Audio Audit Develops Tech Tool That Double Checks A Podcast’s Audio Output.

The audio production tech company Audio Audit today has taken its latest feature, an online podcast audio checking tool, out of beta. After several months’ of development and beta testing, Audio Audit says any podcaster can use the machine-learning powered tool to quickly check the quality of their output.

Audio Audit analyses the audio files of podcasts (MP3s) and produces reports which help podcasters, producers and engineers improve their audio. For professionals, it says the benefit is that consistent quality is maintained in every episode, even when deadlines are tight. For people that are self-producing and learning, it says the tool guides them towards the most important areas of audio engineering, helping them improve in the most time-efficient manner.

The idea for Audio Audit occurred when founder Damian Moore was working his way through a long list of podcasts and audiobooks while doing some renovations at his U.K. home and noticed inconsistencies and editing mistakes in the podcasts that he regularly listened to.

“Whenever one podcast stopped and another one started I would have to turn the volume up or down — which isn’t ideal when your hands are messy. I also noticed blocks of silence which would make me think I’d reached the end of the queue and restarted sentences that were meant to be cut-out. Surprisingly these problems occurred in the large, popular podcasts as well as the much smaller ones,” says Moore. “Being a software developer familiar with writing automated tests I wondered what audio standards existed and if it was possible to write tests that could benefit everyone. Every time I noticed something odd, I’d make a note of it so that I could train the machine to detect it later.”

Users can sign up for the free plan HERE, which provides one hour of audio processing each month. It does a check for 15 different things, including loudness, silence at the beginning and end of an episode, restarted sentences, encoding and compression, and profanity – complete with the ability to beep-out swearing.