4 ms·

As someone who has personally edited over a hundred 1-2 hour podcasts with a new guest every time removing umms, ahhs, dead air and filler words is soul crushin

by nickjj 5y ago

As someone who has personally edited over a hundred 1-2 hour podcasts with a new guest every time removing umms, ahhs, dead air and filler words is soul crushing. It has gotten to the point where after 2 years of running my podcast[0] I'm seriously considering stopping the show because I'm getting burnt out from editing and without sponsors it's not feasible to hire an editor, but even with the show making no money I would happily pay triple your asking price if I could click a button and have the problem solved in a way that matched a human's ability to edit out filler words. It really is the difference between being able to edit a 1 hour episode in 1 real life hour (editing at 2x speed) vs literally spending 5 hours to edit 1 hour when there's a lot of filler words or ums. That's due to having to stop every few seconds, think about when to cut it and perform the cut. This is using a heavily optimized keyboard shortcut focused workflow too. I hope you don't mind constructive criticism but in my opinion your "after" version doesn't sound natural. This isn't an attack on your service specifically, because the outcome is the same with all of the automated tools I've tried. I haven't tried them all but I did play with a few of them. For example in your case the pause between "Removing" and "filler" doesn't match the pace of the rest of the sentence and the transition from "very" to "time" has a very hard cut. This is also a 10 word clip that's about 6 seconds. If you listened to a 1 hour podcast episode that was edited like this it would be much more noticeable. There's so many intricate and subtle details around when and what to cut to remove these things in a way where it's not noticeable. Are there any paths moving forward in AI / ML that can lead to this being indistinguishable from being humanly edited? I debated deleting this comment before posting it because it's a combination of feedback but also saying the service isn't something I would buy in its current state but I'd like to think it's more beneficial to post this to show there is a real demand for this service if it can be executed flawlessly. [0]: https://runninginproduction.com/ https://runninginproduction.com/

