In this section, you’re going to be taking the recordings you’ve made and editing them down to make a podcast episode of under 20 minutes. You might have a lot more than 20 minutes’ worth of recorded audio at this point – if so, don’t worry, this is good! It just means that you’ll need to make some choices about what you want to include in your episode, and what you want to remove, choosing the best bits from what you’ve recorded to go in. Your finished episode might end up being a lot shorter than 20 minutes – think of 20 minutes as an upper limit, but not as a target. In podcasting, short can be good. Make your editing choices based on what you want your listener to know, rather than aiming for a specific length. At the end of the page you will be presented with two options: Level 1 and Level 2. Choose Level 1 first, and then come back to Level 2 when you are ready.
Transferring your recordings
The first step is to transfer your recordings from the device you recorded on to the computer you’ll be editing on. You can transfer files by emailing them (if the file size isn’t too big) or by using a file transfer system like Google Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive.
Audacity 
You will also need the latest version of Audacity, a free editing tool which can be downloaded from: https://manual.audacityteam.org/download/. If you have experience of editing using different software, you can use that instead (and you probably won’t need to use this guide very much!).
If you get stuck…
If you get stuck at any point, try having a look at the Audacity user manual, which you can find here: http://www.manual.audacityteam.org/. There are loads of good Audacity tutorials online (especially on YouTube) which will help you fix a range of problems.
Level 1 will teach you the basics of editing: the things you need to know to make something that works. Level 2 is an extension: these are things you can do if you have time, to make your episode really shine. But if you find level 1 very challenging and you don’t want to go to level 2, you can skip it!
One more thing to mention at this stage – once you get into editing, it might be tempting to add music to your podcast episode. But please don’t, unless it’s music you’ve written yourself. This is because most music is protected by Copyright law, and podcasters who want to use someone else’s music usually need to get their permission or pay the pay them for it.