Every episode of a show needs the same things around it: the intro, the outro, a sting between segments, a beep for the word that can't go out, and the same artist, album, feed and cover art in the file. In Podcast Track Cleaner those belong to a podcast, set up once and used in every episode.
Set up a podcast
Add it
Open Settings ▸ Podcasts and click Add a Podcast. Give it a name, and choose an Export folder — the export panel will open there for this show's episodes.
Add the sounds
In the Assets pane, click Add and pick a starting point — Intro, Outro, Ding, Beep or Custom — then choose the audio file. The file is copied into the app's own library, so tidying your Downloads folder later can't break it.
Fill in the tags
In the ID3 Tags pane, enter what stays the same from episode to episode: artist, album, the feed URL, the show's description, cover art. See ID3 tags below.
Several shows? Add a podcast for each and switch between them in Assets ▸ Podcast. Podcasts live outside any project, in ~/Library/Application Support/Podcast Track Cleaner, so every window and every episode sees them.
How an asset places itself
The starting points only fill in the fields; everything stays editable. Select an asset to see them, and press Play to hear it.
| Field | What it means |
|---|---|
| Length | The asset's own length, or As long as the selection — for beeps |
| Placement | Insert pushes the show aside to make room; Overlay plays on top and moves nothing |
| Anchor | Start of the show, the insertion point (the cursor), or the end of the show |
| Start | Seconds from the anchor to where the show is opened up |
| Preceding audio continues | How far the speech before the cut keeps playing into the asset |
| Following audio starts | How far before the asset ends the show comes back in |
| Volume | The asset's level, in percent |
| Silence the tracks underneath | For a censor beep: whatever it covers goes quiet |
A worked example
An intro is 15 s long, anchored to the insertion point, at 80% volume, with 2 s of preceding and 4 s of following overlap — exactly what the Intro starting point gives you. Put the cursor at 20.5 s and insert it. The intro is laid down at 18.5 s, so the last 2 s of speech run over its opening; the show is cut at 20.5 s and everything after moves 9 s later (15 − 2 − 4); the speech comes back at 29.5 s, 4 s before the intro ends at 33.5 s.
| Starting point | Anchor | Placement | Overlaps | Volume |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intro | Insertion point | Insert | 2 s before, 4 s after | 80% |
| Outro | End of the show | Insert | 4 s before | 80% |
| Ding | Insertion point | Overlay | — | 70% |
| Beep | The selection | Overlay | — | 70% |
Using them in an episode
Insert from the menu or the keyboard
The Assets menu lists the active podcast's sounds; the first nine are ⌥⌘1 … ⌥⌘9, in the order they appear in Settings — drag them there to reorder. Each lands on a single Effects track, created the first time, in its own color so you can see what went where. Every insert is one undo step.
Add them last
Do all the cutting first. Once the intro and outro are in, every later cut moves the show underneath them — which is also why Tighten Pauses refuses to run after they are placed.
Beeps
Select the word and press B. The podcast's first selection-length asset covers exactly that region — looped if the sound is shorter, trimmed if longer, faded at both ends so the seams don't click. A podcast with no beep of its own gets a generated 1 kHz tone, so it works before you've imported anything.
Moving them, and putting them back
A placed asset is ordinary audio on the Effects track: drag its grab bar to move it. Re-apply Asset Positions (⇧⌘B) snaps everything back to what its preset says — the outro re-hugs the current end of the show after you trim the tail — and re-renders each one from its preset, so a changed volume or a replaced sound is picked up too. The show itself is not pushed aside a second time.
ID3 tags
MP3 files carry their metadata inside them. Podcast Track Cleaner writes an ID3v2.3 tag at the front of the file, with the podcast frames players look for, and a short ID3v1 trailer at the end for very old players.
| Field | Written to |
|---|---|
| Title, artist, album, year, track, genre, comment | The usual frames, and the ID3v1 trailer |
| Identifier | TGID — the podcast's ID |
| Feed | WFED — the RSS feed URL |
| Description | TDES — the show's description |
| Lyrics | USLT — what podcast players show as the episode description |
| Picture | APIC — the cover art |
| Chapters | CHAP and CTOC — the chapter list players show |
Set the fields that never change in the podcast's ID3 Tags pane. Text is written so Cyrillic and accented titles survive: plain Latin text as ISO-8859-1, anything else as UTF-16.
Export
⌘E exports the mix of every unmuted track. Choose the format, then the rest of the sheet adapts to it.
| Format | Settings | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| WAV | 16-bit, 24-bit or 32-bit float | A lossless master, or handing the mix to someone else |
| M4A | AAC, 96–256 kbps, encoded by macOS | A small file with nothing extra needed — works in both editions |
| MP3 | 128–320 kbps constant, or VBR V0 (best) … V4 (smallest) | What podcast hosts expect; tags and chapters go inside. Pro only — see the MP3 encoder |
Channels
Stereo keeps stereo tracks as they are and puts mono tracks in both ears. Mono mixes everything to one channel — the usual choice for a talk show. Dual Mono writes that mono mix to both channels, for a host that insists on a stereo file. Split Stereo puts the first track fully left and the second fully right.
Chapters
With MP3, the chapters can go Inside the MP3 — what podcast players read, nothing extra to upload — Beside it as JSON (a Podcasting 2.0 .chapters.json for hosts that ask for one), or Both. WAV and M4A get the JSON file.
Tags in the export sheet
Pick the podcast and press Populate from Preset. The show's fields are filled in; anything you've already typed for this episode — title, track number, episode description — is kept. The year starts at the current one, the genre at "Podcast", and the file name is suggested from the track number and title.
Just a part
With a region selected, Export selection only writes just that stretch — with the chapters inside it, re-timed to start at zero.
The defaults the sheet starts with — WAV bit depth, constant or variable MP3 — are in Settings ▸ Editing.