autoencoders 5y ago
The edit on the page is not the best. I agree!. Mainly, if your recording is unnatural (like that one) the edit is also unnatural. However, the tool works better in an interview podcast. I would strongly recommend to just upload a sample, and you would see a big difference. Regarding if ML would be indistinguishable from humanly edit. Hard to tell. I think it will be like self-driving cars in the future. 98% edits good 2% bad edits.
- jffry 5y ago
  This is a super cool product, congratulations. I especially like the extremely clear value proposition on the homepage. I know what this is and who it is for right away. My first impression of the unnatural recording was that it must be that way to make it easier to get a good result, but then the result doesn't sound natural either. I think a lot of this is the drawn out uterrances made the speaker vary their pitch/cadence a lot more than usual. Once edited to remove the gap, the sudden change is very noticeable. I don't think that's due to your software, but just a fact of the unnatural source audio. I think a different, more realistic source audio could let you have a really awesome example, without it being disingenuous or not representative of real-world results. Thanks for jumping into the ring and answering questions in here!
  - autoencoders 5y ago
    Thank you for the suggestion and your impression. I agree, a better example would highlight it better.
moritonal 5y ago
Meta, but your comment was (IMHO) a great example of constructive criticism. Show HN is about that, not just staying silent and letting the users work die.
simonbarker87 5y ago
I’ve not edited anywhere near as much as you have but I agree, it’s so tedious and by the end of an editing session you can really start to resent the guest and all their verbal ticks. I find I get a good idea for what the waveforms look like for some noises and can see them coming and preemptively split the track the start with a decent success rate. Using RiversideFM to get two locally recordings is also a big help. I was sat next to an audio editor and producer at a wedding recently and we got on to this topic and he said “your number one job when editing an interview is to make the host sound good and then just do the minimum on the guest, otherwise you’ll waste too much time”. Doing the kind of editing 8 hours a day I can see why he says that.
- nickjj 5y ago
  Yeah it's weird. I have these in depth technical conversations with every guest where it's great, I love this part. The frequency of verbal ticks and filler content really takes an edit from "this isn't too bad" to "what the fuck am I doing with my life?" all based on how many times you need to remove filler content within the first 5 minutes of editing a 90 minute show. I'm kind of surprised that wedding producer openly said that. My philosophy has always been the opposite. One of my main goals of the show is to make the guest walk away thinking this was the best podcast experience they ever had from start to finish as well as do everything I can to make them come off as good as possible. I rarely cut content but most episodes have hundreds of manual edits to remove filler content and create a more concise flow by removing long pauses because my 2nd main goal is to optimize for the listener. I keep the edits organic at the same time by leaving in some filler content and subtle things like a deep inhale or a sigh because there's a lot of meaning around that when it comes to sentiment and tone, the same can be said for sometimes leaving in an extra 500ms pause to amplify the meaning behind something. At the same time, sometimes filler content gets left in because it flowed too quickly into the next word so cutting it sounds too unnatural as if it clipped. This is why I think it's a crazy hard problem to get a machine to be able to make decisions like this. I do use separate recordings (we each record our track locally), it definitely helps eliminate the few cases where we talk over each other or being able to lower the volume of a laugh so it doesn't overpower what the other person said while still keeping it in because it's a good part of a conversation and a snort or laugh can easily be the difference between a listener wondering if the guest was offended or happily agreeing with something.
dannyeei 5y ago
Funnily enough I was about to start building this then found descript[1]. It transcribes the text and allows you to edit the transcription then export it as audio. [1] https://www.descript.com/ https://www.descript.com/
- userhacker 5y ago
  revoldiv.com has a similar feature set
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
qmmmur 5y ago
What post-processing do you do already to catch the low hanging fruit? Izotope? I reckon putting in 100 hours of editing and not being able to get an hour down to sub an hour means there is something which could be optimised out quite quickly.
- nickjj 5y ago
  > What post-processing do you do already to catch the low hanging fruit? None, everything is manual. I use DaVinci Resolve to do the editing where both the guest and myself have separate tracks. Then I line up the tracks (only takes a few seconds) and start playing things from the beginning at 2x speed. I stop to make cuts mostly to remove filler content. Through out this process of editing I'm also creating show notes as I go. An example of the end result is here https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/103-great-question-makes-it-easy-for-teams-to-perform-customer-research https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/103-great-question-m.... Basically every few minutes I recap what was said into a 1 sentence bullet point with a timestamp. Along the way I list out techs used as tags and list out reference links / libraries into a Markdown document. Then once I'm done editing the show I write a few paragraphs which is a TL;DR of the episode. All in all if the guest uses minimal filler words or noises it takes about 1 real life hour per 1 hour of recorded content to do all of the above. For context, the episode I linked has someone who I would bucket into a category of speaking very fluently with minimal filler content. I was able to blaze through that one. I also have a 2560x1440 display and use the "always on top" feature of most window managers to layer the Markdown document and a preview of the page just above the waveform in DaVinci Resolve so I can quickly make cuts and update the notes with minimal mouse movement. Almost everything is keyboard driven. What tools can be used to speed up that process?
  - qmmmur 5y ago
    It sounds like the show notes are the most costly part I would assume? I imagined you were exhausting yourself on scrubbing through manually and editing little clicks, lip smacks, inhales out slowly. The former is much harder to automate away but the latter is definitely easy with some commercial audio plugins.
jcims 5y ago
Is it possible you’ve set the bar too high for yourself? What if you timebox the editing effort and just focus on the most egregious issues? Certainly you would get more complaints but how much impact would there really be?
- JoeJonathan 5y ago
  It might not make much of a difference with a hobbyist's podcast, but filler/mouth sounds won't fly in professional productions for a variety of reasons (time constraints, professional standards, wanting to make hosts/guests sound good, etc.)
  - jcims 5y ago
    Professional productions also have deadlines and budgets and obsessive grooming won’t fly either. I’m not suggesting no edits, just relaxing things a bit so the burden doesn’t become an existential threat to the podcast.
- nickjj 5y ago
  > Is it possible you’ve set the bar too high for yourself? Probably but I have no way to turn this off and be happy with myself. I try to approach everything I do from the angle of "what needs to be done to make this as good as it can be with my current skill set?". From a listener's perspective if I had to listen to something with a bunch of mouth noises, ums every 3 seconds or long pauses I would end up focusing on that instead of the topics being covered. It would give off a wrong impression that conflicts with my core values.
  - jcims 5y ago
    >Probably but I have no way to turn this off and be happy with myself. I can appreciate this, but... >It has gotten to the point where after 2 years of running my podcast I'm seriously considering *stopping the show* because I'm getting burnt out from editing and without sponsors it's not feasible to hire an editor, but even with the show making no money I would happily pay triple your asking price if I could click a button and have the problem solved in a way that matched a human's ability to edit out filler words. (emphasis mine) I don't think it's actually the case, but extrapolating a list of priorities from this, I can only arrive at the following: Priority #1 - no aahs, umms, slurps or smacks Priority #2 - no ads or obvious sponsors Priority #3 - surfacing hard-won lessons from experienced folks for the world to learn from Maybe that resonates, maybe it doesn't, but to me it seems upside down. I'm only commenting because what you're describing used to be me. I used to do this type of editing for recordings of live audio production and I've gone down the rabbit hole you're describing above. The problem is there's no obvious point of 'done', and chasing perfection in the output can become a pathological obsession. You can get so lost in mating phase angle at each end of a trim or taking an eraser to get rid of a sleeve drag across the desk that you lose sight of the totality of it. Ultimately you end up in a weird uncanny valley, like those folks that keep 'fixing' their face with plastic surgery. Once you get to that point, you can no longer identify specific issues to correct, you just fall into a diffuse unease. For me podcasts are a way to join a conversation that I wouldn't otherwise have an opportunity to listen to. I don't see them as a show or corporate media product, and the more they start moving that direction the less inclined I am to listen to them. Julia Childs had a quote that I've found oddly applicable in this context: 'It's so beautifully arranged on the plate, you know someone's fingers have been all over it.' Hope this doesn't come across as negative. Good luck!
jv22222 5y ago
I use the editing software “descript” and this process (removing ums) takes just a few minutes even for a long show, because you just delete the words in text. They even have a button, remove “ums”. It’s a game changer.

