tinglekit · editing guide
Audacity is free, runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and does everything a new creator needs. This is a clean, light-touch edit — natural and quiet, never over-processed.
Editing fixes small problems in good source audio. It cannot rescue a bad recording. Get your room quiet and your mic technique right first — the beginner's guide covers both. Once you have that, this walkthrough handles the rest.
Drag your recording into Audacity, or use File > Import > Audio.
If you recorded in stereo or binaural, keep it stereo throughout the entire edit. Never collapse a binaural recording to mono — you destroy the left/right ear effect completely and it cannot be restored.
Play the whole recording through before you touch anything. Editing ASMR on speakers misses the detail and the channel balance that headphones reveal. Make a mental note — or a text note — of where the problems are. Editing blind wastes time and leads to over-processing.
This is the most important step and the most commonly overdone. Aim to take the edge off the noise floor, not to eliminate it entirely.
Remove obvious problems, but don't over-cut. Natural small pauses are part of the calm — a half-second of silence between triggers is not dead air, it's breathing room.
Use Effect > Loudness Normalization so the whole piece sits at a consistent level and listeners aren't adjusting the volume as the recording progresses.
A target of around −16 LUFS works well for soft spoken and ASMR content — quiet enough to feel intimate without making people strain to hear it. Trust your ears on this; if it feels too loud or too quiet after normalising, adjust the target and re-apply.
These are finishing touches, not requirements. Each one should be inaudible as an effect — you should hear the recording improve, not hear the processing.
Put your headphones back on and play the start, middle, and end of the recording. Confirm that left and right feel even in volume. For binaural content, verify that the spatial effect — sounds appearing to come from beside your head — is still intact throughout.
If one channel is louder than the other, use the track's gain or pan slider to correct it before exporting.
Every step here is less is more. Clean, quiet, natural. Over-editing is the most common beginner mistake — an over-processed ASMR track loses the organic quality that makes the format work. When in doubt, do less and get the room right instead.
Still choosing your gear? Try the setup builder → — pick your budget and content type and get a specific gear list.