track. Here is how to fix a podcast recorded in mono or on one channel in REAPER.
3. Delay in your headphones while recording? That is monitoring latency, a buffer-size and driver issue, not a recording fault. Lower the audio block size or use your interface's own direct monitoring.
4. Clips drifting out of sync when you edit? Ripple editing is either off when you want it, or on when you do not. Check the toolbar mode.
5. Recording a video podcast and the voices drift away from the picture? That is a video sync problem rather than an audio fault, and the usual cause is variable frame rate footage. Work through how to fix audio that is out of sync with video in REAPER.
6. Episode sounds quiet or uneven after export? Re-check the integrated LUFS reading against the -16 LUFS target and level the master, rather than pushing individual tracks louder.