by nickjj 5y ago

autoencoders 5y ago

The edit on the page is not the best. I agree!. Mainly, if your recording is unnatural (like that one) the edit is also unnatural. However, the tool works better in an interview podcast. I would strongly recommend to just upload a sample, and you would see a big difference. Regarding if ML would be indistinguishable from humanly edit. Hard to tell. I think it will be like self-driving cars in the future. 98% edits good 2% bad edits.

jffry 5y ago
This is a super cool product, congratulations. I especially like the extremely clear value proposition on the homepage. I know what this is and who it is for right away. My first impression of the unnatural recording was that it must be that way to make it easier to get a good result, but then the result doesn't sound natural either. I think a lot of this is the drawn out uterrances made the speaker vary their pitch/cadence a lot more than usual. Once edited to remove the gap, the sudden change is very noticeable. I don't think that's due to your software, but just a fact of the unnatural source audio. I think a different, more realistic source audio could let you have a really awesome example, without it being disingenuous or not representative of real-world results. Thanks for jumping into the ring and answering questions in here!
- autoencoders 5y ago
  Thank you for the suggestion and your impression. I agree, a better example would highlight it better.

moritonal 5y ago

Meta, but your comment was (IMHO) a great example of constructive criticism. Show HN is about that, not just staying silent and letting the users work die.

simonbarker87 5y ago

I’ve not edited anywhere near as much as you have but I agree, it’s so tedious and by the end of an editing session you can really start to resent the guest and all their verbal ticks. I find I get a good idea for what the waveforms look like for some noises and can see them coming and preemptively split the track the start with a decent success rate. Using RiversideFM to get two locally recordings is also a big help. I was sat next to an audio editor and producer at a wedding recently and we got on to this topic and he said “your number one job when editing an interview is to make the host sound good and then just do the minimum on the guest, otherwise you’ll waste too much time”. Doing the kind of editing 8 hours a day I can see why he says that.

nickjj 5y ago
Yeah it's weird. I have these in depth technical conversations with every guest where it's great, I love this part. The frequency of verbal ticks and filler content really takes an edit from "this isn't too bad" to "what the fuck am I doing with my life?" all based on how many times you need to remove filler content within the first 5 minutes of editing a 90 minute show. I'm kind of surprised that wedding producer openly said that. My philosophy has always been the opposite. One of my main goals of the show is to make the guest walk away thinking this was the best podcast experience they ever had from start to finish as well as do everything I can to make them come off as good as possible. I rarely cut content but most episodes have hundreds of manual edits to remove filler content and create a more concise flow by removing long pauses because my 2nd main goal is to optimize for the listener. I keep the edits organic at the same time by leaving in some filler content and subtle things like a deep inhale or a sigh because there's a lot of meaning around that when it comes to sentiment and tone, the same can be said for sometimes leaving in an extra 500ms pause to amplify the meaning behind something. At the same time, sometimes filler content gets left in because it flowed too quickly into the next word so cutting it sounds too unnatural as if it clipped. This is why I think it's a crazy hard problem to get a machine to be able to make decisions like this. I do use separate recordings (we each record our track locally), it definitely helps eliminate the few cases where we talk over each other or being able to lower the volume of a laugh so it doesn't overpower what the other person said while still keeping it in because it's a good part of a conversation and a snort or laugh can easily be the difference between a listener wondering if the guest was offended or happily agreeing with something.

dannyeei 5y ago

Funnily enough I was about to start building this then found descript[1]. It transcribes the text and allows you to edit the transcription then export it as audio. [1] https://www.descript.com/ https://www.descript.com/

userhacker 5y ago
revoldiv.com has a similar feature set

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

qmmmur 5y ago

What post-processing do you do already to catch the low hanging fruit? Izotope? I reckon putting in 100 hours of editing and not being able to get an hour down to sub an hour means there is something which could be optimised out quite quickly.

