How to Paper Edit a Podcast (Step-by-Step Guide)

By Paper Edit Team — March 17, 2025

Paper editing is the fastest way to turn a long, rambling interview recording into a tight, compelling podcast episode. Instead of scrubbing through waveforms for hours, you read through a transcript, mark what's worth keeping, and build your edit on paper first.

This guide walks you through the entire process from raw audio file to finished edit — step by step.

Not sure what paper editing is? Read our introduction to paper editing first.

What You'll Need

• Your raw podcast audio file (WAV or MP3)
• An AI transcription tool (we'll cover options below)
• A way to mark up the transcript (paper and pen, or digital)
• A DAW for final audio editing — ideally Reaper

If you're using Paper Edit, the transcription, markup, script building, and Reaper export all happen in one place. But the method itself is tool-agnostic — you can adapt it to whatever you have.

The 5-Step Paper Editing Workflow

1 Transcribe the audio

The first step is getting your audio into text. Upload your recording to an AI transcription service. Good options include Deepgram, Whisper (open-source), Descript, and Otter.ai. If you're using Paper Edit, just drag the file in — transcription happens automatically using Deepgram's word-level timestamps.

What you want from transcription:

• High accuracy — at least 90%+ for clean audio
• Word-level timestamps — so every word maps back to its exact position in the audio file
• Speaker labels — if you have multiple speakers, automatically identifying who said what saves enormous time

2 Do a first read-through

This is the most important step, and the one most people skip when they're new to paper editing. Read the entire transcript once without marking anything.

Your goal on this pass is simply to understand the whole shape of the material. Where's the story? What are the strongest moments? What's the core message your guest or host was trying to communicate? What's in the way of that message?

Resist the urge to start cutting on this pass. You need the full picture before you start making decisions.

3 Mark up the transcript

Now go through again and actively mark the transcript. You're making three kinds of decisions:

• Keep — Strong moments, quotable lines, essential context, great storytelling beats. Highlight or circle these.
• Cut — Tangents, repetition, filler ("um", "you know"), false starts, off-topic digressions. Cross these out or mark them clearly.
• Maybe — Passages you're not sure about. Flag these to revisit.

Don't be precious about cutting. The goal is a tighter, more engaging episode — not preserving everything your guest said. A good interview episode is usually 50–70% of the original recording length after a solid paper edit.

4 Build the script

Take your marked-up "keep" sections and arrange them into a script. This is where you shape the narrative:

• Does the episode need a strong opening hook? Find the best 30 seconds and move it up front.
• Are there sections that flow better in a different order? Resequence them.
• Do you need to add a brief voiceover to bridge two clips? Note it in the script.
• Check that each section connects logically to the next — remove any that don't serve the story.

At this stage you're essentially writing a screenplay for your audio — each line of the script corresponds to an audio clip with a known start and end time.

5 Export and finish in your DAW

With word-level timestamps attached to every word, your script can be converted directly into audio cuts. In Paper Edit, clicking "Export to Reaper" generates an RPP project file with all your selected clips placed on the timeline in the right order.

Open the project in Reaper and you'll see your episode already assembled. From here:

• Listen through and fine-tune cut points (tighten pauses, smooth transitions)
• Add music, sound effects, and intros/outros
• Mix and master (EQ, compression, loudness normalization)
• Export the final MP3

The waveform work goes much faster because all the structural decisions are already made. You're polishing, not deciding.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Editing while you transcribe

Don't try to edit on a first listen-through while the file is uploading or processing. Get the full transcript first. You need to see the whole picture.

Being too conservative with cuts

New editors often keep too much. A tight 35-minute episode almost always outperforms a rambling 60-minute one. Cut ruthlessly on your first pass, then add back anything you genuinely miss.

Ignoring the ending

Most great podcast edits have a killer ending — a moment that makes the episode feel complete. Hunt for it in the transcript. It's rarely the literal last thing said.

Skipping the DAW polish pass

Paper editing handles the structural edit, but the audio still needs attention. Don't skip the DAW. Even a 30-minute cleanup pass makes a significant difference to the listener's experience.

How Long Does Paper Editing Take?

For a 60-minute interview, experienced paper editors typically spend:

• 1–2 minutes: AI transcription
• 15–20 minutes: first read-through
• 20–30 minutes: markup and script building
• 30–45 minutes: DAW polish pass

Total: roughly 1.5–2 hours for a 60-minute episode. Compare that to 4–6+ hours of traditional waveform editing, and the efficiency gain is substantial.

Also see: the complete podcast editing workflow guide for how paper editing fits into the broader production process.