mixing your music with dialogue

How to Perfectly Mix Music and Dialogue for Your Podcast

When mixing your podcast, balancing music and dialogue is key to creating a professional and enjoyable listening experience. Here's a step-by-step guide to help you achieve a clear and polished mix, ensuring your voice shines without being overshadowed by background music.

1. Separate Your Tracks

To achieve clarity, start by ensuring that each voice in your podcast has its own channel. Keeping voices and music separate will give you greater control over the final mix. Avoid exporting everything into a single mix before applying effects like EQ or compression, as this will impact all elements equally—making it harder to balance your audio effectively.

Learn more about track separation with iZotope’s Music Rebalance. Track separation and techniques from David Barber's dialogue mixing insights on A Sound Effect ​(A Sound Effect).

2. Optimize Music Volume and Compression

While music adds depth to your podcast, it should never drown out the dialogue. Use compression to smooth out the music levels, allowing the quieter parts to be heard without overpowering the voices. Keep the music track volume balanced so that your listeners can hear every word clearly, even when the music is playing.

3. Stereo Panning and Mono Voice Centering

Another technique to enhance clarity is to pan the music wider across the stereo spectrum. By keeping the music stereo and centering the voices in mono, you give each element its own space in the audio mix. This creates a cleaner listening experience, especially when the dialogue needs to be the focus. PremiumBeat's podcast sound mixing guide ​(Descript).

4. Adjust Levels During Intros and Outros

In podcast production, it's common for dialogue to be layered over music during intros and outros. During these moments, ensure the music volume is reduced to prevent it from overshadowing the voice. Once your levels are set, you can apply the final volume boost through a master channel or export your audio into a separate program for mastering.

5. Final Mixing Tips

When you’re ready to mix, use your final audio track to balance the dialogue and music. Test your mix on different devices, including car speakers, headphones, and phone speakers, to ensure your podcast sounds great no matter where your audience listens.

Example: Here's a podcast outro I edited, where the music smoothly fades while the voice remains clear and engaging.