Podcast Checker

Introducing the “Podcast Checker” by Audio Audit: Your all-in-one solution for podcast quality assurance. Whether youʼre a DIY podcaster, working with a production company, or part of a recording studio, this tool is designed to enhance your podcasting experience. Are you recording, editing, and producing your own podcast? Audio Auditʼs automated QA takes your podcast from good to great by identifying areas of concern within episodes and providing actionable solutions. Elevate your workflow and overall quality with this professional-grade tool, transforming your podcast into a polished masterpiece.

For those collaborating with production professionals, the Podcast Checker ensures peace of mind. Even the most skilled production companies can overlook certain standards or miss critical details. Audio Audit steps in to evaluate the listener experience and metadata inclusion, guaranteeing your podcast maintains top-tier quality. In fact, most podcasts audited through this tool uncover at least one improvement opportunity. Trust that your producers are delivering excellence and maximising your podcastʼs potential.

If youʼre a part of a recording studio or production company, your reputation hinges on delivering top-notch content consistently. The Audio Audit Podcast Checker streamlines your quality control process. It meticulously reviews each episode, ensuring alignment with industry standards. Additionally, the tool can be tailored to your specific requirements, allowing you to create a custom quality control framework. With Audio Audit, you can confidently affirm that every episode leaving your studio meets the highest standards, solidifying your professional standing within the industry.

You can upload from your file system or use any RSS feed on the Internet to get started and everything can be managed through your web browser. Once the recipes run, youʼll be guided via our tips, articles, blog and community. The software is updated regularly with detector improvements that will help your show shine on iTunes, Stitcher, search engines, social media and other discovery channels.

Signing up for a free account only takes a minute and youʼll have enough free credits to run several reports each month on our platform. If you turn on automatic checking for your podcast then youʼll receive a report by email whenever you publish a new episode and get notified of any downtime your feed has.

Checks that are run

These are the checks that are currently being run whilst generating each report. We have detailed resources for most topics if youʼd like to learn more. If you start by generating a report then you can ignore the topics where youʼre already performing well.

Metadata

• Metadata tags — embedded information such as title, album name, artist name and track number
• Cover image — artwork shown with an episode
• Chapters — easier navigation to segments within an episode

Signal encoding

• Bit rate — data to store each second of audio
• Number of channels — stereo or mono
• Sample rate — how many times per second a waveform is sampled
• Sample width — number of digital steps available to represent the audio signal

Audio quality

• Loudness (LUFS) — industry standard for measuring perceived loudness to avoid sudden jumps in volume between podcasts
• Peak volume — maximum signal strength within a file which indicates possible clipping
• Noise floor — a high value indicates poor quality microphones or forgotten noise reduction filtering
• Quiet channel — is the left or right channel missing in a stereo file?

Editing mistakes

• Silences at beginning and end — thereʼs a recommended time gap to leave before and after
• Unwanted noises — maybe you or a guest coughed, a dog barked or a phone received a notification
• Silences in the middle — sometimes this can happen if something got cut out or a clip/jingle didnʼt make it to the final export
• Restarted sentences — uses AI speech recognition to find similar repeated sections that were likely forgotten about
• Swearing detection — uses AI again to protect shows that are published as suitable for younger listeners

Feed

• Valid RSS — validity of feed is checked while automatic reporting is enabled so youʼll know if something breaks on you or your host's website and syndication systems
• Slow server response — the response time is logged each time it is checked and you can see this data as a graph and as averages over the past day, week and month, ensuring high availability
• Episode download speed — soon there will also be a log of download times and speeds of each episode so you compare this with others and keep load at a reasonable level