nickjj 5y ago
> What post-processing do you do already to catch the low hanging fruit? None, everything is manual. I use DaVinci Resolve to do the editing where both the guest and myself have separate tracks. Then I line up the tracks (only takes a few seconds) and start playing things from the beginning at 2x speed. I stop to make cuts mostly to remove filler content. Through out this process of editing I'm also creating show notes as I go. An example of the end result is here https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/103-great-question-makes-it-easy-for-teams-to-perform-customer-research https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/103-great-question-m.... Basically every few minutes I recap what was said into a 1 sentence bullet point with a timestamp. Along the way I list out techs used as tags and list out reference links / libraries into a Markdown document. Then once I'm done editing the show I write a few paragraphs which is a TL;DR of the episode. All in all if the guest uses minimal filler words or noises it takes about 1 real life hour per 1 hour of recorded content to do all of the above. For context, the episode I linked has someone who I would bucket into a category of speaking very fluently with minimal filler content. I was able to blaze through that one. I also have a 2560x1440 display and use the "always on top" feature of most window managers to layer the Markdown document and a preview of the page just above the waveform in DaVinci Resolve so I can quickly make cuts and update the notes with minimal mouse movement. Almost everything is keyboard driven. What tools can be used to speed up that process?
- qmmmur 5y ago
  It sounds like the show notes are the most costly part I would assume? I imagined you were exhausting yourself on scrubbing through manually and editing little clicks, lip smacks, inhales out slowly. The former is much harder to automate away but the latter is definitely easy with some commercial audio plugins.

jcims 5y ago

Is it possible you’ve set the bar too high for yourself? What if you timebox the editing effort and just focus on the most egregious issues? Certainly you would get more complaints but how much impact would there really be?

JoeJonathan 5y ago
It might not make much of a difference with a hobbyist's podcast, but filler/mouth sounds won't fly in professional productions for a variety of reasons (time constraints, professional standards, wanting to make hosts/guests sound good, etc.)
- jcims 5y ago
  Professional productions also have deadlines and budgets and obsessive grooming won’t fly either. I’m not suggesting no edits, just relaxing things a bit so the burden doesn’t become an existential threat to the podcast.
nickjj 5y ago
> Is it possible you’ve set the bar too high for yourself? Probably but I have no way to turn this off and be happy with myself. I try to approach everything I do from the angle of "what needs to be done to make this as good as it can be with my current skill set?". From a listener's perspective if I had to listen to something with a bunch of mouth noises, ums every 3 seconds or long pauses I would end up focusing on that instead of the topics being covered. It would give off a wrong impression that conflicts with my core values.
- jcims 5y ago
  >Probably but I have no way to turn this off and be happy with myself. I can appreciate this, but... >It has gotten to the point where after 2 years of running my podcast I'm seriously considering *stopping the show* because I'm getting burnt out from editing and without sponsors it's not feasible to hire an editor, but even with the show making no money I would happily pay triple your asking price if I could click a button and have the problem solved in a way that matched a human's ability to edit out filler words. (emphasis mine) I don't think it's actually the case, but extrapolating a list of priorities from this, I can only arrive at the following: Priority #1 - no aahs, umms, slurps or smacks Priority #2 - no ads or obvious sponsors Priority #3 - surfacing hard-won lessons from experienced folks for the world to learn from Maybe that resonates, maybe it doesn't, but to me it seems upside down. I'm only commenting because what you're describing used to be me. I used to do this type of editing for recordings of live audio production and I've gone down the rabbit hole you're describing above. The problem is there's no obvious point of 'done', and chasing perfection in the output can become a pathological obsession. You can get so lost in mating phase angle at each end of a trim or taking an eraser to get rid of a sleeve drag across the desk that you lose sight of the totality of it. Ultimately you end up in a weird uncanny valley, like those folks that keep 'fixing' their face with plastic surgery. Once you get to that point, you can no longer identify specific issues to correct, you just fall into a diffuse unease. For me podcasts are a way to join a conversation that I wouldn't otherwise have an opportunity to listen to. I don't see them as a show or corporate media product, and the more they start moving that direction the less inclined I am to listen to them. Julia Childs had a quote that I've found oddly applicable in this context: 'It's so beautifully arranged on the plate, you know someone's fingers have been all over it.' Hope this doesn't come across as negative. Good luck!

jv22222 5y ago

I use the editing software “descript” and this process (removing ums) takes just a few minutes even for a long show, because you just delete the words in text. They even have a button, remove “ums”. It’s a game changer.